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American Photographer Quotes
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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
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Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.
Duane Michals
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One of the ongoing themes in my work, I hope, and one of the things I believe in, is a sense of human nature, a sense of shared humanity above the cultural layers we place on ourselves [which don't] mean that much compared to the human experience.
Chris Hondros
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Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.
Arnold Newman
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When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.
Annie Leibovitz
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A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph, it is an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
On his 1985 book, In The American West
Richard Avedon
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People who hate what I make hate me, too. They must think I am a demon or some kind of evil sorcerer. Those who understand what I do appreciate the determination, love, and courage it takes to find wonder and beauty in people who are considered by society to be damaged, unclean, dysfunctional, or wretched.
Joel-Peter Witkin
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The photograph is an incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readability.
Allan Sekula
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The world is infinitely more interesting than any of my opinions about it.
Nicholas Nixon
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I feel that whatever picture an artist makes it is in part a picture of himself - a matter of identity.
Emmet Gowin
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You know, a documentary is only interesting once in a while. If you look at a whole book of Dorothea [Lange]'s where she has row after row of people bending over and digging out carrots - that can be very tedious. And so it's only once in a while that something happens that is worth doing.
Imogen Cunningham
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I have always tried to keep truth in my photographs. My work, whether realistic or abstract, has always dealt with a form of religion or imagination.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
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Reporters listen, photographers look. If you are doing your job seriously as a photojournalist, your sight must be the primary sense that you use at all times.
Bill Eppridge
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I wanted to change history and preserve humanity. But in the process I changed myself and preserved my own.
Danny Lyon
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I often wondered why I was attracted to certain landscapes and not others and why my photographs (and depictions by other artists) looked the way they did, Archetypes imprinted on my mind started me on a search...
John Pfahl
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Dissatisfaction with one's self and dissatisfaction with the world - is necessary - it is one of the prime things that keeps the artist going on - that drives him - happiness, as such, must come in between times, as best it can.
Clarence John Laughlin
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It is easier for me to take ten good pictures in an airplane bathroom than in the gardens at Versailles.
Sally Mann
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We perceive and interpret the outer world through a set of incredibly fine internal receptors. But we are incapable, by ourselves, of grasping or tweezing out any permanent, sharable figment of it. Practically speaking, we ritually verify what is there, and are disposed to call it reality. But, with photographs, we have concrete proof that we have not been hallucinating all our lives.
Max Kozloff
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Run. For your life, for your joy, for your calm and peace of mind. Run. Because your legs are strong and your lungs are aching for the taste of air. Run. Because what's the point of a life spent walking in the middle?
Tyler Knott Gregson
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Is she as pretty as a picture
Or clear as crystal
Or pure as a lily
Or black as coal
Or sharp as a razor?
Lorna Simpson
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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.
Gus Van Sant
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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.
Sherrie Levine
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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
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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.
Andres Serrano
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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."
Joe Lewis
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Quote of the day
Guilt is anger directed at ourselves - at what we did or did not do. Resentment is anger directed at others - at what they did or did not do.
Peter McWilliams
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