Photography Quotes - Page 9

Photography is like stealing.You rob someone of a moment that exposes something essential about their character,their soul if you like.there are people who are very conscious of that,who find that terrifying.The thought that everyone,friend of foe,can get so close to you,look you straight in the eye and judge you without having any control over it or being able to respond.A part of them has become the property of the photographer.

Esther Verhoef

Don't we all know that art is dangerous. You play it - then you live it.

Stefan Balint

Art is nothing more than creating an emotion in your own form.

Shannon L. Alder

The snapshots in CHINA: Portrait of a People are not meant to be works of art. I was too preoccupied with participating, with reveling in the moment, to worry about their perfection. Their purpose, then, is to form a candid portrait of China exactly as China presented itself to me.

Tom Carter

For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.

Diane Arbus

What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own.

Diane Arbus

Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers, however, have not understood 'information.' What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.

Vilém Flusser

Nobody has ever taken a photograph of something they want to forget. We can build a wall of happy Kodak moments around ourselves, a wall of our Christmases, birthdays, baby showers and weddings, but we can never forget that celluloid film is see-through, that behind it, all the misery of real life waits for our wall to collapse someday.

Rebecca McNutt

But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art --it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-- photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, form the beginning photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. The power of photography --and its centrality in present aesthetic concerns-- is that it confirms both ideas of art. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger.

Susan Sontag

The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us.

Vilém Flusser

Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing.

Duane Michals

It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.

Diane Arbus

To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.

Edward Weston

A photograph is usually looked at- seldom looked into.

Ansel Adams

Art is what we call...the thing an artist does.It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human.Art is not in the ...eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist.

Seth Godin

A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.

Ansel Adams

I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.

Nan Goldin

The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness

Yann Arthus-Bertrand

It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down....

Kate Morton

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

Ansel Adams

Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

Diane Arbus

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

Ansel Adams

What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.

Karl Lagerfeld

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.

Ansel Adams

You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.

Ansel Adams

As a photographer you have a deep love for light, life and yourself. You know that the eyes of love aren’t blind, they are wide open. Only when your eye, heart and soul shine brighter than the sun, you realize how ordinary it is to love the beautiful, and how beautiful it is to love the ordinary.

Marius Vieth

Photography saved my life by opening my eyes to the beauty that surrounds me each and everyday. Life look much richer from behind the lens.

Donna Kasubeck

Beautiful women have a following all their own. If that sounds misogynistic, I’m sorry, that’s the way the world works. Homer said the Greeks went to war over a woman. I can’t get a battle, but I can get a few hundred thousand views with the right face in a skirt.

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Thanks to photography, some memories overstay their welcome.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.

Susan Sontag

My husband and I have always been good at creative visualization. Before we quit drugs and got married he’d place tabs of acid on his eyes to see things that weren't there. I'd lay blank sheets of photographic paper on the cornea of developing solution to conjure images. We'd always coaxed dreams from paper, and believed them.

Jalina Mhyana

When I came home, I was asked to put my pictures in a photo exhibit at the Cinematography College ... my pictures won first prize. I began to ask myself what I was doing, and why. A few months after the exhibit, I dropped out of college, left my wife and began to write this book.

Vladislav Tamarov

In the years that I could not see him, I came to know my father through the medium of photography. My perceptions of him were forged on black-and-white squares that stole an instant out of history and immortalized it between the pages of a family album. When I summoned up the image of the man, it came to me frozen, black-bordered, flat. He stood pale above the creases of his uniform, framed in the foamy wake of some ship, drops of sunlight caught in the buttons on his jacket. He winked at me from the liberty ports of countless exotic places. In an atrocious hand he scrawled stilted, affectionate words to the stranger that bore his name and his features, telling of adventures far away, misbehavings under suns hotter than that which shone over the Greater German Reich.

Miles Watson

I have always loved being behind the camera. I love how it sets you apart in a crowd, so that you can float at the edges, pausing only occasionally to capture a moment.In its own way it’s easier than writing. As a writer, I have to know people, to talk to them, to barge into silences with a dozen of those little lighthearted quips that lead up to a conversation. And even then, they’re guarded around you. Nobody wants their drunken conversation written down somewhere.Being a photographer is different. People come to you. They smile. They flirt. They make sure you see only their best side. Nobody wants to upset the camera.

