Popular quotes about Photography! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
The thing with my workshops is, photography is a thoughtful process. In an atmosphere of fast photography, and generally thoughtless, quick, automatic photography, I think that there is an interest in the slowed down, thoughtful approach.
Sam AbellThere is a lot of social photography being done now to point to the untruth of photography. It's getting very dull now. So, okay photography doesn't tell the truth. So what? Everyone has known this forever.
Abelardo MorellTraditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.
Ralph GibsonWhat's happened is that the digital age has made photography more accessible to people. Everyone is a photographer. But to do it [photography] at a certain level, well, there's a skill to it. Still, it's a good time for photography now.
Bryan AdamsOriginally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts it is the most democratic, in so far as it's instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth.
Gregory CrewdsonPhotography is a mechanical device; photomontage is a piece of work done with the products of photography. This entire process forms one whole... If I assemble documents and juxtapose them with intelligence and skill, the effect of agitation and propaganda on the masses will be enormous.
John Heartfield... the battle for the acceptance of photography as Art was not only counter-productive but counter-revolutionary. The most important photography is most emphatically not Art.
A. D. ColemanIn my years of photography I have learned that many things can be sensed, seen, shaped, or resolved in a realm of quiet, well in advance of, or between, the actual clicking of shutters and the sloshing of films and papers in chemical solutions. I work to attain a state of heart, a gentle space offering inspirational substance that could purify one's vision. Photography, like music, must be born in the unmanifest world of the spirit.
Paul CaponigroIf it doesnโt have ambiguity, donโt bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography - the mendacity of photography. Itโs got to have some kind of peculiarity in it, or itโs not interesting to me.
Sally MannThe photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what's going on and what's happening outside.
Andy GoldsworthyMy biggest challenge was moving from photography to film without losing my way of working - which is very intimate and learning to collaborate with more people, since photography for me is a very solitary process.
Maya Goded[Photography] can be tiny, on your phone, or it can be a billboard, or a film-sized projection, or printed in a magazine. I don't think we've been in a time before when so much photography is available in so many formats, when everybody is a photographer.
Christian MarclayPhotography is Photography; And in it's purity and innocence is far too uniquely, valuable and beautiful to be spoilt by making it imitate something else.
Frederick H. EvansI discovered photography completely by chance. My wife is an architect; when we were young and living in Paris, she bought a camera to take pictures of buildings. For the first time, I looked through a lens - and photography immediately started to invade my life.
Sebastiao SalgadoThis idea of imposing an order is very interesting to me. Photography is in essence an analytic medium. โฆ In photography, you start with the whole world and every decision you make imposes an order on it. The question is to what extent itโs an idealized order Iโm imposing or is it an order that grows out of what the world looks like.
Stephen ShoreI think we seem to remember things in still pictures. I never gave up on painting. When they said painting was dead, I just thought, Well, that's all about photography, and photography's not that interesting, and it's changing anyway.
David HockneyNot only has photography so thoroughly saturated our visual environment as to make the invention of visual images seem archaic, but it is also clear that photography is too multiple, too useful to other discourses, ever to be wholly contained within traditional definitions of art.
Douglas CrimpI have gradually confused photography and life and as a result of this I believe I am able to work out of myself at an almost precognitive level.
Jerry UelsmannThe aesthetic discussion of photography is dominated by the concept of time. Photographs appear as devices stopping time and preserving fragments of the past, like flies in amber.
Peter WollenOne of the most amazing things that came out of 9/11 was all the pictures taken by amateurs, by people just going to work or coming or saw what was going on and took it. But all forms and various types of cameras, and when you look at that body of work you just see the impact of how photography is - when I taught once, I said that you have to be ready now for any event.
Stanley GreenePhotography's about the surface, what's happening at the top of the sea. Literature's about all the stuff below.
Max PamI love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.'
Jerry SaltzA reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment. Everything in a novel is explicitly chosen, whereas some of what a film captures feels incidental, according to the vagaries of photography and sound recording.
Jonathan LethemPhotography has the capacity to provide images of man and his environment that are both works of art and moments in history.
Cornell CapaMy generation came at a time when photography was advancing by leaps and bounds, creating the impulse to experiment and seek new approaches.
Gjon MiliI think of myself as being an ethical man, but I don't try to teach ethics. I have no message. I know little about contemporary life. I don't read a newspaper. I dislike politics and politicians. I belong to no party whatever. My private life is a private life. I try to avoid photography and publicity.
Jorge Luis BorgesThrough photography, both artist and scientist can find a common denominator in their search for the synthesis of modern vision in time, space and structure.
Ernst HaasPhotography is a medium, a language, through which I might come to experience directly, live more closely with, the interaction between myself and nature.
Paul CaponigroThe ultimate role of photography as a contemporary language of visual communication consists of its capacity to slow down our fast and chaotic way of reading images.
Luigi GhirriI think of myself as a reportage photographer. I like the word. It implies a personal account of an observed event with connotations of subjectivity but honesty. It is eye-witness photography.
David HurnYes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.
Nan GoldinI think people just see cinematography as being about photography and innovative shots and beautiful lighting. We all want our movies to look great visually, to be beguiling and enticing, but I think that what really defines a great cinematographer is one who loves story.
Seamus McGarveyPhotography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isnโt attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you donโt see.
Emmet GowinThe ambition of instantaneous photography... was that of preserving the spontaneity of action and avoiding any indication that the presence of the picture taker had a modifying influence on what was going on.
Rudolf ArnheimPhotography, for me, is something I can control fully. It's wholly my own expressions.
Mia WasikowskaThe relation of photography and language is a principal site of struggle for value and power in contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where images and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity.
William J. MitchellPhotography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere.
John SzarkowskiPhotography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyonwith a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed.
Edward SteichenDocumentary photography has amassed mountains of evidence. And yet... the genre has simultaneously contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world.
Allan SekulaConsider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.
Peter ThielI could ramble on forever, I just love photography. It's my passion, it drives my family crazy. I live it and breathe it.
Russell JamesPhotography is the dominant and fascinating and only authentic folk art of the twentieth century.
John RothensteinTo extend the depth of what has been called 'art' into photography requires... making available to the spectator the amazing transformations the subject undergoes to become the photograph.
Michael SnowIn the beginning I was really, really lean. For the longest time I did it all. I played every hat. I was in the factory, doing the graphic design, the photography, the selling - literally everything. I saved money doing what I could myself. It was hard but I learned. I learned that nobody's better than you to get your business off the ground. The experience you get is priceless.
Lori Greiner