Famous Quotes & Sayings

Rudolf Arnheim

The ambition of instantaneous photography... was that of preserving the spontaneity of action and avoiding any indication that the presence of the picture taker had a modifying influence on what was going on.

Thomas Merton

The camera does not know what it takes; it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene.

Roman Jakobson

A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.

Roland Barthes

Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography.

Roland Barthes

The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death.

Roland Barthes

The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive... Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.

Roland Barthes

The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

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

I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme.

Roland Barthes

As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.

Roland Barthes

[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.

Sunidhi Chauhan

One of my passions is photography. I always carry a camera in my bag whenever I travel. I always take pictures wherever I go, and some of them end up being really crazy ones.

Subcomandante Marcos

For me it is clear that photography prizes should be for those being photographed and not for the photographers.

Steve Coleman

Laugh, love, dream, strive, smile, feel, joy, look, try, fail, read, walk, search, share, help, work, fun, learn, retry, sweat, cry, rest, wait, fear, hope, trust, pride... when we have lived all of these, our photography might stop being a record of what our camera sees and become an expression of what we as photographers feel.

Stephen Sprouse

Then I moved down to the Bowery to this building where Debbie Harry lived. It was there that I started combining some clothes for her and continued doing the art and photography.

Stephen Sprouse

The photograph, the clothes, the sets - this was about 1974, and I started hanging out with my friend Richard Sold, who was playing in a band with Patti Smith.

Stephen Sprouse

I just really wanted to do art, except when I was taking those photographs of people I would make the clothes that I would photograph them in so I could control the whole thing.

Steven Wright

I just got this new camera. It's very advanced - you don't even need it.

Steven Soderbergh

Maybe I'll paint, do photography, just something else. I can see that.

Tom Clancy

In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.

Tibor Kalman

I believe that this whole question of some photography being true and some untrue is a non-question. Photography is not objective; it never was objective.

Tim Walker

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.

Tim Walker

The point of fashion is that you take the picture you want. And fashion is the only photography that allows fantasy, and I'm a fantasist.

Tim Walker

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.

Tim Walker

I like capturing stuff that is disappearing - that’s the point of photography. What I am photographing is an imaginary place that never existed, but is connected to something that has already been.

Viggo Mortensen

Photography, painting or poetry - those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things; they are my way of communicating.

Val Kilmer

It's the first time that I've ever had an art show based on a film, but it's a photography collage.

Susie Bright

Seeing lesbian photography is just the tip of my radicalized clitoris. I have modeled for, commissioned, published, and fought for these pictures, and answered threats against them. I've seen the feminist movement bring these pictures to life, and I've seen that same movement try to suppress the liberating results.

Taryn Simon

Photography threatens fantasy.

Taryn Simon

There is no truth in photography. One can't reproduce an absolute truth. That said, I don't see [my photographs] as being any less truthful than any other photographs.

Taryn Simon

...photography's history is bound to the mistake, to the accident.

Taryn Simon

The photograph doesn't claim to be a participant, or to know, or to be a club member of whatever it's documenting - photography is more demanding when it doesn't pretend to know.

Taryn Simon

I'm designing a seductive frame to attract an audience to a subject they would otherwise ignore. And that's what I do in all of my photography - give a stage to things that wouldn't normally receive that stage.