Quotes & Sayings About A Photograph

Photography seems to fix, but this is an illusion created by our short lives. A photograph is merely a note held for 200 years. — Douglas McCulloh

I have a completely worthless degree: a BS in Photojournalism from Boston University (BU). With this degree, I suppose I could have gotten a job teaching grade school kids how to photograph their relatives, but knowing about B&W photo processing and developing and how to shoot a picture story is good basic info that every photographer should have. — Peter Menzel

We did photograph albums, best dresses, favourite novels, and once someone's own novel. It was about a week in a telephone box with a pair of pyjamas called Adolf Hitler. The heroine was a piece of string with a knot in it. — Jeanette Winterson

I remember seeing a photograph of myself en pointe with my hand over my head and the other hand turned in under my breast curtseying. I took dance lessons at Miss Debbie's Dance Studio, and she put this picture of me in the storefront window. I was so unbelievably humiliated by the sight of myself. — Lisa Yuskavage

The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. — Roland Barthes

Would you want people walking up to you and pointing at your d
k? I can't believe I'm still talking about this. But I've worn underwear every day of my life and the fact that I'm painted as this exhibitionist is a little annoying. It's become a meme, I guess. Being someone who people want to photograph, you have to open yourself up to the positive and negative. It is what it is. If I get mad at it I'll look like a douchebag. But it's silly. — Jon Hamm

The photograph, now they are detached from their original surroundings, they are involved in a close world in which they only relate to each other: all the rest of 'reality' has vanished. This allows us to see those elements from a new point of view and perhaps to reach a better understanding ... — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

The person who looks at a photograph as a complete picture, unable to say anything about anything except the facts which existed at the moment of exposure, does not see very far. — Francis Meadow Sutcliffe

A photograph is usually looked at- seldom looked into. — Ansel Adams

Sometimes photographers mistake emotion for what makes a great street photograph. — Garry Winogrand

As Marcel Proust understood, memory is not exclusively or even predominantly visual. It is synesthetic, a combination and even a confusion of the senses that no simple image can reach or encapsulate. A photograph can act as a spur to memory, it can yield treasures, like looking under your bed and finding the baseball card you were certain you lost. But an image stands mute before the inexpressible delicacy, horror, humor, and associative complexity of our experience. — Will Steacy

We have a piano in this house that exists solely for the purpose of supporting her photograph. — Chris Lynch

There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. I photograph to see what something will look like photographed. — Garry Winogrand

A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective. — Irving Penn

Watching my daughter sort of live in this world where a photograph is not something to keep a memory. It's something to just speak with. It's language. — Alec Soth

When you take a photograph of someone, you take a portrait of their soul — Winna Efendi

There are certain restaurants where you should photograph the food rather than eat it. These are great places to bring a narcissistic boyfriend before you break up. — Perry Brass

A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once. — Susan Sontag

It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones. — Susan Sontag

I don't particularly care about photographic authorship. Whether an astronaut who doesn't even have a viewfinder makes an image, a robotic camera, a military photographer, or Mike Light really doesn't matter. What matters is the context of the final photograph and the meaning it generates within that context. — Michael Light

The Hubbell space telescope, it's first year up after they fixed it, categorized and counted 500 billion galaxies in any one photograph field of view of dark matter. That's like grains of sand at the beach and you've just got a handful. It's massive amounts. I'm sure that of all of the galaxies, and I'm sure the universe is teeming with life. — Alex Jones

I think you can photograph a certain sliver of human presence in its absence ... images taken in the empty rooms, the marks left on the walls, disappearing shadows, etc. — Mona Kuhn

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see. — Charles Bukowski

Some photographers take reality ... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation. — Ansel Adams

If you ask people to remember a painting and a photograph, their description of the photograph is far more accurate than that of the painting. Strangely enough, there is a physical element intertwined with the painting. It shakes loose an emotional element within the viewer. — Luc Tuymans

Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it. — Susan Sontag

There is a considerable amount of manipulation in the printmaking from the straight photograph to the finished print. If I do my job correctly that shouldn't be visible at all, it should be transparent. — John Sexton

Where were we?" she said.
"Getting credit," I said.
"What about it?"
"Well, it's nice to get credit."
The spokes of her rear wheel spun behind the curtain of her long skirt. She looked like a photograph from a hundred years ago. She turned her wide eyes on me. "Is it?" she said. — Jerry Spinelli

As I was walking up the stairs to dad's old room, and I was looking at the photographs, I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories. That someone actually took the photograph, and the people in the photograph had just eaten lunch or something. — Stephen Chbosky

Now that's a sight for sore eyes, Sebastian. Maybe I should just leave you here: the hotel maids might appreciate that. Or, better still, maybe I'll take a photograph of you on my phone. Dont worry, I wont post it on the internet, it'll just be my screen saver. — Jane Harvey-Berrick

It's said that in the beginning was the word, but for me the beginning is always an image. When I think about a conversation, it always starts with images. And what I love about photography is the inscription of a single moment: it's completely ephemeral. You take the photograph, and one second later, everything has changed. — Abbas Kiarostami

For me the criterion of a good photograph is that it is unforgettable. — Brassai

The wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene [in a photograph] is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imagined plenitude. — Victor Burgin

Photographs were more than my livelihood. They were part of my life. The way light fell on a surface never failed to tug at my imagination. The way one picture, a single snapshot, could capture the essence of a time and place, a city, a war, a human being, was embedded in my consciousness. One day, one second, I might close the shutter on the perfect photograph. — Robert Goddard

The woman above him had tumbled out of his dreams, and now stood like a half-waking ghost, a photograph double exposed, showing him in one moment the fallacy of his past as it bled into his future. The image of Maria Sophia had grown too large for him to bear. He had made it so. In his industry and creativity he had transformed her into something so wonderful that the very fact she might now be anything less terrified him almost as much as the prospect she might exceed it. — F.D. Lee

Gray February skies, misty white sands, black rocks, and the sea seemed black too, like a monochrome photograph, with only the girl in the yellow raincoat adding any color to the world. — Neil Gaiman

You can talk about a caption underneath a photograph being true or false, because there is a linguistic element. You can claim that a photograph is a picture of a horse or a cow, but it is the sentence that expresses the claim, which is true or false, not the photograph. — Errol Morris

This was not Newt's fault; in his younger days he would go every couple of months to the barber's shop on the corner, clutching a photograph he's carefully torn from a magazine which showed someone with an impressively cool haircut grinning at the camera and he would show the picture to the barber, and ask to be made to look like that, please. And the barber, who knew his job, would take one look and then give Newt the basic, all-purpose, short-back-and-sides. After a year of this, Newt realized that he obviously didn't have the face for haircuts. The best Newton Pulsifer could hope for after a haircut was shorter hair. — Neil Gaiman

In taking that photograph, I understood something I will never forget: how I wished to arrest all the beauty that came before me. Not the classical beauty of symmetry and exact proportions or the fancy of fashion, which is ever-changing with the seasons, but the beauty of a soul, that inner life that reveals itself so seldom, just for an instant, and only if you look closely and learn to see with an open heart. — Elizabeth Ross

They looked happy, but, of course, that didn't say much. Everyone smiles for a photograph. — Marisha Pessl

There was no question about it- the girl in the photograph was staggeringly beautiful. She was Miss Canal Zone, a runner-up in the Miss Universe Contest
and in fact far more beautiful than the winner of the contests. Her beauty had frightened the judges. — Kurt Vonnegut

The other week I wrote a piece on a photograph I got at a flea market, and I got about 70 hits. I think a lot of people must be interested in flea markets. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. — Ambrose Bierce

Once a photographer is convinced that the camera can lie and that, strictly speaking, the vast majority of photographs are camera lies, inasmuch as they tell only part of a story or tell it in distorted form, half the battle is won. Once he has conceded that photography is not a naturalistic medium of rendition and that striving for naturalism in a photograph is futile, he can turn his attention to using a camera to make more effective pictures. — Andreas Feininger

