Quotes about photography (99 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Photography is not only an art, it is an international language that everybody understands.”

NasserTone (1994) Nasser Ali Albahrani is a director, cinematographer, photographer, producer, & YouTuber, who was born on April 3…

Amasi Program, Sharjah TV Interview (March 1, 2016)

Understanding , Art

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

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) American photographer and environmentalist

Disappointment

“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place…I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”

Elliott Erwitt (1928) American photographer

Art , Way

“In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a Leitmotiv.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

“Photography helps people to see.”

Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) American photographer

People , Help

“Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

Life , Pleasure

“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

“Photography doesn't teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.”

Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) American photographer

“Thus, not merely what it can do, but the rate at which it can do it, has to be considered in estimating the value of photography as an ally in astronomy.”

Agnes Mary Clerke book The System of the Stars

Source: The System of the Stars (1890), p. 33.

“The photogram, image formation outside the camera is the real key to photography, it embodies the essence… that allows us to capture light on light sensitive material without the use of any camera.”

László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) Hungarian artist

Art of the 20th century, Part 1 by Karl Ruhrberg, Klaus Honnef, Manfred Schneckenburger, Ingo F. Walther, Christiane Fricke (2000) p. 627.

Light

“I hate looking at photography books or illustrated magazines. This is not because of contempt. I’d rather look at contact sheets: that is where you can sense the individual.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, Only Geometricians May Enter: Interview with Yves Bourde (1974), p. 62

Hate , Books , Sense

“Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.”

Julian Barnes (1946) English writer

Source: Levels of Life

Love , Truth

“I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.”

Lorrie Moore (1957) American writer

Source: Anagrams

Understanding

“Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever…it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.”

Aaron Siskind (1903–1991) American photographer

Aaron Sussman, cited in: The Amateur Photographer's Handbook, (1973), p. vi
Sussman, Aaron. The Amateur Photographer's Handbook. Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1973.
Context: 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. The camera is a perfect companion. It makes no demands, imposes no obligations. It becomes your notebook and your reference library, your microscope and your telescope. It sees what you are too lazy or too careless to notice, and it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.

Love , Way , Feeling

“Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) American photographer

Alfred Stieglitz, as quoted in The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940, M. Orvell (1989). p. 220
Variant: There is a reality — so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. That's what I'm trying to get down in photography.

Reality

“Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.”

Kim Edwards book The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Source: The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Secret

“The camera will never compete with the brush and palette until such time as photography can be taken to Heaven or Hell.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

Hell , Time

“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

“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.”

Jean-Luc Godard (1930) French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic

Le Petit Soldat (film) (direction and screenplay, 1960).
[variation] Cinema is truth at twenty-four frames a second.

Truth , Time

“With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That's not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn't it? There will be painting again, absolutely!”

David Hockney (1937) British artist

Interview with Martin Gayford, " 'Photography is crumbling,' " http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/05/18/bahock18.xml The Telegraph, (18 May 2004)
2000s

War , Time , Painting

“We're free and easy. We're not very authoritative. We have no doctrine, no dogma. It is a community of mostly people who are interested in the arts, literature, photography, music.”

Irving Fiske (1908–1990) American writer

1984 interview, quoted in The Burlington Free Press (6 May 1990), p. 5 https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/201083677/

People , Art , Music , Communication

“I don't crop. Photography is like diamond cutting. If you miss you miss. There is no difference with painting. If you don't cut you have to accept the whole image. You wait until life is in the frame, then you have the permission to click. I like the adventure of waiting until the whole frame is full.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

1980's, I don't necessarily desire a perfect photography,' 1981

Life , Waiting , Painting

“Today, Psycho still holds up extraordinarily well (another reason why a remake seems pointless). With the exception of Halloween, no latter-day horror/thriller has been capable of generating as many goosebumps. The black-and-white photography is perfect for the film's tone and mood — the starkness of color would have blurred the nightmarish quality. The painstaking care with which [director Alfred] Hitchcock composed every scene is evident in the quality of the final product.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=669 of Psycho (1960).
Three-and-a-half star reviews

Color , Mood , Perfection

“Photography is a very, very simple experience. It really is. You have the palette up there so it’s about you saying yes or no.”

