Quotes about photographer

A collection of quotes on the topic of photograph, photographer, likeness, people.

Quotes about photographer

“No politician should ever let himself be photographed in a bathing suit.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

“I can better understand the inert blindness & defiant ignorance of the reactionaries from having been one of them. I know how smugly ignorant I was—wrapped up in the arts, the natural (not social) sciences, the externals of history & antiquarianism, the abstract academic phases of philosophy, & so on—all the one-sided standard lore to which, according to the traditions of the dying order, a liberal education was limited. God! the things that were left out—the inside facts of history, the rational interpretation of periodic social crises, the foundations of economics & sociology, the actual state of the world today … & above all, the habit of applying disinterested reason to problems hitherto approached only with traditional genuflections, flag-waving, & callous shoulder-shrugs! All this comes up with humiliating force through an incident of a few days ago—when young Conover, having established contact with Henneberger, the ex-owner of WT, obtained from the latter a long epistle which I wrote Edwin Baird on Feby. 3, 1924, in response to a request for biographical & personal data. Little Willis asked permission to publish the text in his combined SFC-Fantasy, & I began looking the thing over to see what it was like—for I had not the least recollection of ever having penned it. Well …. I managed to get through, after about 10 closely typed pages of egotistical reminiscences & showing-off & expressions of opinion about mankind & the universe. I did not faint—but I looked around for a 1924 photograph of myself to burn, spit on, or stick pins in! Holy Hades—was I that much of a dub at 33 … only 13 years ago? There was no getting out of it—I really had thrown all that haughty, complacent, snobbish, self-centred, intolerant bull, & at a mature age when anybody but a perfect damned fool would have known better! That earlier illness had kept me in seclusion, limited my knowledge of the world, & given me something of the fatuous effusiveness of a belated adolescent when I finally was able to get around more in 1920, is hardly much of an excuse. Well—there was nothing to be done … except to rush a note back to Conover & tell him I'd dismember him & run the fragments through a sausage-grinder if he ever thought of printing such a thing! The only consolation lay in the reflection that I had matured a bit since '24. It's hard to have done all one's growing up since 33—but that's a damn sight better than not growing up at all.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Catherine L. Moore (7 February 1937), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 407-408
Non-Fiction, Letters

God, Age, World, Education

“While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.”

Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) American photojournalist

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

Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019) German fashion designer

“To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.”

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) American photographer and environmentalist

Context: I would never apologize for photographing rocks. Rocks can be very beautiful. But, yes, people have asked why I don’t put people into my pictures of the natural scene. I respond, “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” That usually doesn’t go over at all.

People

“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 (1923–1971) American photographer and author

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

“Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment.”

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) American photographer and environmentalist

Disappointment

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

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) American photographer and environmentalist

“What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Personality

“A photograph is usually looked at- seldom looked into.”

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) American photographer and environmentalist

“I had an incident with a really dumb magazine called Voici where they printed a photograph of Lily-Rose, a long-lens shot from very far away, and I just went ballistic. You can sue them — I've sued a couple of times, Vanessa's sued and we win every time — but this time I was beyond suing. I just wanted to beat whoever was responsible into the earth — I just wanted to rip him apart.So I tracked him down and gave him a few suggestions about how to live life and stay healthy and he took my advice. Because that's just unacceptable. They can do anything they want to me — and most tabloids have — but not my kid, not my pure, innocent little baby. She didn't ask to be in this circus.”

Johnny Depp (1963) American actor, film producer, and musician

Quoted in Jessamy Calkin, "Johnny Depp Esq.," http://www.johnnydeppfan.com/interviews/ukesquire.htm Esquire [U.K. edition] (February 2000)

Life, Time, Baby

“I didn’t try to communicate any kind of philosophy since I am not a philosopher. I am a photographer. That’s it.”

Saul Leiter (1923–2013) American photographer

Saul Leiter: The Quiet Iconoclast (2009)

Communication

“Everyone has a photographic Memory, some just don't have film.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

Memory

“All colors made me happy: even gray.
My eyes were such that literally they
Took photographs.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Source: Pale Fire

Color, Happiness

“A photograph it a souvenir of a memory.
It is not a moment.
It is the looking at the photograph that becomes the moment. Your own moment.”

David Levithan book Every You, Every Me

Source: Every You, Every Me

Memory

“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”

Lorrie Moore (1957) American writer

Love, Marriage

“Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

“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 (1902–1984) American photographer and environmentalist

Love, People, Books, Music

“I mean, it's very subtle and a little embarrassing to me, but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.”