The same camera that photographs a murder scene can photograph a beautiful society affair at a big hotel. — Weegee

When I'm ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I'm interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without. — Ansel Adams

I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than of having written something very good, a very good story. Maybe it's because the element of magic is so present in a good photograph - luck and magic, but also hard work and being ready and all that. — Teju Cole

Beneath it was a photograph of Hank alone, standing shirtless on the deck of a sailboat with his hands on his hips. — Sara Gruen

Landscapes or still-lifes I paint in between the abstract works; they constitute about one-tenth of my production. On the one hand they are useful, because I like to work from nature - although I do use a photograph - because I think that any detail from nature has a logic I would like to see in abstraction as well. — Gerhard Richter

Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs! — Rachel Kushner

There'll be moments in life, sweet pea, that stand out in your memories like a photograph. Scenes captured perfectly in your mind, frozen in time with each detail as colorful as it was that first time you saw it. 'Flashbulb memories,' some people call them," she'd told me, her eyes crinkling up and nearly disappearing in a face etched with too many laugh lines to count. "Most people don't recognize those moments as they happen. They look back fifty years later, and realize that those were the most important parts of their entire life. But at the time, they're so busy looking ahead to what's coming down the line or worrying about their future, they don't enjoy their present. Don't be like them, sweet pea. Don't get so caught up in chasing your dreams that you forget to live them. — Julie Johnson

Most of us, when we go out with a camera in our own country, try to find exotic subject matter to photograph. — Martin Parr

When we were kids, growing up in the sixties, the only images we had of ourselves were either still photographs or 8mm movies ... Now we have video, digital cameras, MP3s, and a million other ways to document ourselves. But the still photograph continues to hold a sense of mystery and awe to me. — Catherine Opie

It's been a strange [summer] ... I was sent by a magazine to photograph famous photographers ... Of course, I included myself. — Weegee

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film. — Lorrie Moore

Seeing a photograph of myself is often pretty jarring. Why is it that the vision I see of myself in a photo is so different than the one I see in a mirror - not to mention the "self" that I see in my mind's eye? Pondering it can pretty easily cast me into a vortex of self-doubt, wondering how the me that people experience - my voice, my personality, my creative expression - is regarded without my knowledge. — Keith Murray

The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how. — Margaret Atwood

The eye is made to see and not to think ... A good photograph is a surprise. How could we plan and foresee a surprise? We just have to be ready. — Marc Riboud

We are only beginning to learn what to say in a photograph. The world we live in is a succession of fleeting moments, any one of which might say something significant. — Alfred Eisenstaedt

You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved. — Ansel Adams

This is the gift of the landscape photograph, that the heart finds a place to stand. — Emmet Gowin

A theory is no more like a fact than a photograph is like a person. — E.W. Howe

Mori smiled properly. The lines around his eyes were deeper than usual now. They made him look like an old photograph of a young man, often crushed, but ironed carefully so that only the ghosts of the marks remained. — Natasha Pulley

Starting a new chapter is much like composing the perfect photograph. You must ensure the proper components are there. You may throw out the extra, but with out the key elements the story goes untold. — Faith Tilley Johnson

I'm pretty open. I'm not afraid of men. I'm not afraid of women. I'm not afraid of sex and sexuality. It's part of me, and it comes out in the photograph. It's as if at that moment when I'm taking pictures, I'm not a man and I'm not a woman. If I see a moment that seems true to me, that seems honest, whether it's female or male, it's part of me as well. — Mario Sorrenti

Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes known, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose. — Fred Hoyle

Rene Char wrote somewhere, apropos poetry, that there are those who create and those who discover; they are too completely different worlds. Photograph also has two sides to it and thank goodness, I am only intersted in those who discover; I feel a certain solidarity with those who set out in a spirit of discovery; I think there is much more risk invovled in this than in trying to create images; and in the end, reality is more important. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