Hélène Binet (1959) Swiss photographer

Source: Ten questions for photographer Hélène Binet http://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/photography/articles/2012/december/06/ten-questions-for-photographer-helene-binet/, Phaidon Press, 6 December 2012.

“Black and white are the colors of photography. To me, they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected. Most of my photographs are of people; they are seen simply, as through the eyes of the man in the street. There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough—there has to be vision and the two together can make a good photograph. It is difficult to describe this thin line where matter ends and mind begins.”

Robert Frank (1924–2019) American photographer and filmmaker

Robert Frank, in: Nathan Lyons, Photographers on photography: a critical anthology, (1966), p. 66

People , Hope , Color , Despair

“That the outer man is a picture of the inner, and the face an expression and revelation of the whole character, is a presumption likely enough in itself, and therefore a safe one to go on; borne out as it is by the fact that people are always anxious to see anyone who has made himself famous …. Photography … offers the most complete satisfaction of our curiosity.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Vol. 2, Ch. 29, § 377
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims

People

“I love acting because it’s my heart. I love playing characters. When I get on the set, something snaps in me, something different. It’s what I was meant to do. I love working with other actors, I love working with directors, and I love creating something. From the DP [director of photography] to the director and the actors—and even down to the catering—you know, it’s just a family.”

Tara Reid (1975) American actress

Tara Reid Is Not a Loser https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wd47d5/tara-reid-is-not-a-loser-954 (August 30 2014)

Love , Family , Heart

“From the point of view of photography, I'll smite the picture with sun rays. I'll take old stock shots and scratch them; I'll claw at them so that unknown beauty sees the light of day. I shall sculpt flowers upon the film stock.”

Isidore Isou (1925–2007) Romanian-born French poet, film critic and visual artist

Venom and Eternity (1951), Danielle's Monologue

Beauty , Flowers , Light , Sun

“[This book] is intended as a text from which the student can learn and the teacher can teach the methods and results of economic analysis. It also seeks to be a contribution to the development and systematization of the body of economic analysis itself. These purposes are not separate. The task of presenting a systematic, orderly, and accurate account of economic analysis is identical with the task of preparing the material for teaching. It must be emphasized, however, that the purpose of this work is not primarily to entertain the student, or to enable him to regurgitate appropriate material into examination books, or to learn a few pat phrases, or to indoctrinate him with an abstract discipline which he will never use. Economics is like photography in this respect, that under-exposure is less desirable than no exposure at all.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1940s, Economic Analysis, 1941, p. xv

Books , Learning , Teachers

“So-called "realist" photography does not capture the "what is." Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

New millennium, Photography, or the Writing of Light, (2000)

Reality , Suffering

“That question is so big that there is no end [Albers refers here to the relationship between colors and the source of light]. You see, they have just you cannot participate with it if you have not lubricated your eyes very thoroughly to see the little changes produced in our eye that has another action than any optical apparatus like photography. We must know that we have two ways of seeing. For instance, when we are indoors another part of the retina is engaged compared with when we are outdoors. If we are in warm light or cool light, in higher light or lower light.”

Josef Albers (1888–1976) German-American artist and educator

Homage to the square' (1964), Oral history interview with Josef Albers' (1968)

Color , Way , Question , Light

“I love computer graphics, but every system I've seen to try to turn programming into pictures has lost that syntactic element. There's something about syntax that makes it very precise for reading. I love photography. A photograph will tell a story. But words tell a story even better. Words are more versatile. You can paint a verbal picture that's much richer than you can photograph.”

Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), To Plan or Not To Plan

Love , Reading , Painting

“1948 Black Mountain College N. C. Disciplined by Albers. Learned photography. Worked hard but poorly for Albers. Made contact with music and modern dance. Felt too isolated, Sue [Weil, they married soon, then] and I moved to NYC. Went to Art Students League. Vytlacil & Kantor. Best work made at home. Wht. Painting with no.'s best example. Summer 1950, Outer Island Conn. Married Sue Weil. Christoher (son) Born July 16, 1951 in NYC. First one man show Betty Parsons's”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

Source: 1980's, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art world of Our Time, 1980, pp. 55-56 : Autobiographic notes

Art , Music , Home , Mountain

“There are photographers who invent, others who discover. Personally, I am interested in discoveries, not for the trials or experiences but to capture life itself. I flee from the dangers of the anecdote and the picturesque, which are very easy and better than sensational, but quite as bad. To my mind, photography has the power to evoke, and must not simply document. We have to be abstract, just like nature.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, To Seize Life: Interview with Yvonne Baby (1961), p. 44

Life , Nature , Personality

“Photography itself may err by inaccurately rendering the relative tones in Nature. Then we shall have to ask, What is " Tone "?…”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, How expression may be given to a picture, p. 34

Nature

“Photography has fulfilled my adventurous side: it is a real trade. I behaved like a thief in every country where I went, in China, in Africa, in America… all things considered, our trade is situated somewhere between pickpocket and tightrope walker… yes, we steal from people, we take something that belongs to them: their image, their culture.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, Photographing Is Nothing, Looking Is Everything! Interview with Philippe Boegner (1989), p. 114

People , Country

“Photography is solitary work. There is emulation. It is interesting to know what other people do. Even so, writers do not read everything that is published. A painter does not look at everything. You have to choose. It’s reality, it’s life that is important. We shouldn’t be sniffing around each other all the time, looking….”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, The Main Thing Is Looking: Interview with Alain Desvergnes (1979), p. 75

Life , People , Reality , Time

“The practice of Pictorial Photography cannot be taught by a Kindergarten system; the mere comparison with typical examples must be accompanied with a right understanding of underlying principles and theory.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, p. 1

Understanding

“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; that alone matters; it is that which the sculptor or painter should seek beneath the mask of features.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. VII. Of Yesterday and of to-day, p. 121

Soul

“Nature has always been recorded by artists, from prehistoric cave paintings to twentieth-century landscape photography. I too wanted to make nature the subject of my work, but in new ways. I started working outside using natural materials like grass and water, and this evolved into the idea of making a sculpture by walking … My first work made by walking, in 1967, was a straight line in a grass field, which was also my own path, going ‘nowhere’. In the subsequent early map works, recording very simple but precise walks on Exmoor and Dartmoor, my intention was to make a new art which was also a new way of walking: walking as art.”

Richard Long (1945) artist

Richard Long in: Ben Tufnell (ed.), Richard Long: Selected Statements & Interviews, London 2007, p. 39; Cited in: " Richard Long: A Line Made by Walking 1967 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/long-a-line-made-by-walking-ar00142/text-summary," at Tate.org
2000s

Art , Way , Idea , Nature

“I think that photography has a lot to do with sculpture – because it is three-dimensional and because it depicts reality. For example, I have always been able to relate to photography more than to painting. When I was photographing the hi-fi adverts ['Hi-Fi-Serie' (1979)] I thought to myself, everyone has one of these towers at home. It's the latest thing, the most modern equipment available. So a sculpture must be at least as modern and must stand up to it. Then I hung the pictures on the wall and put an ellipsoid on the floor and thought, the ellipsoid must be at least as good as this advert. At least as good. That's how good a modern sculpture has to be. Do you see what I mean? That was the dialogue…”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

2001 - 2010, Isa Genzken in conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans' (2003)

Home , Thinking , Reality , Painting

“… especially considering that the whole matter of applying photography to purely artistic ends is in such a state of infancy, and that this idea of deliberate violation of truth to fact, for the sake of securing truth to ideas, has hardly yet been put into practice.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, Fidelity to nature and justifiable untruth, p. 14

