Photography Quotes - Page 5

Unpredictability. Accidents. Not good when you’re engaging in, say, brain surgery, but when lighting...wonderful!

A photograph is a click away. A good photograph is a hundred clicks away and a better one, a thousand clicks away

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.

If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under-world in a second, and examined it at leisure.

H.G.Wells

I am a professional photographer by trade and an amateur photographer by vocation.

Elliot Erwitt

For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ('this-has-been'), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.

Roland Barthes

Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.

Eddie Adams

We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask ... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however 'lifelike' we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.

Roland Barthes

It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like those pairs of fish (sharks, I think, according to Michelet) which navigate in convoy, as though united by an eternal coitus.

Roland Barthes

Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumes as such, publicly.

Roland Barthes

The key is to integrate our art into our life, not the other way around.

Brooks Jensen

You’ve gotta taste the light, like my friend and fellow shooter Chip Maury says. And when you see light like this, trust me, it’s like a strawberry sundae with sprinkles.

Joe McNally

These are the two basic controls at the photographer's command--position and timing--all others are extensions, peripheral ones, compared to them

David Hurn

What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: She is going to die: I shudder… over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

Roland Barthes

It's been said that the role of the artist is to teach us to see and that's true. However, the role of other artists is to teach me how they see. To learn how I see is somethig that cannot be taught but must be learned.

Brooks Jensen

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

When I was in school, I wanted to be W. Eugene Smith. He was a legendary staffer at Life, a consummate photojournalist, and an architect of the photo essay. He was also kinda crazy.That was obvious when he came to lecture at Syracuse University and put a glass of milk and a glass of vodka on the lectern. Both were gone at the end of the talk. He was taking questions and I was in the front row, hanging on every word.Mr. Smith, is the only good light available light?” came the question.He leaned into the microphone. “Yes,” he baritoned, and paused.A shudder ran through all of us. That was it! No more flash! God’s light or nothing!But then he leaned back into the mic, “By that, I mean, any &*%%@$ light that’s available.”Point taken.

Joe McNally

To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.

Diane Arbus

Photographers tend not to photograph what they can’t see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it. Otherwise we’re going to go on forever just photographing more faces and more rooms and more places. Photography has to transcend description. It has to go beyond description to bring insight into the subject, or reveal the subject, not as it looks, but how does it feel?

Duane Michals

Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.

Joe McNally

What's really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer.

William Albert Allard

It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.

Dorothea Lange

A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.

Brigitte Bardot

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.

William S Burroughs

No matter how much crap you gotta plow through to stay alive as a photographer, no matter how many bad assignments, bad days, bad clients, snotty subjects, obnoxious handlers, wigged-out art directors, technical disasters, failures of the mind, body, and will, all the shouldas, couldas, and wouldas that befuddle our brains and creep into our dreams, always remember to make room to shoot what you love. It’s the only way to keep your heart beating as a photographer.

Joe McNally

When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.

Roland Barthes

I know the best moments can never be captured on film, even as I spend nearly half my life trying to do just that.

Rosie O'Donnell

I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.

Lorrie Moore

I don't just look at the thing itself or at the reality itself; I look around the edges for those little askew moments-kind of like what makes up our lives-those slightly awkward, lovely moments.

Keith Carter

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.

Roland Barthes

The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence ... The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality.

Roland Barthes

One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.

Diane Arbus

Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.Photographs are.

Susan Sontag

Photography is a magical kind of art that allows people to preserve time and moments, and to describe the world the way they see it.

Sahara Sanders

In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The 'anything whatever' then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.

Roland Barthes

John Loengard, the picture editor at Life, always used to tell me, ”If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.

Joe McNally

When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!

Ted Grant

To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.

Ansel Adams

When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.

Robert Frank

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Susan Sontag

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

Ansel Adams

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.

Ansel Adams

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.

Salman Rushdie

The eye should learn to listen before it looks.

Robert Frank

Always seeing something, never seeing nothing, being photographer

Walter De Mulder

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

Susan Sontag

Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

Alfred Stieglitz

People spot a big black lens, and they worry about what they're doing, or how their hair looks. Nobody see the person holding the camera.

Erica O'Rourke

Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference

Robert Frank

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Susan Sontag

Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

Roland Barthes

Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment.

Ansel Adams

It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us.

Ian McEwan

The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.

Elliott Erwitt

Photobomb me at your own risk!

Ken Poirot

We sometimes take photos (or record a video) so that we can later see what was happening while we were busy taking photos (or recording a video).

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Standing in the spotlight, surrounded by all my selves, each of them naked and vulnerable before your lens, I want to be split open and reminded of shame. I know that sounds selfish, but I’m allowed to be selfish ’cause we’re talking about photography. Do you honestly believe I don’t see it for what it actually is: Exploitative? Exploitation is the nature of the beast, whatever the hell that means.

Kris Kidd

He who seeks beauty will find it.

Bill Cunningham

A paparazzi is merely an extremely nosy nobody with a camera—and bills to pay.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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Photography Quotes - Page 5

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