Photography Quotes

228 Sourced quotes

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)

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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

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

Lucy R. Lippard

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

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.

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)

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.

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

None of us works entirely in a vacuum. Unless you are uncompromisingly working to please yourself you must think to whom your photography is directed and how is it likely to be received.

Michael Langford

I don't think of myself as a photographer. I've engaged questions regarding photography's role in culture... but it is an engagement with a problem rather than a medium.

Sarah Charlesworth

Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningness. If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

I love acting because it's my heart. I love playing characters. When I get on the set, something snaps in me, something different. It's what I was meant to do. I love working with other actors, I love working with directors, and I love creating something. From the DP [director of photography] to the director and the actors—and even down to the catering—you know, it's just a family.

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.

Let me here call attention to one of the most universally popular mistakes that have to do with photography - that of classing supposedly excellent work as professional, and using the term amateur to convey the idea of immature productions and to excuse atrociously poor photographs.

Alfred Stieglitz

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

Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.

The practice of photography is no longer a means for recording reality. Instead, it has become reality itself

Photography [...] can be perfectly described by that sage French proverb: The more things change, the more they are the same. True, techniques have been improved; materials and equipment are better, faster, or easier to use. But the eye and heart of the photographer are still the same, and the simplest camera with ordinary film can still make great pictures if the artist sees clearly and presses the button at the decisive moment.