Truth , Idea

“As a rule, in pictorial photography a long-focus lens will on the whole be most satisfactory.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, The use of the lens in pictorial work, p. 58

“Photography is not an art. Neither is painting, nor sculpture, literature or music. They are only different media for the individual to express his aesthetic feelings... You do not have to be a painter or a sculptor to be an artist. You may be a shoemaker. You may be creative as such. And, if so, you are a greater artist than the majority of the painters whose work is shown in the art galleries of today.”

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) American photographer

'Is Photography a Failure?', Alfred Stieglitz, 'Sun: 5.', March 14, 1922; as quoted on Wikipedia

Art , Music , Feeling , Literature

“Art is about collecting experiences and expressing them. For me music and photography are similar art forms. I collect experiences, stir them in myself and express it in my own language. Just like my photography, music is my language.”

TY Bello Nigerian singer

Bio! TY Bello http://www.pulse.ng/entertainment/music/bio-ty-bello-id2789473.html

Art , Music

“I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism—real life—the now.”

Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) American photographer

"Photography at the Crossroads," 1951.

Life , World , Home , Time

“How do things stand, now, if the subject contains a large element of pathos?... Consider such an interesting subject as the scene taking place around the bed of a dying woman, for example; seize and render that ensemble by photography, if that is possible [photography was a very recent invention in Paris ca. 1853, a. o. by the photographer Nadar ]: it will be falsified in a thousand ways. The reason is that, according to the degree of your imagination, the subject will appear to you more or less beautiful, you will be more or less the poet in that scene in which you are an actor; you see only what is interesting, whereas the instrument puts in everything.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

In Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 233
quote circa 1853, in which Delacroix relates painting to theater from the view of the visitor / spectator
1831 - 1863

Beauty , Way , Imagination , Appearance

“The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

"The Heroism of Vision", p. 105
On Photography (1977)

Art , Painting

“People say they have to express their emotions. I’m sick of that. Photography doesn’t teach you how to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.”

Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) American photographer

Art News, January 1981.

People

“Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it. Degas liked it not only because it provided an accurate record, but because the snapshot showed him a means of escape from the classical rules of design. Through it he learnt to make a composition without the use of formal symmetry.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 13: Degas

“Inferior as a mechanical printing method for ordinary photographic purposes, the gum process may for a time at least be regarded as standing apart for pictorial purposes, because the large amount of personal control which must be exercised before it can be said to show distinct advantages over other methods implies that the controlling hand must be guided by an artist that is, a man of such large instinctive artistic taste that one can hardly conceive that he would be able to produce a better result by painting, and without the use of photography at all, were he to devote the same skill and endeavour to the employment of brush or pencil, instead of photographic appliances.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Printing methods and their bearing on pictorial photography, p. 73

Exercises , Time , Painting , Personality

“What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it.”

Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) English illustrator and author

As quoted in Aubrey Beardsley : A Biography (1999) by Matthew Sturgis, p. 189

Painting , Perfection

“What I find interesting is working in a society with certain taboos — and fashion photography is about that kind of society. To have taboos, then to get around them — that is interesting.”

Helmut Newton (1920–2004) German-Australian photographer

American Photo (January/February 2000), p. 90

Fashion

“But with photography as with drawing or painting, once it is done I want to know whether it holds together or not. That is the real critique. I couldn’t care less if the person to whom I show what I do likes it or not — it takes all sorts to make a world and all that. To criticize is to put oneself in someone else’s shoes and try to figure out what they wanted to do. Only the “why” of things is important to me.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, We Always Talk Too Much: Conversation with Pierre Assouline (1994), p. 132

World , Shoe , Drawing , Painting

“Séances lost their popularity with the invention of infrared photography when it became possible to see what mediums were doing in the dark. Nowadays, spiritualists’ fakery is more ambiguous and subtle.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze.”

