Photography Quotes

228 Sourced quotes

Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other peoples pictures too - photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community.

Robert Adams (photographer)

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

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

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)

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

Jean Baudrillard

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

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

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

Jerome Liebling

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

Photography has saturated us as spectators from its inception amidst a mingling of laboratorial pursuits and magic acts to its current status as propagator of convention, cultural commodity, and global hobby.

Photography's vaunted capture of a moment in time is the seizure and freezing of presence. It is the image of simultaneity, of the way that everything within a given space at a given moment is present to everything else; it is a declaration of the seamless integrity of the real.

Rosalind E. Krauss

Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.

Photography's potential as a great image-maker and communicator is really no different from the same potential in the best poetry where familiar, everyday words, placed within a special context, can soar above the intellect and touch subtle reality in a unique way.

I consider myself fortunate that photography exists, because otherwise I'd be stuck in the tragedy of ephemeralness that can come with installation art.

Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.

I tell you (dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well) a square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that were ever dipped in acid... Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against sculpture. That and no more. (1865)

The camera does not know what it takes; it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene.

I like the idea that the sacred photo framing process is equally violatible and I think that's partly a carryover from the way I deal with structures to the way I deal with photography.

Gordon Matta-Clark

Contrary to the general belief about photography, you don't need bright sunlight: the best moodiest pictures are taken in the dim light of almost dusk, or of rainy days...

Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse.

Robert Adams (photographer)

One knows that frontal and/or profile photography is torn to pieces... Inversely, what remains of the photograph must be seen as a fragment coming to fill a gap in the drawing.

Jean-François Lyotard

Any photographer worth his/her salt - that is, any photographer of professional caliber, in control of the craft, regardless of imagistic bent - can make virtually anything look good. Which means, of course, that she or he can make virtually anything look bad - or look just about any way at all. After all, that is the real work of photography: making things look, deciding how a thing is to appear in the image.

The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.

If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.

Charles Baudelaire

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.