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) American photographer and author

“One of my favorite album covers is On the Beach. Of course that was the name of a movie and I stole it for my record, but that doesn't matter. The idea for that cover came like a bolt from the blue. Gary and I traveled around getting all the pieces to put it together. We went to a junkyard in Santa Ana to get the tail fin and fender from a 1959 Cadillac, complete with taillights, and watched them cut it off a Cadillac for us, then we went to a patio supply place to get the umbrella and table. We picke up the bad polyester yellow jacket and white pants at a sleazy men's shop, where we watched a shoplifter getting caught red-handed and busted. Gary and I were stoned on some dynamite weed and stood there dumbfounded watching the bust unfold. This girl was screaming and kicking! Finally we grabbed a local LA paper to use as a prop. It had this amazing headline: Sen. Buckley Calls For Nixon to Resign. Next we took the palm tree I had taken around the world on the Tonight's the Night tour. We then placed all of these pieces carefully in the sand at Santa Monica beach. Then we shot it. Bob Seidemann was the photographer, the same one who took the famous Blind Faith cover shot of the naked young girl holding the airplane. We used the crazy pattern from the umbrella insides for the inside of the sleeve that held the vinyl recording. That was the creative process at work. We lived for that, Gary and I, and we still do.”

Neil Young book Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream

Source: Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream

Men, World, Faith, Travel

“I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.”

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) American photographer and author

Thinking

“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 (1923–2004) American photographer

Truth

“The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Reality, Parting

“This is a photograph of me as I wish I looked all the time. Then I might have a chance of getting in Hollywood.”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

Chance, Time

“I don't have a photograph. I'd give you my footprints, but they're upstairs in my socks.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

When asked for a photograph for identification
The Groucho Phile (1976)

“A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.”

Salman Rushdie The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Source: The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Decision

“When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies”

John Fowles book The Collector

Source: The Collector

Drawing

“When I make a photograph, I make love.”

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) American photographer

in 'Alfred Stieglitz' Photo notes, August 1946, p. 65
From Adams to Stieglitz' (1990)

Love, Making love

“Kodachrome,
They give us those nice bright colours,
Give us the greens of summers,
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day,
Oh, yeah, I got a Nikon camera,
I love to take a photograph,
So Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Kodachrome
Song lyrics, There Goes Rhymin' Simon (1973)

Love, World, Thinking, Summer

“There are people who have made me see shapes — and others I thought of a great deal, even people I have loved, who make me see nothing. I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

1970s, Some Memories of Drawings (1976)

Love, People, World, Painting

“But there is one very odd thing - to notice that basically a picture doesn't change, that the first 'vision' remains almost intact, in spite of appearances. I often ponder on a light and a dark when I have put them into a painting; I try hard to break them up by interpolating a color that will create a different effect. When the work is photographed, I note that what I put in to correct my first vision has disappeared, and that, after all, the photographic image corresponds with my first vision before the transformation I insisted on.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Boisgeloup, winter 1934
As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 313
Quotes, 1930's

Color, Light, Appearance, Winter

“Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.
Letter to Helen Keller, after she had been accused of plagiarism for one of her early stories (17 March 1903), published in Mark Twain's Letters, Vol. 1 (1917) edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, p. 731

Men, Soul, Idea, Parting

“It would be very curious to record by means of photographs, not the stage of the picture, but its metamorphoses. Perhaps one would perceive the path taken by the mind in order to put its dreams into a concrete form. But what is really very curious is to observe that fundamentally the picture does not change, that despite appearances the initial vision remains almost intact”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Boisgeloup, winter 1934
Richard Friedenthal, (1963, p. 256).
Quotes, 1930's, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

Dreams, Appearance, Winter, Change

“[…], old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it's not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him or herself in us, Who's that looking at me so sadly, he or she would say.”

José Saramago book All the Names

Source: All the Names (1997), p. 153

Personality

“The modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world – in other words – expressing the energy, the motion and the other inner forces.... the modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Source: 1950's, Interview by William Wright, Summer 1950, pp. 139-140

Age, World, Feeling, Nature

“The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous.
I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen. Being able to sit at home in the parsonage and your books would be very famous and occasionally you would correspond with the Prince of Wales's secretary.
You know I didn't think they'd rake through my bins, I didn't expect to be photographed on the beach through long lenses. I never dreamt it would impact my daughter's life negatively, which at times it has.”

Joanne K. Rowling (1965) British novelist, author of the Harry Potter series

As quoted in an interview with Jeremy Paxman, on Newsnight, as quoted in 'Harry is a lot, lot, lot angrier in this book' in The Telegraph (20 June 2003) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/fictionreviews/3596993/Harry-is-a-lot-lot-lot-angrier-in-this-book.html) <br class="br">2000s

Life, Books, Home, Imagination

“A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.”

Brigitte Bardot (1934) French model, actor, singer and animal rights activist

Life

“Your photograph is all I have: it is with me from the morning when I wake up with a frantic half dream about you to the last moment when I think of you and of death at night.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Source: Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

Death, Dreams, Thinking, Night

“The photographer in my head says:
Give me peace.
Flash.
Give me release.
Flash.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Invisible Monsters

Source: Invisible Monsters

Peace

“Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Animals, Dead

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

Source: On Photography

Reality

“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality… One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

Source: On Photography

Way, Reality, Past

“She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.”

Elizabeth Bowen book The Death of the Heart

Source: The Death of the Heart

Fate, Girl

“In the photograph by my bed my mother is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees

Sadness, Smile, Dreams, Forgiveness

“Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.”