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) American photographer

Alfred Stieglitz (1887), in the American Annual of Photography 1897.

“T. V. has made going to the theatre seem pointless, photography has pretty much killed painting but graffiti has remained gloriously unspoilt by progress.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

Wall and Piece (2005)

Painting

“Photography has never been a problem for me, [what is important] is looking, the way of looking, of questioning with your eyes: I don’t think; I am impulsive, it is /looking/ that’s important, not photography. Now, since I have started drawing, I’ve merely switched tools, but it is still looking that’s important. To look the right way, one should learn to become a deaf-mute.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, Photographing Is Nothing, Looking Is Everything! Interview with Philippe Boegner (1989), p. 113

Way , Question , Problem , Thinking

“I shoot only on film and plate. I don’t touch digital. There are many reasons: mentally it’s very different to work with film. It’s expensive, it’s heavy, so you have to prepare. It’s precious and every photograph you have to say yes! It’s now! There's no fiddling about and fixing it later. I really believe the soul of photography is its relationship with the instant.”

Hélène Binet (1959) Swiss photographer

Source: Ten questions for photographer Hélène Binet http://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/photography/articles/2012/december/06/ten-questions-for-photographer-helene-binet/, Phaidon Press, 6 December 2012.

Soul

“More than 100 years of photography at Manly Beach in my electorate does not suggest that sea levels have risen despite frequent reports from climate alarmists that this is imminent.”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

Quoted in "'I've learnt to speak my mind': 10 excerpts from Tony Abbott's climate change speech in London'" http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/ive-learnt-to-speak-my-mind-ten-excerpts-from-tony-abbotts-climate-change-speech-in-london-20171009-gyxk92.html, Sydney Morning Herald, October 10, 2017
2017

Sea

“I don’t need to belittle the work of present day photography. I see quite often things that I like and admire. I do digital photography myself. Certain people of my generation decided that the past was better than the present. I am not sure that that is true. I don’t want to be one of those people that says the world has come to an end.”

Saul Leiter (1923–2013) American photographer

Saul Leiter: The Quiet Iconoclast (2009)

People , World , Past

“Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.”

Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) American photographer

"It Has to Walk Alone," Infinity magazine, 1951.

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

Philip Larkin book The Less Deceived

Source: The Less Deceived (1955), Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album

Faith , Smile , Art , Disappointment

“I was surprised by photography, which we all use so massively every day. Suddenly, I saw it in a new way, as a picture that offered me a new view, free of all the conventional criteria I had always associated with art. It had no style, no composition, no judgment. It freed me from personal experience. For the first time, there was nothing to it: it was pure picture. That's why I wanted to have it, to show it - not use it as a means to painting, but use painting as a means to photography.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

Art , Way , Time , Painting

“The sign had been put up out of suspicion and a guilty conscience: “Military zone. Filming or photography prohibited."”

Patrick Modiano (1945) French writer

p 125
The Search Warrant (2000)

“Few speeches which have produced an electrical effect on an audience can bear the colorless photography of a printed record.”

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847–1929) British politician

Life of Pitt (1891), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Hence SELECTION in photography, or at least in landscape and some other branches of work, often takes the place of what in painting becomes voluntary COMPOSITION.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Methods - The practical application of means to end, p. 28

Painting

“I have sometimes felt that writers on the artistic aspect of photography have too often, like the reformers of religious creeds, led their followers into a condition of disbelief and unrest, and then left them to find out for themselves how to live up to new and vague beliefs, so many writers on Pictorial Photography have told us what to avoid without saying why, and have then told us what to do without showing how.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, p. 2

“Photography is not about seeing, but about Knowing. Going so deeply into the subject, whatever, whoever, that you find the spirit within. And then you memorialize it for others to also Know.”