I'm lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don't want a Picasso on my wall; it's great art, but it's dead art to me. I'd rather have a photograph by someone I've never heard of that really inspires me. — Elton John

If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it's a street photograph — Bruce Gilden

Unlike Ronan, Adam's Aglionby jumper was second-hand, but he'd taken great care to be certain it was impeccable. He was slim and tall, with dusty hair unevenly cropped above a fine-boned, tanned face. He was a sepia photograph. — Maggie Stiefvater

I admit that I am hopelessly hooked on the printed newspaper. I love turning the pages and the serendipity of stumbling across a piece of irresistible information or a photograph that I wasn't necessarily intending to read. — Jill Abramson

The pictures have a reality for me that the people don't. It is through the photographs that I know them. — Richard Avedon

There are some people who become best friends with everyone they photograph. There are people that I really like and admire and respect, but in a way I think it's better to keep a distance. I think you get better pictures of people that you don't know very well. — Mary Ellen Mark

She is bending over her child. She can't leave her. The
child is laid out in state on a table. She wants to take one more photograph of the child, probably the last. In life, the child would never sit still for a photograph. She says to herself, "I'm going to get the camera," as if saying to the child, "Don't move. — Lydia Davis

My urge to photograph is activated by an almost biological instinct for preservation from disorder. The camera is a mechanical apparatus that extends my natural ability and desire for meaningful organization. I need it to survive. — Arthur Tress

I tried to photograph the mysterious, true and magical soul of popular Spain in all its passion, love, humor, tenderness, rage, pain, in all its truth; and the fullest and most intense moments in the lives of these characters as simple as they are irresistible, with all their inner strength, as a personal challenge that gave me strength and understanding and in which I invested all my heart. — Cristina Garcia Rodero

Fantasy isn't something I put into the pictures; I don't try and inject them with a sense of play. But it's about being an honest photographer; a photograph is as much of a mirror of the photographer as it is the subject. — Tim Walker

My way in for photographing people is really their work. I'm always interested in what people make, and then I photograph the person. Sometimes the person is a disappointment. But that's the risk. It informs me a lot about the character of a person if I know their work first. — Anton Corbijn

The fact is that the camera is literal if anything, which gives it something in common with a thermometer ... Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture's true beauty. There is sleight of hand in photography ... you make the viewer think he's seeing everything while at the same time you make him realize he's not. I try to make my pictures seem reasonable and then, at the last minute, pull the rug from beneath the viewer's feet, very gently so there's a little thrill. — John Loengard

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph. — Janet Malcolm

One thing that struck me early is that you don't put into a photograph what's going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in. — Diane Arbus

There is a big difference between The Merchant of Venice and a photograph of two males of different races in an erotic pose on a marble table top. — Jesse Helms

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

She had to do that
she had to become a widow, for life, before she was even married. That's why I never got married. I'm thirty-eight years old. I can read and write very well
my mother made sure I was educated
and I do the bookwork for all the shops and businesses in the slum. I do the taxes for every man who pays them. I make a good living here, and I have respect. I shouldn't been married fifteen or even twenty years ago. But she was a widow, all her life, for me. And I couldn't do it. I just couldn't allow myself to get married. I kept hoping I would see him, the sailor with the best moustache. My mother had one very old, faded photograph of the two of them, looking very serious and stern. That's why I lived in this area. I always hoped I would see him. And I never married. And she died last week, Lin. My mother died last week. — Gregory David Roberts

If you finish like a photograph, on the other hand, the picture has as much personality as a photograph. — Emile Gruppe

I couldn't wait to get out of the car. The first thing I did was smell the air. I closed my eyes and took a breath, the biggest breath of my life, knowing I was taking the biggest breath of my life. I was taking a breath to smell Shepelevo. Breathing in Shepelevo was like hitting the right note on the piano. There was only one right note. When I was young, Shepelevo was the smell of nettles, of salted smoked fish, of fresh water from the Gulf of Finland, and of burning firewood, all wrapped up in one Shepelevo. As it had been, so it was. Across two continents, a dozen countries, twenty cities, three colleges, two marriages, three children, three books, and twenty-five years of another life, I breathed it and smelled the air. Nowhere else in the world had it. "Papa," I said, my voice breaking. "Do you think we could photograph the smell?" He gave me a look and then laughed. — Paullina Simons

