Famous Quotes & Sayings

Barbara Kruger

I have problems with a lot of photography, particularly street photography and photojournalism - objectifying the other, finding the contempt and exoticism that you might feel within yourself or toward yourself and projecting it out to others. There can be an abusive power to photography, too.

Arthur Miller

The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect.

Jamie Bell

I don't take any photographs. I travel a lot by myself, and I feel weird taking photos on my own.

Janet Malcolm

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

Diane Arbus

The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.

Diane Arbus

I don't know what good composition is.... Sometimes for me composition has to do with a certain brightness or a certain coming to restness and other times it has to do with funny mistakes. There's a kind of rightness and wrongness and sometimes I like rightness and sometimes I like wrongness.

Edward Abbey

Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.

Alfred Stieglitz

The fight for photography became my life.

Chuck Close

If the bottom dropped out of the market and the artist was not going to sell anything, he or she will keep working, and the dealer will keep trying to find some way to convince somebody to buy this stuff.

Chuck Close

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

Ansel Adams

It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.

Ansel Adams

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

Ansel Adams

I know some photographs that are extraodrinary in their power and conviction, but it is difficult in photography to overcome the superficial power or subject; the concept and statement must be quite convincing in themselves to win over a dramatic and compelling subject situation.

Annie Leibovitz

As you get older, you have different tools, and you learn to use photography differently.

Alfred Eisenstaedt

I don't like to work with assistants. I'm already one too many; the camera alone would be enough.

Susan Sontag

The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.

Susan Sontag

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.

Susan Sontag

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects)- a material vestigate of its subject in a way that no painting can be... Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.

Susan Sontag

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt

Susan Sontag

The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.

Susan Sontag

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Roland Barthes

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

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.

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.

Taryn Simon

Simulations directly relate to the process of and complications in photography. They also overtly create layers of fantasies, myths and interventions... The simulation confuses the idea of a truth. I've always been interested in this kind of theater and illusion at the foundation of belief.

Marina Warner

When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm.

Philip Larkin

But, o, photography! as no art is,Faithful and disappointing! That recordsDull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,And will not censor blemishes,Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards

Mary Ellen Mark

A good print is really essential. I want to take strong documentary photographs that are as good technically as any of the best technical photographs, and as creative as any of the best fine-art photographs. [...] I don't want to just be a photo essayist; I'm more interested in single images...ones that I feel are good enough to stand on their own.

Martin Parr

I do read many of the photography magazines from the U.K. and abroad.

Martin Parr

We are drowning in images. Photography is used as a propaganda tool, which serves to sell products and ideas. I use the same approach to show aspects of reality.

Martin Parr

There are two parts to the process: taking the picture and finding ways of using it.

John Updike

Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.

John Szarkowski

The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it.