PHOTOGRAPHY QUOTES II
quotations about photography
Composition in photography is almost as varied as composition in music or words -- melodic or atonal, safe or daring -- and can enhance subject, theme, and style. Every photograph you take involves you in some compositional decision, even if this is simply where to set up the camera or when to press the button.
MICHAEL LANGFORD
Basic Photography
The act of photography is like going on a hunt in which photographer and camera merge into one indivisible function. This is a hunt for new states of things, situations never seen before, for the improbable, for information.
VILEM FLUSSER
Towards a Philosophy of Photography
The definition of photography is changing, too, and becoming more of a language. We're attaching imagery to tweets or text messages, almost like a period at the end of a sentence. It's enhancing our communication in a whole new way.
JOSHUA ALLEN HARRIS
"In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at Nothing", The New Yorker, April 4, 2016
Photography is more than a means of recording the obvious. It is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever, whether it be a face or a flower, a place or a thing, a day or a moment.
AARON SISKIND
attributed, The Amateur Photographer's Handbook
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
JOHN BERGER
About Looking
You put your camera around your neck in the morning, along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you.
DOROTHEA LANGE
Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life
Photography knows how to authenticate its misrepresentations.
MASON COOLEY
City Aphorisms
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.
DOROTHEA LANGE
Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life
Photography is a powerful medium of persuasion and propaganda. It has that ring of truth when all the time, in artful hands, it can make any statement the manipulator chooses.
MICHAEL LANGFORD
Basic Photography
The definition of a picture and the definition of photography is evolving in this truly digital space. Pictures can do things that pictures were never supposed to do.
RUSSELL ARMAND
"How the GIF Is Taking Over the World", Time, March 30, 2016
The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.
RICHARD AVEDON
attributed, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance
A great image is a great image, no matter who took it, where they live, and whether they were using a phone or the most expensive camera.
MIKE BETTS
"Community for Photography Photocrowd Seeks £450,000 Through Crowdcube", Crowd Fund Insider, April 28, 2016
A photograph is a biography of a moment.
ART SHAY
interview, CBS News, February 13, 2014
Life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference and it is important to see what is invisible to others.
ROBERT FRANK
attributed, Photographic Possibilities
Photography suits the temper of this age -- of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately.
EDWARD WESTON
The Daybooks of Edward Weston
Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.
MARC RIBOUD
FotoFest 90: The International Month of Photography: February 10-March 10
What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that's gone forever, impossible to reproduce.
KARL LAGERFELD
attributed, Click You!
I love things like Instagram and Pinterest. I get so many ideas just by getting a daily digest of images from great photographers who I follow on social media. What that also does is it tells me which pictures stand out to me, then I can analyse them and try and work out what it is about that particular image that had me mesmerised for longer than a glance.
GUY SEBASTIAN
"Guy Sebastian shares his photography tips", Sunshine Coast Daily, April 26, 2016
Photography bears witness to the passage of time, but it cannot make statements as to the importance of things at any time, nor is it concerned with "truth and beauty" or with teasing out what underlies appearance. Rather, it voraciously records anything in view.
LIZ WELLS
Photography: A Critical Introduction
Photography, if practiced with high seriousness, is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere.
JOHN SZARKOWSKI
Looking at photographs: 100 pictures from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art