Quotes & Sayings About B&w Photography

I believe that the essence of photography is black and white. Color is but a deviance. — Sarah Moon

Photography is about being exquisitely present. — Joel Meyerowitz

The majority of America's colossal fortunes have been made by entering industries in their early stages and developing leadership in them ... Think of what opportunities the present and the future contain in such fields as ship-building and ship-owning, aircraft, electrical development, the oil industry, different branches of the automotive industry, foreign trade, international banking, invention, the chemical industry, moving pictures, color photography, and, one night add, labor leadership. — B.C. Forbes

When the reality looks magnificent, a real art of photography has only one choice: To capture this beauty magnificently! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

A perfectly clear photograph is a distortion of reality. — David B. Lentz

As a senior in high school my counselor recommended that I soften my science and math direction with an art course. Fortunately my high school offered a new course in B&W photography, so I opted for that instead of art, towards which I had an aversion. Composition is something that comes pretty naturally to me and I appreciate ordered chaos: the photo class turned out to be fun. — Peter Menzel

The aesthetic discussion of photography is dominated by the concept of time. Photographs appear as devices stopping time and preserving fragments of the past, like flies in amber. — Peter Wollen

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. — Frank Gohlke

To me, the work I do is a means of interpreting unsettling truths, of bearing witness, and of sounding an alarm. The beauty of formal representation both carries an affirmation of life and subversively brings us face to face with news from our besieged world. — Richard Misrach

I'm so drawn to photography because you can convey a complex story in a single frame. — Gia Coppola

If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under-world in a second, and examined it at leisure. — H.G.Wells

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

To collect photographs is to collect the world. — Susan Sontag

I don't see how a woman in documentary photography could have children. I think it's a very difficult thing to do to raise a family, and I have enormous respect for people who do it. I'd hate to do something like that and not be good at it. — Mary Ellen Mark

As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art. — Susan Sontag

Some photographers could vomit on a piece of paper and call it art, you know ... Hang it in the Guggenheim, or whatever. Sell a print for two hundred pounds? But I can't do that. I just
Maybe I have too much respect for walls ... or something. — Pansy Schneider-Horst

I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography. — Ben Shahn

Essentially what photography is is life lit up. — Sam Abell

Looking and seeing are two different things. What matters is the relationship with the subject. — Christophe Agou

Just someone trying to shoot in 70mm deserves the nomination, and he[Quentin Tarantino] is shooting interiors, like tight interior shots, for that matter. Obviously [Quentin] is the director and demanding the shots, but all credit for the beauty of that film [Hateful Eight] goes to the director of photography. — Bun B.

Compelling outdoor imagery always combines some kind of personal connection to nature and skillful technique. The former seems to be a form of grace, and the latter an act of the will. — George B. Ward

Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he maycommunicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole. — E.B. White

As a matter of fact, nearly all the greatest work is being, and has always been done, by those who are following photography for the love of it, and not merely for financial reasons. As the name implies, an amateur is one who works for love. — Alfred Stieglitz

I read like a crazy person, I play the piano, and I'm a photographer. I always say my photography keeps me sane. I spend a lot of time in the darkroom. It's a very solitary, quiet life when I'm not working. — Alaina Huffman

No, I don't work here, I'm taking pictures of messy bathrooms for a photo essay on the American West. But I'm always up for clean, so if you want to pitch in, I've got Pine Sol and a sponge in my car ... It's that VW microbus parked next to the dumpster, and you don't need a key, just pull hard. — Pansy Schneider-Horst

Photographing a culture in the here and now often means photographing the intersection of the present with the past. — David DuChemin

Before the invention of photography, significant moments in the flow of our lives would be like rocks placed in a stream: impediments that demonstrated but didn't diminish the volume of the flow and around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can: when we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished. — Sally Mann

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

Photography is a transformation, not a reproduction. — Ernst Haas

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

Photography is humbling, it really is, and it really allows for me to atone for some of the missteps I've made throughout the course of my life. — Jamel Shabazz

We are one human race, and there must be understanding among all men. For those who look at the problems of today, my big hope is that they understand. That they understand that the population is quite big enough, that they must be informed that they must have economic development, that they must have social development, and must be integrated into all parts of the world. — Sebastiao Salgado

In previous ages the word 'art' was used to cover all forms of human skill. The Greeks believed that these skills were given by the gods to man for the purpose of improving the condition of life. In a real sense, photography has fulfilled the Greek ideal of art; it should not only improve the photographer, but also improve the world. — David Hurn

Do not settle for easy. Do not settle for that first image. Craft it, work it, and make something more out of it. And finally, don't forget that the biggest joy in photography is making pictures of those things in your own life. — David Burnett

I always said it kept me alive - photography - because it did. It was my catharsis. — Bruce Gilden

Photography's a case of keeping all the pores of the skin open, as well as the eyes. A lot of photographers today think that by putting on the uniform, the fishing vest, and all the Nikons, that that makes them a photographer. But it doesn't. It's not just seeing. It's feeling. — Don McCullin

T.V. has made going to the theatre seem pointless, photography has pretty much killed painting but graffiti has remained gloriously unspoilt by progress. — Banksy

Probably one of the worst things that happened to photography is that cameras have viewfinders. — John Baldessari

I was making photographs of the world long before I was a photographer. — Marcey Jacobson

I like to think that the music is a mixture of personal experiences mixed with photography and movies. — Sune Rose Wagner

Becoming a professional artist takes talent and perseverance, even more so when the field is photography. — Clyde Butcher

Advice to artists: always take the opportunity to shut up. — Bill Jay