PHOTOGRAPHY QUOTES II
quotations about photography
Composition in photography is almost as varied as composition in music or words -- melodic or atonal, safe or daring -- and can enhance subject, theme, and style. Every photograph you take involves you in some compositional decision, even if this is simply where to set up the camera or when to press the button.
MICHAEL LANGFORD
Basic Photography
Photography bears witness to the passage of time, but it cannot make statements as to the importance of things at any time, nor is it concerned with "truth and beauty" or with teasing out what underlies appearance. Rather, it voraciously records anything in view.
LIZ WELLS
Photography: A Critical Introduction
The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
ROLAND BARTHES
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that's gone forever, impossible to reproduce.
KARL LAGERFELD
attributed, Click You!
Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.
MARC RIBOUD
FotoFest 90: The International Month of Photography: February 10-March 10
The definition of photography is changing, too, and becoming more of a language. We're attaching imagery to tweets or text messages, almost like a period at the end of a sentence. It's enhancing our communication in a whole new way.
JOSHUA ALLEN HARRIS
"In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at Nothing", The New Yorker, April 4, 2016
A photograph is a biography of a moment.
ART SHAY
interview, CBS News, February 13, 2014
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.
AARON SISKIND
attributed, The Amateur Photographer's Handbook
Several years ago, I went through a painful writer's block -- a period of silence that lasted six or seven months. I'm convinced that the only thing that really saved me, and led me back to the page, was taking a class in black and white photography. In fact, living with a camera around my neck for a year, and hunting for pictures to shoot, taught me a lot about the importance of the image and its relationship to narrative in writing, something I'd struggled with before discovering photography.
TRACY K. SMITH
interview, Gulf Coast, vol. 17, number 1
In order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.
ROLAND BARTHES
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.
DOROTHEA LANGE
Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
DOROTHEA LANGE
Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life
The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous.
WILLIAM ALBERT ALLARD
attributed, Fine Art Photography: Water, Ice, and Fog
We think of photography as the intersection of science and art.
EDWIN H. LAND
attributed, Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land
A great image is a great image, no matter who took it, where they live, and whether they were using a phone or the most expensive camera.
MIKE BETTS
"Community for Photography Photocrowd Seeks £450,000 Through Crowdcube", Crowd Fund Insider, April 28, 2016
After all, the decisive quality in a photographer is the faculty of seeing certain things and being tempted by them.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
"George Bernard Shaw on Coburn's Photography", British Journal of Photography, 1906
Life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference and it is important to see what is invisible to others.
ROBERT FRANK
attributed, Photographic Possibilities
My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, or the camera's eye may entirely change my idea.
EDWARD WESTON
attributed, Pictures on a Page: Photojournalism and Picture Editing
Photography knows how to authenticate its misrepresentations.
MASON COOLEY
City Aphorisms
Photography, if practiced with high seriousness, is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere.
JOHN SZARKOWSKI
Looking at photographs: 100 pictures from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art