Quotes About Photography

Now that photography is a digital medium, the ghost of painting is coming to haunt it: photography no longer retains a sense of truth. I think that's great, because it frees photography from factuality, the same way photography freed painting from factuality in the mid-nineteenth century.

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.

Photography really is all about lines, and so is clothing. I worked for Oberto Gili for a couple of years after I was at ICP; we worked in fashion, travel, interior design, everything. I was inspired by his styling choices within fashion photography, and I think those experiences helped steer me towards fashion design. I love photography as a medium, so I think I will always take inspiration from it.

The traditional difficulty of balancing the mechanical with the imaginative schools of photography still operates. In schools of photography meaningful art education is often lacking and on the strength of their technical ability alone students, deprived of a richer artistic training, are sent forth inculcated with the belief that they are creative photographers and artists. It is yet a fact that today, as in the past, the most inspiring and provocative works in photography come as much (and probably more) from those who are in the first place artists.

To speak technically photography is the art of writing with light. But if I want to think about it more philosophically, I can say that photography is the art of writing with time. When you capture an image you capture not only a piece of space, you also capture a piece of time. So you have this piece of specific time in your square or rectangle. In that sense I find that photography has more to do with time than with light.

I’m more interested in a photography that is ‘unfinished’ - a photography that is suggestive and can trigger a conversation or dialogue. There are pictures that are closed, finished, to which there is no way in.

Somebody said recently that the best thing a student could do was to get in some shows and publish a book; but nothing about becoming a human being, nothing about having important feelings or concepts of humanity. That's the sort of thing that is bad education. I'd say be a human being first and if you happen to wind up using photography, that's good for photography.

I never liked photography. Not for the sake of photography. I like the object. I like the photographs when you hold them in your hand.

"Though many painters and sculptors talk glibly of "going in for photography," you will find that very few of them can ever make a picture by photography; they lack the science, technical knowledge, and above all the practice. Most people think they can play tennis, shoot, write novels, and photograph as well as any other person - until they try."

Photography is like a found object. A photographer never makes an actual subject; they just steal the image from the world... Photography is a system of saving memories. It's a time machine, in a way, to preserve the memory, to preserve time.

Photography has arrived at the point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject. In any case, a certain aspect of the subject now belongs to the domain of photography. So shouldn't painters profit from their newly acquired liberty, and make use of it to do other things?

Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me.

Photography has been a passion of mine since I was 15. After my kids were born I found myself incorporating my photography into different art endeavors and from there it just blossomed.

To speak technically photography is the art of writing with light. But if I want to think about it more philosophically , I can say that photography is the art of writing with time.

Photography and writing are marvelous distractions from painting. I might even have found movies more interesting than photography. I tried it a bit, but not enough.

Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already.

Photography is nature seen from the eyes outward, painting from the eyes inward. Photography records inalterably the single image, while painting records a plurality of images willfully directed by the artist.

Photographers should follow their own judgment, and not the fads and dictates of others. Photography is still a very new medium and everything is allowed and everything should be tried and dared... Photography has no rules. It is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it was achieved.

There's a reductiveness to photography, of course - in the framing of reality and the exclusion of chunks of it (the rest of the world, in fact). It's almost as if the act of photography bears some relationship to how we consciously manage the uncontrollable set of possibilities that exist in life.

Photography, if there is photography, is already snapped, already shot, in the very interior of things and for all points of space.

In this, photography is the same thing as love. When my gaze, diving into the sea as my subject, converges with the act of photography, hot sparks fly at the point of intersection.

I left film because I felt that photography was my art. It was something I could do on my own, whereas film was so collaborative. I thought as a photographer I could make something that was artistic and that was mine, and I liked that. And it wasn't until I got back into film and I have very small crews and I could do very tiny filmmaking that wasn't 100 people that I still felt that I was making something artistic as a filmmaker. So, you know, I'm an artist, and whether it's photography or film, I want my voice to be there and I think my voice is very strong in this film.

There's this idea that photography is a kind of testimony and therefore we're forbidden to tell lies with it. I think that's nonsense. Photography isn't testimony.

The persistent problem in photography is how to look at it.

Photography is the only "language" understood in all parts of the world, and, bridging all nations and cultures, it links the family of man.

[Photography] underlines the photographer. That's the Barthesian this has been. Well, this has been for the photographer as well. The photographer is the hidden placeholder in the Barthesian equation.

I forget nothing and then, one day, there will be revenge. Innocence isn't exactly everywhere. But I will say innocence also takes you far in photography.

The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.

With photography, I like to leave a lot of the story, even to myself.

The 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.

The '60s in London obviously brought about the explosion of music, the Beatles especially, and then the Rolling Stones and other forms of music, and then fashion and photography and films - kitchen-sink dramas we called them at that time, which was our nouvelle vague in Britain, films that talk about real life.

I have always felt that a lot of the most interesting work, not just mine but other people's, falls into [the] nether area, somewhere between the worlds of documentary and photojournalism (two very vague words) and the world of art. I think a lot of street photography falls into this nether area.

The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative. By their fewness, and by the importance of the reader’s eye, this will be misunderstood by most of that minority which does not wholly ignore it. In the interests, however, of the history and future of photography, that risk seems irrelevant, and this flat statement necessary.

I do believe strongly in photography and hope by following it intuitively that when the photographs are looked at they will touch the spirit in people.

There's no great mystique to photography. A lot of photographers like to put their hands up to their forehead and tell you how they've suffered and so forth. Well, I just rent a car and drive to the place and take the pictures.

The joy for me of television is the sort of family feeling of being involved with an ensemble - the cast and the crew and the director of photography and the guys in the camera truck - and you're all coming together. There's a great feeling when that is a successful unit, a successful family.

Photography is only a new road from a different direction, but moving toward the common goal, which is life.

If youre not interested in life, then photography has no meaning

There's this way that photography is always about going out searching. I'm not the kind of a photographer who can photograph my home.

Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.

I 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.

The thing about photography is that every day is a new day, even if you are working on the same story, because every day you have got a chance to correct what you did the day before, and try to take it a bit further or a bit back.

Digital [photography] has sped up the process to a point that it's a bit self-destructive. It is like driving by a new neighborhood without stopping for a walk. Special discoveries need time.

I love being photographed, or I should say I love the art of photography. It's about people taking photographs of you, stealing them, and then presuming or assuming or captioning. Words can never be taken back, photographs can never be taken back, nothing can ever be taken back.

Although I get a lot of ideas from things that have happened in my life, I see the final product as a place where my imagination meets my experience. What I love about photography is that nothing is really as it seems.

Photography is a strange phenomenon... You trust your eye and cannot help but bare your soul.

The greatest tool at our command is the very thing that is photography. Light. Light is our paintbrush and it is a most willing tool in the hands of the one who studies it with a sufficient care.

Photography is about freezing a moment in time; McGinley's is about freezing a stage in a lifetime.