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

When you're taking photographs of people, creating the “perfect scenery” is always secondary. It's much more important to capture the emotions. Especially when there's true love.

Nina Hrusa

They were all highly respectable in their professions and, together, practically unstoppable. But most importantly, they were on her side. She couldn't feel more blessed....or anxious. She sighed. *in italics* Forgive me, Lord, for being so antsy. For worrying, I know it adds nothing to my life or any help to the situation at hand, but it's my friend's disappearance that we're investigating, and I don't know where to start. I don't want to choose the wrong lead. Please direct our investigation and help me to bring Skylar home. I'm the reason she is the way she is. Please don't let it be too late. *end italics*

Dani Pettrey

Photographers don't take pictures. They create images.

Mark Denman

I have found my way, step by step, proceeding from touch points that have emerged, some through conscious choice and some through dream state discovery.

Leonard Nimoy

A professional headshot in front of a bookshelf says you're an intellectual. A professional headshot peeking though a bookshelf says you're probably under a restraining order.

Ryan Lilly

If it can happen in your mind, it can happen in your camera

Arno Rafael Minkkinen

If it can happen in your mind, it can happen in your camera

Arno Rafael Minkkinen

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

Susan Sontag

For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

Roland Barthes

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

Susan Sontag

The best thing about photography: it changes your point of view.

Nina Hrusa

Women that can work a camera with ease often work men just as effortlessly for both require the same commitment to vanity and manipulation.

Tiffany Madison

It's like a malicious person lifting a photograph from the developing chemicals too early, and then pronouncing the photographer incompetent.

John Taylor Gatto

A society where feminine beauty is defined not by the human self on genuine intellectual and sentimental grounds, but by a computer software on the grounds of economic interest, is more dead than alive. It is a society of human bodies, not human beings.

Abhijit Naskar

[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.

Roland Barthes

Its not enough to just own a camera. Everyone owns a camera. To be a photographer you must understand, appreciate and harness the power you hold!

Mark Denman

Having a camera is not enough. You must understand, appreciate, and harness the power you hold!

Mark Denman

When your heart jumps every time your camera locks focus...You've become a photographer.

Mark Denman

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.

Linda Olsson

Mediante la fotografía y la palabra escrita intento desesperadamente vencer la condición fugaz de mi existencia, atrapar los momentos antes de que se desvanezcan, despejar la confusión de mi pasado.

Isabel Allende

... so this is for us.This is for us who sing, write, dance, act, study, run and loveand this is for doing it even if no one will ever knowbecause the beauty is in the act of doing it.Not what it can lead to.This is for the times I lose myself while writing, singing, playingand no one is around and they will never knowbut I will forever rememberand that shines brighter than any praise or fame or glory I will ever have,and this is for you who write or play or read or singby yourself with the light off and door closedwhen the world is asleep and the stars are alignedand maybe no one will ever hear itor read your wordsor know your thoughtsbut it doesn’t make it less glorious.It makes it ethereal. Mysterious.Infinite.For it belongs to you and whatever God or spirit you believe inand only you can decide how much it meantand meansand will forever meanand other people will experience it toothrough you.Through your spirit. Through the way you talk.Through the way you walk and love and laugh and careand I never meant to write this longbut what I want to say is:Don’t try to present your art by making other people read or hear or see or touch it; make them feel it. Wear your art like your heart on your sleeve and keep it alive by making people feel a little better. Feel a little lighter. Create art in order for yourself to become yourselfand let your very existence be your song, your poem, your story.Let your very identity be your book.Let the way people say your name sound like the sweetest melody.So go create. Take photographs in the wood, run alone in the rain and sing your heart out high up on a mountainwhere no one will ever hearand your very existence will be the most hypnotising scar.Make your life be your artand you will never be forgotten.

Charlotte Eriksson

I drift like a cloud,Across these venerable eastern lands,A journey of unfathomable distances,An endless scroll of experiences...Lady Zhejiang here we must part,For the next province awaits my embrace.Sad wanderer, once you conquer the East,Where do you go?

Tom Carter

art is risk made visible

Arno Rafael Minkkinen

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Richard Avedon

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Photography Quotes - Page 9

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