20th-century Photographer Quotes

I am a passionate lover of the snapshot, because of all photographic images it comes closest to truth.

My personal interest in ordinary people is unlimited, but I am fascinated by the challenge of portraying true greatness adequately with my camera.

Today I see beauty everywhere I go, in every face I see, in every single soul, and sometimes even in myself.

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.

We are Afropolitans: not citizens, but Africans of the world.

If I had been born one or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make sculpture.

Robert Mapplethorpe

One of our core beliefs was that significant art could be made by anyone, anywhere and anytime. You didn't have to live and work in New York City to be an artist. It was in line with the philosophy of Outsider art and movements for artistic "localism."

Just as typography is human speech translated into what can be read, so photography is the translation of reality into a readable image.

Affection is the mortal illness of lonely people.

Like a disc jockey from Paradise, Howard flips Marie over and plays her B side. Every now and then she reaches for Sissy to include her, but the laws of physics insist on being obeyed.

What the nuns told us in school when I was going to religious instruction was that we worship not the crucifix but Christ... We aren't supposed to worship the symbol or give it the same level of reverence that we give Christ because it's only a representation.

Over the years, photography has been to me what a journal is to a writer - a record of things seen and experienced, moments in the flow of time, documents of significance to me, experiments in seeing.

Beaumont Newhall

I try to make art which celebrates doubt and uncertainty. Which provokes answers but doesn't give them. Which withholds absolute meaning by incorporating parasite meanings. Which suspends meaning while perpetually dispatching you toward interpretation, urging you beyond dogmatism, beyond doctrine, beyond ideology, beyond authority.

The magic of photography is metaphysical. What you see in the photograph isn't what you saw at the time. The real skill of photography is organized visual lying.

Terence Donovan (photographer)

I didn't want to make 'high' art, I had no interest in using paint, I wanted to find something that anyone could relate to without knowing about contemporary art. I wasn't thinking in terms of precious prints or archival quality; I didn't want the work to seem like a commodity.

Usually I think if there is something imperfect in a photograph it makes the picture more real. Photographs that are slick, smooth, and imperfect seem less honest to me.

White is the color of decomposition. White is also no color. White is nothing. In photography, the paper is white, next comes the light, which is also white, then the shadow is created, the apparition.

Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse.

To make images is a way of ordering one's world, of exploring and understanding one's relationship to existence.... The images we make are often ahead of our understanding, but to say "yes" to a subject is also to have recognized, however dimly, a part of oneself; to live with that image, to accept its significance is perhaps to grow in understanding.

AIDS was... an illness in stages, a very long flight of steps that led assuredly to death, but whose every step represented a unique apprenticeship. It was a disease that gave death time to live and its victims time to die, time to discover time, and in the end to discover life.

I know how to tell a story, but there's a deeper thing I'm trying to get to now that can't be expressed with a caption.

The camera eye is the one in the middle of our forehead, combining how we see with what there is to be seen.

I could never bear to be buried with people to whom I had not been introduced.

Norman Parkinson

I want to take retirement rather than feel as if it's taking me unawares. Maybe even seize it joyously. But at least behold it without looking back so longingly that I turn into a pillar of regret.

The literal meaning of the Chinese characters for revolution is elimination of life

Ma Jian (writer)