PHOTOGRAPHY QUOTES II
quotations about photography
Composition in photography is almost as varied as composition in music or words -- melodic or atonal, safe or daring -- and can enhance subject, theme, and style. Every photograph you take involves you in some compositional decision, even if this is simply where to set up the camera or when to press the button.
MICHAEL LANGFORD
Basic Photography
Photography bears witness to the passage of time, but it cannot make statements as to the importance of things at any time, nor is it concerned with "truth and beauty" or with teasing out what underlies appearance. Rather, it voraciously records anything in view.
LIZ WELLS
Photography: A Critical Introduction
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
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.
MARC RIBOUD
FotoFest 90: The International Month of Photography: February 10-March 10
What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that's gone forever, impossible to reproduce.
KARL LAGERFELD
attributed, Click You!
A photograph is a biography of a moment.
ART SHAY
interview, CBS News, February 13, 2014
In order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.
ROLAND BARTHES
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
Photography is more than a means of recording the obvious. It is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever, whether it be a face or a flower, a place or a thing, a day or a moment.
AARON SISKIND
attributed, The Amateur Photographer's Handbook
Several years ago, I went through a painful writer's block -- a period of silence that lasted six or seven months. I'm convinced that the only thing that really saved me, and led me back to the page, was taking a class in black and white photography. In fact, living with a camera around my neck for a year, and hunting for pictures to shoot, taught me a lot about the importance of the image and its relationship to narrative in writing, something I'd struggled with before discovering photography.
TRACY K. SMITH
interview, Gulf Coast, vol. 17, number 1
The definition of photography is changing, too, and becoming more of a language. We're attaching imagery to tweets or text messages, almost like a period at the end of a sentence. It's enhancing our communication in a whole new way.
JOSHUA ALLEN HARRIS
"In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at Nothing", The New Yorker, April 4, 2016
Life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference and it is important to see what is invisible to others.
ROBERT FRANK
attributed, Photographic Possibilities
The photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise. The movie stars and matinee idols are put in the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy.
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Photography, if practiced with high seriousness, is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere.
JOHN SZARKOWSKI
Looking at photographs: 100 pictures from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art
The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous.
WILLIAM ALBERT ALLARD
attributed, Fine Art Photography: Water, Ice, and Fog
To photograph ... is to put in the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.
HENRI-CARTIER-BRESSON
Pix, 1993
A great image is a great image, no matter who took it, where they live, and whether they were using a phone or the most expensive camera.
MIKE BETTS
"Community for Photography Photocrowd Seeks £450,000 Through Crowdcube", Crowd Fund Insider, April 28, 2016
After all, the decisive quality in a photographer is the faculty of seeing certain things and being tempted by them.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
"George Bernard Shaw on Coburn's Photography", British Journal of Photography, 1906
My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, or the camera's eye may entirely change my idea.
EDWARD WESTON
attributed, Pictures on a Page: Photojournalism and Picture Editing
Photography knows how to authenticate its misrepresentations.
MASON COOLEY
City Aphorisms
The definition of a picture and the definition of photography is evolving in this truly digital space. Pictures can do things that pictures were never supposed to do.
RUSSELL ARMAND
"How the GIF Is Taking Over the World", Time, March 30, 2016