Best 2475 quotes in «photography quotes» category

Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.

Over the past two decades, the boundary between photography and other media like painting, sculpture, or performance has become increasingly porous. It would seem that each medium has absorbed the other, leaving the photographic residing everywhere, but nowhere in particular.

Over the last few millennia we've invented a series of technologies - from the alphabet to the scroll to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone - that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity.

Painting, drawing - I'm really into photography, I've done it since high school.

Over the years I have photographed thousands of people. I have never stopped being curious and trying to discover new worlds. I have used my camera as a mirror for my subjects as well. I remember photographing a woman in her 80s for my book, Wise Women, who told me it had been a long time since anyone had really been interested in "seeing" or photographing her. When she saw the picture, she burst into tears. She saw something in the photograph, an inner beauty and soul, she felt had long ago vanished.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

Over the years, photography has been to me what a journal is to a writer - a record of things seen and experienced, moments in the flow of time, documents of significance to me, experiments in seeing.

Painting is a lie. It's the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.

Painting is traditional but for me that doesn't mean the academy. I felt a need to paint; I love painting. It was something natural - as is listening to music or playing an instrument for some people. For this reason I searched for themes of my era and my generation. Photography offered this, so I chose it as a medium for painting.

Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

Part of the fascination that photography holds is its ability to unlock secrets kept even from ourselves. Like dreams, the photograph can uncork a heady bouquet of recognition which can escape into the cognitive world.

Parks and gardens are the quintessential intimate landscapes. People use them all the time, leaving their energy and memories behind. It's what's left behind that I like to photograph.

Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?'

Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate, and that is an aspect that I have to puncture. I do that by showing the world as I really find it.

Painting requires skill. Photography is created by the camera, and one cannot fully control what the camera sees. So people take many photographs because several must always be discarded.

Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate. Most of the photographs in your paper, unless they are hard news, are lies. Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality... Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.

People are under the illusion that it's easy...Technically, it is complex. You have a million options with equipment to distract you. I tell my students to simplify their equipment.

People criticized me for my photography. They said it's not art.

People believe pictures. It's a photograph that's in your passport, not a painting. Now, George Bernard Shaw said, 'I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot.' That's what the power of photography is.

People are always trying to find the next groovy thing, and it hasn't gone back to painting... I'd like it to go back to painting. I'm sick of all this photography and video. There's so much of it, it's almost annoying.

People have responded to the pictures I make as mystical things, and they somehow carry the illusion further thinking that the place is this mystical, magical place. The desert is also a very barren place, a very lonely place, a very boring, uneventful place.

People don't have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography.

People have been reading photography as a true document, at the same time they are now getting suspicious. I am basically an honest person, so I let the camera capture whatever it captures whether you believe it or not is up to you; it’s not my responsibility, blame my camera, not me.

People say photographs don't lie, mine do.

People thought this was a computer IT gig, and that will flow through those nerdy departments and it won't come into fashion photography, it won't come into television, it won't come into my daily communications, it won't come into my telephone, my microphone, my light control, my microwave radio, my - I mean, just name it.

People think because it's photography it's not worth as much, and because it's a woman artist, you're still not getting as much - there's still definitely that happening. I'm still really competitive when it comes to, I guess, the male painters and male artists. I still think that's really unfair.

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

People who wouldn't think of taking a sieve to the well to draw water fail to see the folly in taking a camera to make a painting.

Perhaps why so much of today's photography doesn't grab us or mean anything to our personal lives is that it fails to touch upon the hidden life of the imagination and fantasy, which is hungry for stimulation.

Perhaps most intriguing of all is that it is possible to photograph what is impossible for the human eye to see - cumulative time.

Perishability in a photograph is important in a picture. If a photograph looks perishable we say, "Gee, I'm glad I have that moment.

Photographing a cake can be art.

Perhaps there was more authentic danger in the photography that was banned - why shouldn't one be able to produce it? But this new enthusiasm finally caused us some trouble, and it suffices to say, if I remember correctly, that it was in this way that my thoughts turned to the young maidens.

Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing.

photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer's decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.

Photographs help people look at things they may not be able or may not want to look at. Until you can look at something, you can't change it. First you have to look at it, then you have a chance to understand it and can change it.

Photographs will always be impressive because they show us nature, and all artists will find in them a world of sensations. The photographer must therefore intervene as little as possible, so as not to cause photography to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses, notwithstanding its defects.

Photography allows you to learn to look and see. You begin to see things you'd never paid attention to.

...photographers who carry 60 pounds of equipment up a hill to photograph a view are not suffering enough, although their whining causes enough suffering among their listeners. No, if they really expect us to respect their search for enlightenment and artistic expression, in [the] future they will drag the equipment up the hill by their genitals and take the view with a tripod leg stuck through their foot.

PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne.

Photography and movies are a much bigger influence on me than music is itself.

Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze.

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.

Photography can be perceived as the opposite of war.

...photography can lie as convincingly as literature or painting. The angle, the selected content, the assumed context.

Photography can strip from the world that spiritual dust and grime with which our eyes have covered it.

Photography could have been invented in color. Colors existed.

Photography does deal with 'truth' or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality - it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible?