Photography Quotes

228 Sourced quotes

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

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

Photography, too, reduces the world to strips and rectangles; photographers scrutinize the surfaces of reality in hope of unlocking the potential for significance that is latent within them.

I think there is an element of magic in photography - light, chemistry, precious metals - a certain alchemy. You can wield a camera like a magic wand almost. Murmur the right words and you can conjure up proof of a dream. I believe in wonder. I look for it in my life every day; I find it in the most ordinary things.

Keith Carter (photographer)

It's a pity I am so impatient and careless, as any ordinary person could learn all the techniques of photography in a week. It is the democratic art, i.e. technical skill is practically eliminated - the more foolproof cameras become with focusing and exposure gadgets the better - and artistic quality depends only on choice of subject.

No one can really explain in a rational way what makes a good photograph or a bad photograph... This is why the art world will not throw billions of dollars at photography the way it has at painting; and that is what makes it an exciting medium.

David Wojnarowicz

There is indeed something omnivorous about the act of photography. It offers a way of responding to everything about everything.

Lucy R. Lippard

Photography makes one conscious of beauty everywhere, even in the simplest things, even in what is often considered commonplace or ugly. Yet nothing is really 'ordinary', for every fragment of the world is crowned with wonder and mystery, and a great and surprising beauty.

Alvin Langdon Coburn

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

Photography is only a new road from a different direction, but moving toward the common goal, which is life.

Mere exactitude, of which photography and moulage [life casting] are the lowest forms, does not inspire feelings.

Photography has almost no reality; it is almost a hundred per cent picture. And painting always has reality: you can touch the paint; it has presence; but it always yields a picture - no matter whether good or bad. That's all the theory. It's no good. I once took some small photographs and then smeared them with paint. That partly resolved the problem, and it's really good - better than anything I could ever say on the subject.

Gerhard Richter

It would be mistaken to suppose that any of the best photography is come at by intellection; it is like all art, essentially the result of an intuitive process, drawing on all that the artist is rather than on anything he thinks, far less theorizes about.

Human experience comes suspended in the sickly-sweet amniotic fluid of commercial photography. And a world normally animated by abrasive differences is blithely reduced to a single, homogeneous National Geographic way of seeing.

Geoffrey Batchen

As an allegorical art, then, photography would represent our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable and stabilizing image.

Craig Owens (critic)

For photography is a way to capture the moment - not just any moment, but the important one, this one moment out of all time when your subject is revealed to the fullest - that moment of perfection which comes once and is not repeated.

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.

How does photography serve to legitimate and normalize existing power relationships?... How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs?

My sympathies have always been with the everyday people... the center of my photography.

Jerome Liebling

When photography was invented, people had to make room in their minds for the idea that the dead would always be visible.

Two factors thus emerge as requisites of success in the field of creative photography. First, the subject must be photogenic. Second, its re-creation in a photograph must be based upon technical knowledge, guided and supported by artsitic inspiration.

Andreas Feininger

Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.

Jean Baudrillard

I was born on a tiny cot in southwestern Massachusetts during World War II. A sickly child, I turned to photography to overcome my loneliness and isolation.

William Wegman (photographer)

Photographing is an emotional thing, a graceful thing. Photography allows me to wander with a purpose.

The raw materials of photography are light and time and memory.

Keith Carter (photographer)