Quotes About Photography

Most importantly, postmodernism comes down on the side of photography and power, not photography as power. As a consequence, photography continues to be conceived as an inconsequential vehicle or passage for real powers that always originate elsewhere.

Photography has always been associated with death. Reality is colorful, yet early photography always took the color out of reality and made it black-and-white. Color is life; black-and-white is death. There was a ghost hidden in the invention of photography.

Photography is and is not a language; language also is and is not a photography.

... photography is just a medium. It's like a typewriter. Photography as an art doesn't interest me an awful lot; as a participant, though I like to look at it.

My photographs are not really about photography. They are about editing. I use photography but they are all taken from the TV screen. Anybody can do that, but it's the order I put the pictures in to try to create a new kind of movie, something that you can put on your wall.

Photography is Art and Art is Photography.

Actually, I didn't study photography at first. I went to school for painting my first year, poetry my second year, graphic design my third and fourth year, and photography my fifth.

Photography's ability to blur truth and fiction is one of its most compelling qualities. But when misused... this ambiguity can have severe, even lethal consequences.... Photography's ambiguity, beautiful in one context, can be devastating in another.

Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art.

Photography is such an important instrument in the education of our feelings and perception because of its duality. Photography represents the world we know, and suggests a world beyond what we can see. Creativity is the gap between perception and knowledge.

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.

I don’t use an exposure meter. My personal advice is: Spend the money you would put into such an instrument for film. Buy yards of film, miles of it. Buy all the film you can get your hands on. And then experiment with it.That is the only way to be successful in photography. Test, try, experiment, feel your way along. It is the experience, not technique, which counts in camera work first of all. If you get the feel of photography, you can take fifteen pictures while one of your opponents is trying out his exposure meter.

When I was at college, the idea of fashion was more immediate to me, whereas art photography, the depth of it, was a different thing. Storytelling - fanciful storytelling - can only be told through fashion photography. It's the perfect way to play with fantasy and dreams.

Here’s a current example of the challenge we face. At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people. Where did all those jobs disappear to? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?

In the history of photography, one process has always replaced another. The tumultuous realignment that's going on in the photography now is really just a natural evolution. The irony is that none of the processes that have been replaced have disappeared. More people than ever are practicing every approach to shooting and printing.

I 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.

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

We could teach photography as a way to make a living, and best of all, somehow to get students to experience for themselves photography as a way of life.

We think of photography as pictures. And it is. But I think of photography as ideas. And do the pictures sustain your ideas or are they just good pictures? I want to have an experience in the world that is a deepening experience, that makes me feel alive and awake and conscious.

As the possibilities for straightforward photography seem to have become exhausted it has been the photographers who know about the history of art, not simply the history of photography, who have shaped important directions for the future.

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.

I think the best way to put it is that newspictures are the noun and the verb; our kind of photography is the adjective and adverb. The newspicture is a single frame; ours, a subject viewed in series. The newspicture is dramatic, all subject and action. Ours shows what's back of the action.

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.

Straight photography, following the medium, is intoxicating - trying to wrestle it into the form of a poem.

Abstraction in photography is ridiculous, and is only an imitation of painting. We stopped imitating painters a hundred years ago, so to imitate them in this day and age is laughable.

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.

I struggle against photography. I struggle against the fact that it is silent, that it is just a piece of paper on the wall, often presented in a tedious white matt frame.

I don't know how to say easily what I learned. One thing I can say I learned is how amazing photography could be.

A 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.

Now people ask whether photography is art, but I think the question is of absolutely no interest.

I don't think photography has anything remotely to do with the brain. It has to do with eye appeal.

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face.

My generation came at a time when photography was advancing by leaps and bounds, creating the impulse to experiment and seek new approaches.

The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.

Photography is a transformation, not a reproduction.

...the subject, the thing itself, is the genesis of all types of photography.

Photography allows you to be a part of the action and document stories. It is a perfect extension of my body. I can take it pretty much anywhere and tell a story with a photograph.

But sports photography isn't something you just pick up overnight. You can't do it once a year for fun and expect to do a good job. And I take pride in what I do.

What is important is that our optical awareness rids itself of classical notions of beauty and opens itself more and more to the beauty of the instant and of these surprising points of view that appear for a brief moment and never return; those are what make photography an art.

Becoming a professional artist takes talent and perseverance, even more so when the field is photography.

I take pleasure in working with the non-art photographs that reside in public archives, essentially authorless and owned by the world itself, because I find the world of fine art photography to be pretty silly and pretentious.

One of the leading uses of photography by the mass media came to be called photojournalism. From the late 'twenties' to the early 'fifties' what might have been the golden age of this speciality - photographers worked largely as the possessors of special and arcane skills, like the ancient priests who practiced and monopolized the skills of pictography or carving or manuscript illumination. In those halcyon days the photographer enjoyed a privileged status.

I went into photography because it seemed like the perfect vehicle for commenting on the madness of today's existence.

Photography works hand in glove with image and memory and therefore possesses their notable epidemic power.

All my photographs are about meetings and about coups de foudre - love at first sight. To do that type of photography, one must wipe the canvas clean to prepare for chance encounters, be open and aware to such moments, otherwise it becomes a cliché - already seen and expected.

Let us... leave art to the artists, and let us try to use the medium of photography to create photographs that can endure because of their photographic qualities.

What I love about photography is that nothing is really as it seems.