Quotes About Photography

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 should be redefined. It's largely technical... Photography is just unbelievably limiting. I always think of David Bailey and all the fashion photographers - they overlap, you can't always tell who did it. I don't really even like photography all that much. I just think it's so overdone.

Photography today is accomplishing a lofty mission in which every German should collaborate by buying a camera. The German people is ahead of every other in the technical domain and, thanks to its exceptional qualities, the small camera has conquered the whole world... Much is at stake here from the point of view of popular consumer goods and, furthermore, photography has a particularly important political role to play. (Addressing the Berlin Photography Fair, 1933)

I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography—that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms.

Photography is very subjective. Photography is not a document on which a report can be made. It is a subjective document. Photography is a false witness, a lie.

Computer photography won't be photography as we know it. I think photography will always be chemical.

What'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.

I started photography more or less by accident when I was already 27. I was taken on as an assistant by a photographer who was a friend of a friend and I very quickly understood the potential of expression in photography.

Photorealism was this fantastic movement in like the late '60s and '70s, because photography finally became something that everyone could produce. Photorealism was and should've been a very short element. But the thing is, photography is so satisfying. Certainly when it's well done.

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.

For me, the strength of photography lies in its ability to evoke humanity. If war is an attempt to negate humanity, then photography can be perceived as the opposite of war.

All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.

Only recently serious research into the relationship between photography and art has taken place. Why has it been so long in coming ? In some respects historical research is analogous with that of science. The bringing to light of factual material and the development of ideas is to a large extent cumulative. But when artists themselves were, from about 1910, beginning to tear down the bastions protecting Art in its ivory tower, questioning the idea of Art with a capital 'A', photography was inevitably to assume a new stature both in the eyes of artists and the public, too.

I think that it's workshops, honestly, that have kept me keen about photography, and about my photography. My career as a workshop photographer came while I was at the Geographic in the late 70's, and has continued consistently since then.

I don't even like photography at all. I'm just doing photography until I can do something better.

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.

I wanted to combine science and photography in a sensible, unemotional way. Some people’s ideas of scientific photography is just arty design, something pretty. That was not the idea. The idea was to interpret science sensibly, with good proportion, good balance and good lighting, so we could understand it.

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.

In short, [photography] is a matter of turning loneliness into thoughts.

As a matter of fact, nearly all the greatest work is being, and has always been done, by those who are following photography for the love of it, and not merely for financial reasons. As the name implies, an amateur is one who works for love.

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.

Is photography an art? There is no point in trying to find out if it is an art. Art is old-fashioned. We need something else.

For this very reason I refuse all the tricks of the trade and professional virtuosity which could make me betray my career. As soon as I find a subject which interests me, I leave it to the lens to record it truthfully. Look at the reporters and at the amateur photographer! They both have only one goal; to record a memory or a document. And that is pure photography.

I didnt know photography would take me to the places that it has taken me

If I see a nice photography book in New York, and I don't want to have to carry that back to Japan with me, I just order it from Amazon when I come home. There's no treasure-hunting anymore. It used to be like a hunt to find Air Jordans, Max 95s, and carrying them back.

Before the first press pictures, the ordinary man would visualize only those events that took place near him, on his street or in his village. Photography opened a window. As the reader's outlook expanded, the world began to shrink.

It's often about the simple things, isn't it? Painting and photography are first about seeing, they say. Writing is about observing. Technique is secondary. Sometimes the simple is the most difficult.

I'm not interested into victim photography. Photographing people suffering and putting it on a museum wall is too weird.

I guess I knew my dad was into photography, so a part of me was interested in picking it up to understand him a little better.

For a period of time, I carried cameras with me wherever I went, and then I realized that my interest in photography was turning toward the conceptual. So I wasn't carrying around cameras shooting stuff, I was developing concepts about what I wanted to shoot. And then I'd get the camera angle and do the job

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

I often say I've spent more time with photography than I have with literature just in terms of hours.

I have always felt that I have observed life in a different way to others... Music has always been one creative outlet for me, but now I'm happy to add another one too, that being photography

I don't want to sound mystical but sometimes when you take a picture - when the sets are in place - then something takes over and leads you. It's this sense of extraordinary luck and chance. The shoot is blessed and charmed, and you make pictures that you couldn't in your wildest dreams have imagined. That is the magic of photography.

You are not a photographer because you are interested in photography.

The digital image annihilates photography while solidifying, glorifying and immortalizing the photographic.

How does photography serve to legitimate and normalize existing power relationships? ... How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs?

The 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.

The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process - a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made - constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes - but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.

It's just seeing - at least the photography I care about. You either see or you don't see. The rest is academic. Anyone can learn how to develop. It's how you organize what you see into a picture.

Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.

[Dada is] perfectly kindhearted malice, alongside exact photography the only legitimate pictorial form of communication and balance in shared experience.

Documentary 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.

I love painting. As far as photography is concerned, I understand nothing.

I don't think of myself as a photographer. I've engaged questions regarding photography's role in culture... but it is an engagement with a problem rather than a medium.

Photography is the dominant and fascinating and only authentic folk art of the twentieth century.

I have all but killed myself for Photography. My passion for it is greater than ever. It's forty years that I have fought its fight... I am not fighting to make a 'name' for myself. Maybe you have some feeling for what the fight is for. It's a world's fight... All that's born of spirit seems mad in these days of materialism run riot.