We grow up going to school, where you get a gold star, you get the A-plus," she says. "At work you're constantly being evaluated. Then you become a homemaker and suddenly nobody is giving you feedback. Suddenly no one is paying attention to what you're doing. Blogging is a way to get this validation from other people. You put up a recipe and people go, 'Hey, that's a great photograph.'" Clearly blogs can give emotional value to housework. But if a blogger is actually making money from a blog, even a little bit of money, it cane make the blog even more validating. — Emily Matchar

Girls Wanted to Enter Flight Stewardess Training Group
Here is the Career Opportunity for Which You Have Been Waiting!
If you are interested and feel you can meet all of the qualifications below, please write in detail and attach a full length photograph.
HEIGHT: Between 5'2" and 5'6"
WEIGHT: 135 pounds maximum
ATTRACTIVE: "Just below Hollywood" standards
Plenty of Personality and Poise
GENDER: Female
MARITAL STATUS: Single, Not Divorced,
Separated, or Widowed
RACE: White
AGE: 21-26 years old
EDUCATION: Registered Nurse or Two Years of College
VISION: 20/20 without glasses
Must be a US citizen and available for training within 6 months.
If you feel you qualify
— Judy Blume

Trying to find this industry's tendency to celebrate the physical is a waste of time. So I'm happy to play the game. But I am also thirsty for input. I'm not a dunce whose only skill is knowing how to take a photograph, you know? And at the end of the day, I think it makes me slightly less replaceable. — Olivia Wilde

It seems to me that before the photograph can exist as art it must, by its very nature choose whether it is to be a record or a testimony. — Yukio Mishima

Life is a movie; death is a photograph. — Susan Sontag

No matter how physically faint, a photograph involuntarily whisper of something exquisitely carnal. The weeks, the years, whatever stretches of time separating our present from the photographs retire into the transparence of the shot and seem erased by it. We almost have to shake ourselves to overcome the feeling that we peer out at the other place, in that different age. Yet we are always aware of this illusory dislocation, for such is the ambiguity, in principle, that seduces us over and over again in the photographic experience. — Max Kozloff

A [spatial, temporal] work had only to be exhibited in a gallery and then written about and reproduced as a photograph in an art magazine. Then this record of the no longer extant installation, along with accretions of information after the fact, became the basis for its fame, and to a large extent its economic value. — Dan Graham

A person shows himself for an instant as in a photograph but clearer and in the background something which is bigger than his shadow. — Tomas Transtromer

I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme. — Roland Barthes

Selfies became too big. The selfie photos are not good. Fans ask me for a selfie, and I say, 'Let's just do a photo.' I'm not anti-selfie, but I like a classic photograph. — Marin Cilic

It's not that I don't care about content, but content is not the only way a photograph has meaning. — James Welling

I try to express with the camera what the story is, to get to the heart of the story with picture. In battle I look at things first in terms of people, second in terms of strategies or casualties ... To tell a story, you don't photograph one hundred dead civilians to prove there were one hundred dead civilians. You photograph one dead civilian with an expression on his face that says, This is what it's like if you're a dead civilian in Vietnam. — Horst Faas

Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again. — Susan Sontag

Now, we see what we are shown. We have gotten used to being shown no matter what, within or beyond the limited range of human sight. This habituation to the monopoly of visualization-on-command strongly suggests that only those things that can in some way be visualized, recorded, and replayed at will are part of reality ... The result is a strange mistrusts of our own eyes, a disposition to take as real only that which is mechanically displayed in a photograph, a statistical curve, or a table. Eyewitness testimony must be "substantiated" by records that have been acquired, and can be stored and then shown. — Barbara Duden