John Diamond (doctor) (1934) Australian doctor

Source: Beyond the Obvious: Photography for Healing (2014), p. 3

Memory

“Many so called primitives are afraid of cameras. They think it can capture their soul and take it away. There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, sexual intensity, a sexual intensity of pursuit.”

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer

Two Years Later: Mexico City Return
Queer: A Novel (1985)

Soul , Thinking

“Today, I am no longer concerned with photography as an art form. I believe it is potentially the best medium for explaining man to himself and his fellow man.”

Edward Steichen (1879–1973) American photographer, artist and curator

Edward Steichen (1967),, cited in: National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian Institution), ‎Carolyn Kinder Carr, ‎National Portrait Gallery (Great Britain) (2003). Americans: paintings and photographs from the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, Deel 3. p. 207

Art

“It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

New millennium, Photography, or the Writing of Light, (2000)

Age , Way , Reality

“Photography for me is not looking, it's feeling. If you can't feel what you're looking at, then you're never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.”

Don McCullin (1935) artist

David Armstrong, Theo Farrell, Bice Maiguashca, Governance and resistance in world politics http://books.google.pl/books?id=Xs6V0PLaEiEC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 68.

Feeling

“I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for truth my obsession”

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) American photographer

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

Truth , Search , Passion

“With the invention of printing, mass standardized culture had become possible.
With the inventions of photography and then cinema, the standardization of popular culture began to progress geometrically and its rate of change slowed down.
In addition, the complete documentation of daily life made possible by these technological advances presented the mass of humanity, for the first time in history, with a mirror in which to regard itself. Less and less had it been able to look away, as its own image became more detailed and perfect, especially with the burden of information that became available at the end of the twentieth century.
What this meant, in practical terms, was that retro was the only fashion.”

Kage Baker book The Life of the World to Come

Source: The Life of the World to Come (2004), Chapter 6, “Alec and His Friends” (p. 105)

Life , History , Fashion , Change

“Evans wanted his photographs to be "literate, authoritative, transcendent." The moral universe of the 1930s being no longer ours, these adjectives are barely creditable today. Nobody demands that photography be literate. Nobody can imagine how it could be authoritative. Nobody understands how anything, least of all a photograph, could be transcendent.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

"America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly", p. 31
On Photography (1977)

Imagination , Understanding , Universe

“I had so many other interests at the time: drawing, tinkering, building, inventing, games, sports, climbing trees. It took me through high school, and then college to settle on photography. But a half-century later, I'm still staging my shots.”

Walter Wick (1953) American photographer and creator of children's books

My First Roll Of Film http://www.walterwick.com/blog/2016/3/2/my-first-roll-of-film-1 (March 2, 2016)

School , Game , Sport , Tree

“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 book On Photography

"Photographic Evangels", p. 147
On Photography (1977)

Art , Reality

“This book [Zen in the Art of Archery], by Herrigel, which I discovered a few years ago, seems to me fundamental to our profession as photographers. Matisse wrote similarly about drawing: set a discipline, make rigor a rule, forget oneself completely. And in photography the attitude must be the same: detach oneself, do not try to prove anything at all. My sense of freedom is the same: a frame that allows any variation. This is the basis of Zen Buddhism, the evidence: that you go in with great force and then you succeed in forgetting yourself.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, Only Geometricians May Enter: Interview with Yves Bourde (1974), p. 65

Books , Art , Sense , Freedom

“to show that [the success of my portray-] photographs was not due to subject matter – not to special trees or faces, or interiors, to special privileges – clouds were there for everyone... I wanted to photograph clouds to find out what I had learned in forty years about photography. Through clouds to put down my philosophy of life... My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs that unless one has eyes and sees, they won't be seen – and still everyone will never forget them having once looked at them.”