Francine Prose (1947) American writer

Source: Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

Time

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.”

Toni Morrison book Tar Baby

Tar Baby (1981)

Life, World, Beauty, Painting

“To me, these people were as exotic as animals in a zoo. I'd never seen anything like them. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be one of them or simply live among them taking notes and photographs.”

Augusten Burroughs (1965) American writer

People, Animals

“He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph. Things should look right. Fun; there should be a lot of fun and no more sadness than absolutely necessary.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Life, Sadness, Way

“Do you know what the difference is between Friendship and Love? Friendship is the photograph, Love is the oil painting.”

Frank Delaney (1942–2017) Irish writer and journalist

Source: The Matchmaker of Kenmare

Love, Friendship, Painting

“I was tanned, happy, and blowing a kiss to Cary, who’d playacted the role of a highfashion
photographer by calling out ridiculous encouragements.”

Sylvia Day book Bared to You

Source: Bared to You

Kiss, Happiness

“Life is a movie; death is a photograph.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Life, Death

“One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books. See how willingly Nature poses herself upon photographers' plates. No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as those of the human soul.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

1872(?), page 95
John of the Mountains, 1938

Books, Soul, Mountain, Nature

“All we ever see of stars are their old photographs.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

Star

“Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.

Photographs are.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

Source: On Photography

Life

“When do I see a photograph, when a reflection?”

Philip K. Dick book A Scanner Darkly

Source: A Scanner Darkly

“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

Source: On Photography

“Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

“This is what I like about photographs. They're proof that once, even if just for a heartbeat, everything was perfect.”

Jodi Picoult book Lone Wolf

Source: Lone Wolf

Perfection

“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 book On Photography

Variant: to take a 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.
Source: On Photography

Time, Personality

“Love After Love
all your life, whom you have ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.”

Derek Walcott (1930–2017) Saint Lucian–Trinidadian poet and playwright

Love, Life, Heart

“I felt like an undeveloped photograph that he was printing, my image rising to the surface under his gaze.”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

“Old pictures look very rugged and young, and the people in the photographs always seem a lot happier than you are.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

People

“The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Source: Haunted (2005)

People

“To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Heart

“You all looked so happy together in the photograph. You looked like the
perfect family. Is there such a thing anymore because if there is, my happy
little unit was definitely not in the queue when they were handing out the
titles.”

Cecelia Ahern book Love, Rosie

Source: Love, Rosie

Family, Perfection, Happiness

“There are two people in every photograph: the photographer and the viewer”

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) American photographer and environmentalist

People

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

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Art, Time

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

“I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps. We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves!”

Erica Jong book Fear of Flying

Source: Fear of Flying

Memory

“I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.”

Charles Bukowski book Love Is a Dog from Hell

Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell

Love

“We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

Way

“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 (1953) American photographer

Thinking

“It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.”

Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) American photojournalist

“Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference”

Robert Frank (1924–2019) American photographer and filmmaker

Robert Frank, "Statement, 1958"; republished in: Vicki Goldberg. Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present https://books.google.nl/books?id=U3qXOp1iT6QC&pg=PA401, 1981, p. 401 <br class="br">Variant: Life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference and it is important to see what is invisible to others. <br class="br">Context: I have been frequently accused of deliberately twisting subject matter to my point of view. Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference. Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism. But criticism can come out of love. It is important to see what is invisible to others — perhaps the look of hope or the look of sadness. Also, it is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph.<br>My photographs are not planned or composed in advance, and I do not anticipate that the onlooker will share my viewpoint. However, I feel that if my photograph leaves an image on his mind, something has been accomplished.

Life, Indifference

“Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Marriage Plot

Source: The Marriage Plot

People, World, Personality

“To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers

Reality, Joy

“I just hope I remember to tell my kids that they are as happy as I look in my old photographs. And I hope that they believe me.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Hope, Happiness

“Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Written on the Body

“A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.”

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) American photographer and environmentalist

Attributed to Adams in E.T. Schoch (2002), The Everything Digital Photography Book (2002) p. 105

“I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it's such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her.”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

People, Beauty, Thinking, Animals

“He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Life, Way

“In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The 'anything whatever' then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.”

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) French philosopher, critic and literary theorist

Source: Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.”

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) American photographer and environmentalist

People, Painting

“Although the photographer and the art thief were close friends, neither had ever taken the other's picture.”

George Carlin book Brain Droppings

Source: Brain Droppings

Art

“What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) French philosopher, critic and literary theorist

Source: Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.”

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) American photographer and author

Appearance

“she took pictures of germs, viruses, and people reacting to germs and viruses. On weekends, for extra money, she photographed weddings, which really wasn't that much of a stretch”

David Sedaris book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Source: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Money, People, Wedding

“Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”

Karen Joy Fowler book We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Source: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Family, Memory

“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 (1902–1984) American photographer and environmentalist

"A Personal Credo" (1943), published in American Annual of Photography (1944), reprinted in Nathan Lyons, editor, Photographers on Photography (1966), reprinted in Vicki Goldberg, editor, Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present (1988)

Life, Feeling, Sense