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.

Auguste Rodin

If the artist only reproduces superficial features as photography does, if he copies the lineaments of a face exactly, without reference to character, he deserves no admiration. The resemblance which he ought to obtain is that of the soul.

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.

Janet Malcolm

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

Asa Butterfield

I do photography and I studied film at school. So I've always really enjoyed that and I've got an eye for camera angles I guess. I've never taken that into filming wildlife.

Diane Arbus

These are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups. Wouldn't it be lovely? Yes.

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.

Diane Arbus

Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.

Brit Marling

Then in college, besides economics, I also majored in studio art and got involved in photography and making short films and acting. But I didn't know you could make a living that way.

Edgar Allan Poe

If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear - but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.

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.

Dorothea Lange

Seeing is more than a physiological phenomenon... We see not only with our eyes but with all that we are and all that our culture is. The artist is a professional see-er.

Alison Jackson

I'm not satirical in a traditional way. What I do is more about creating caricatures and cartoons. I am commentating on the nature of how we live through photography, and how you can twist an angle to create a different perception of a person.

Alfred Stieglitz

The fight for photography became my life.

Alexa Chung

I'm really interested in photography, like every other human being.

Donatella Versace

Richard Avedon is a true genius of photography and one of the greatest artists of our time.

Duane Michals

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

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 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.