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) American photographer

'How I came to Photograph Clouds', Alfred Stieglitz, in 'Amateur Photographer and Photography', (19 September 1923): 255.
about his new subject: 'clouds' in his long series 'Equivalents' he started in 1922

Life , Tree , Learning , Success

“Shadow is an amazing subject. Shadow is an absence. As an absence of energy you can compare it to silence or maybe cold air…. We talk about photography being simple and architecture being complex and how do you convey something that is more deep, that allows you to dream or think This is weird so you start to dream and think and you maybe go out purely from the picture but into yourself. The light and the shadow are tools to allow you to do that.”

Hélène Binet (1959) Swiss photographer

Source: Ten questions for photographer Hélène Binet http://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/photography/articles/2012/december/06/ten-questions-for-photographer-helene-binet/, Phaidon Press, 6 December 2012.

Dreams , Thinking , Light , Silence

“[T]he invention of photography has made the painter and the patron lose interest in the likeness and transfer it to some more formal pattern. Our whole sensibility has been re-created by such subtle shifts.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"Sense and Sensibility"
The Common Sense of Science (1951)

“Yes. Basically, I can read your photography [of Wolfgang Tillmans, who is interviewing her] and see what moves you. What really moves you and not just faked emotion. I don't think it's good when it's like that in art – but unfortunately it often is. That's why I like Bruce Nauman, for example, as a sculptor. With his work, sometimes I have really thought to myself, that's simply beautiful... Above all, it is difficult enough to depict something that moves you deep down inside. But that's ultimately what art is all about, and that's also what appeals to people – if an artist can do it.”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

2001 - 2010, Isa Genzken in conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans' (2003)

People , Beauty , Art , Thinking

“And they took twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us. Took pictures of the approach, the getaway, the northwest corner the southwest corner and that's not to mention the aerial photography.”

Arlo Guthrie (1947) American folk singer

Alice's Restaurant Massacree

Color

“Minimal art went nowhere. Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus. All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art. The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.”

Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) American artist

Quotes of Sol Lewitt, "Sol LeWitt by Saul Ostrow," 2003

Art , Idea

“Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. [It is] a major force in explaining man to man.”

Edward Steichen (1879–1973) American photographer, artist and curator

Quoted in Time Magazine, "To Catch the Instant" http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,874339,00.html, 7 April 1961

Beauty , Feeling , Wealth

“…let it be remembered that as photography is our chosen medium, then if photography unaided will give us the effect we want there is no especial virtue in altering it.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Printing the picture and controlling its formation, p. 79

“In astronomy two characteristics are common to all data on which the solution of the great problems depends. The first is the extreme minuteness of the quantities to be measured. …New epochs were inaugurated in the beginning of the seventeenth century by the invention of the telescope, and in the last third of the nineteenth by the discovery of photography and spectroscopy…. The other characteristic is that astronomy always requires a very large number of data. …These two characteristics of the data that the astronomer requires to build his science on make two things more necessary in astronomy than in any other science: patience and organised coöperation. …The astronomer—each working at his own task…—is always conscious of belonging to a community, whose members, separated in space and time, nevertheless feel joined by a very real tie, almost of kinship. …whatever his special work may be it is always a link in a chain, which derives its value from the fact that there is another link to the left and one to the right of it. It is the chain that is important, not the separate links.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932)

Feeling , Communication , Problem , Science

“I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term — meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching — there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.”

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)

Sense , Effort , Time

“In the 1950's there was a kind of agreement that a good artist would do something in his picture that acknowledge the edge, but it was a question of doing something when you got to the edge. Cropping was something new. It came from photography and from w:Clement Greenberg. It was resisted as being too easy.”

Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) American artist

Kenneth Noland, p. 23
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

Question

“The purpose of photography is the transmission of a visualized sector of life through the medium of the camera into a mental process that starts with the photographer's thinking about the subject he photographs and is continued in the mind of the spectator.”

Roman Vishniac (1897–1990) American photographer

Deschin, Jacob. "Nature as it is". New York Times (1857-Current file); Feb 3, 1952; Proquest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2002) pg. X14

Life , Thinking

“When I thought of myself as a writer in the 1960s, I questioned what made me go from the left to the right margin, from one page to another. As I thought of the space I was also thinking about time. Then I thought: ‘Why am I limiting myself to a piece of paper when there’s a world out there?’ I focused on performance in the early 1970s because the common language of the time was ‘finding oneself.’ In a time like that, what else could I do but turn in on myself and then go from me to you? Photography, film, and video were sidesteps–spaces in front of you–whereas I was more interested in the space where you were in the middle. Now I’m involved with peopled spaces–that’s design and architecture.”

Vito Acconci (1940–2017) Designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist

Vito Acconci interview, in The Art Newspaper, Art Basel edition, December 5, 2012.

People , World , Question , Thinking

“The very idea of philosopher as art curator deeply interests me. One swiftly dreams of what Gilles Deleuze might have done with the opportunity to curate an art exhibition at MoMA: Art and Alloverness perhaps? Or Michel Foucault: the New Panopticons at the Centre Georges Pompidou? What would Susan Sontag or Roland Barthes have done at the International Center of Photography or at the Tate? What could Friedrich Nietzsche have done at the Louvre Museum? What indeed could Georges Bataille have haughtily done at the Metropolitan Museum of Art?”

Joseph Nechvatal (1951) American artist

Joseph Nechvatal. " Painting and Philosophy: An Assessment http://hyperallergic.com/90646/painting-and-philosophy-an-assessment/," at hyperallergic.com, October 28, 2013

Dreams , Art , Idea

“Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

In Plato's Cave, p. 8 http://books.google.com/books?id=B8DktTyeRNkC&q=%22Photography+has+become+almost+as+widely+practiced+an+amusement+as+sex+and+dancing%22&pg=PA8#v=onepage
Previously published as Photography http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1973/oct/18/photography/ in The New York Review of Books, 18 October 1973
On Photography (1977)

Sex , Dance

“Growing up, I was surrounded by Nazi imagery, like everybody in Germany, and for a boy obsessed with photography it left an indelible impression on me.”

Helmut Newton (1920–2004) German-Australian photographer

American Photo (January/February 2000), p. 90
Context: Growing up, I was surrounded by Nazi imagery, like everybody in Germany, and for a boy obsessed with photography it left an indelible impression on me. Later this influence was tempered by Brassaï and Dr. Erich Salomon. My love of photography at night started with m early experience of … the Brelin undergrund stations. Even today I love photographing by the light of street lamps or in the glare of my flash.

Boy

“The works done by mathematical formulas, even though are the works of brain, do not deserve to be called Art. Painting is Art, Photography is not.”

Laxmi Prasad Devkota (1909–1959) Nepali poet

कला र जीवन (Art and Life)
Art and Life

Art , Painting

“The straight forward illustration of practicality cannot take the form of Art, not is photography any Art in my opinion.”

Laxmi Prasad Devkota (1909–1959) Nepali poet

कला र जीवन (Art and Life)
Art and Life
Context: I think human arts depend on the imaginative truths. The straight forward illustration of practicality cannot take the form of Art, not is photography any Art in my opinion.

Art

“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. The camera is a perfect companion. It makes no demands, imposes no obligations. It becomes your notebook and your reference library, your microscope and your telescope. It sees what you are too lazy or too careless to notice, and it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.”

Aaron Siskind (1903–1991) American photographer

Aaron Sussman, cited in: The Amateur Photographer's Handbook, (1973), p. vi
Sussman, Aaron. The Amateur Photographer's Handbook. Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1973.

Perfection , Flowers , Way , Love

“He had varied interests including photography, sports and motoring. He has won trophies as an amateur horse rider and has even played table hockey, tennis, football and polo.”

Uthradom Thirunal Marthanda Varma (1922–2013) Maharaja of Travancore

Sangeetha Seshagiri, in "Marthanda Varma, Titular Head of Travancore Royal Family, Passes Away (16 December 2013)"

Sport , Horse , Football , Hockey