Color Photography Quotes & Sayings

My favorite part about costume designing is the artistry of the job. You meet with a director and a visionary to discuss ideas. You research the characters and figure out the components of their look through your own vision. You create a color palette for a film, television or stage medium and discuss it with the director of photography who then lights your colored subjects. — Ruth E. Carter

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

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. — Dieter Appelt

Photography is much more about elimination than inclusion. The images we make with a lens typically eliminate ninety percent of our field of view and everything that is out of our field of view. The shutter slices time, eliminating all moments before and after it opens and closes. Three dimensions are reduced to two. And in some cases color is removed. How can we call these kinds of artifacts unaltered? — John Paul Caponigro

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

In some sense, list-making is to mind-mapping as black and white photography is to color photography. Both are good, both are useful. One gives you precision and clarity; the other gives you a broader spectrum of potential beauty, as well as access to otherwise-unseen features. — Anonymous

In the history of photography, we have many masterpieces in terms of black and white books. You have Bresson's 'Decisive Moment,' Frank's 'The Americans' ... many masterpieces. But there is nothing to this caliber in color. Well, I think I'll waltz with my muse and hope that I might be able to produce something on this order in color. — Ralph Gibson

But listen: The weight of the camera reminds me to see. It helps me decide against deciding that my world is overly familiar, already known. I look for cracks and fissures, for the new or newly announced. I look for water to run a different color in the stream, or for the sun to strike the pond in winter with delirious force. If I can't see, then I don't know, and if I don't know, I'm not writing, and while some may question the value of words, or of memoir in particular, I will again make this claim: Words rendered true spook and spur us. They expect of us. They expect for us. Photographs do the same thing: "Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees," said Paul Strand. — Beth Kephart

The difficulty with color is to go beyond the fact that it's color ? to have it be not just a colorful picture but really be a picture about something. It's difficult. So often color gets caught up in color, and it becomes merly decorative. Some photographers use it brilliantly to make visual statements combining color and content; otherwise it is empty. — Mary Ellen Mark

Prose is a photography, poetry is a painting in oil-colors. — Austin O'Malley

Light is the photographic medium par excellence; it is to the photographer what words are to the writer; color and paint to the painter; wood, metal, stone, or clay to the sculptor. — Andreas Feininger

Love is the color in the black and white photography! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I really feel that acting for film and acting for the stage are two different crafts. I think that they share things in common. But I liken it to a painter switching over to photography. There are similar things - you have to be conscious of light and color and form - but it's a whole different medium. — Jordan Bridges

The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera - and himself. — Daniel J. Boorstin

I have been using the art of photography to research the ways in which the pictorial strategies of the Nineteenth Century color the way in which the American landscape is apprehended by today's viewers. — John Pfahl

Photography could have been invented in color. Colors existed. — Jean-Luc Godard

In my photography, color and composition are inseparable. I see in color. — William Albert Allard

Curiosity broke her earlier resolve. "Have you ever been tested?"
"No." He stood behind Sara, holding the camera in front so she could see. "Zoom here," he said, flicking the toggle.
"You could probably-"
"This is macro."
"Will-"
"Super macro." He kept talking over her until she gave up. "Here's where you adjust for color. This is light. Anti-shake. Red-eye." He clicked through the features like a photography instructor.
Sara Finally relented. "Why don't I point and you shoot?"
"All right." His back was stiff, and she could tell that he was irritated.
"I'm sorry I-"
"Please don't apologize."
Sara held his gaze for a few moments longer, wishing she could fix this. There was nothing to say if he wouldn't even let her apologize. — Karin Slaughter

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

One very important difference between color and monochromatic photography is this: in black and white you suggest; in color you state. Much can be implied by suggestion, but statement demands certainty ... absolute certainty. — Paul Outerbridge

3D is very exciting. I love it. I'm a complete convert. Everything for me, from now on, is 3D. I'm completely convinced it's the future of home entertainment, as well as cinema entertainment. I think it's a paradigm shift, in terms of cinema, and those things don't happen very often. The introduction of sound, the introduction of color photography and now 3D have been the big shifts. They happen once every 40 or 50 years, so it's very exciting to be a filmmaker, working while one of them is happening. — Paul W. S. Anderson

To see color as form means looking at the image in a new way, trying to free oneself from absorption in subject matter. — Cole Weston

I photographed the entire thing in color because to photograph it in black and white would be to keep it as a tragedy. Because there is a tragic element to photographing, in this case not war, but the collapse. It was just destruction. — Joel Meyerowitz

One sees differently with color photography than black-and-white ... in short, visualization must be modified by the specific nature of the equipment and materials being used. — Ansel Adams

In black and white there are more colors than color photography, because you are not blocked by any colors so you can use your experiences, your knowledge, and your fantasy, to put colors into black and white. — Anders Petersen

Only in black and white can I see the design and textures. I don't consider color photography art. Black and white is an interpretation. Color is a duplication. — Clyde Butcher

In the '70s, in Britain, if you were going to do serious photography, you were obliged to work in black-and-white. Color was the palette of commercial photography and snapshot photography. — Martin Parr

As far as digital technology has come, there's still one thing that digital cameras won't do: give you perfect color every time. In fact, if they gave us perfect color 50% of the time, that would be incredible, but unfortunately every digital camera (and every scanner that captures traditional photos) sneaks in some kind of color cast in your image. Generally, it's a red cast, but depending on the camera, it could be blue. Either way, you can be pretty sure-there's a cast. — Scott Kelby

Color tends to corrupt photography and absolute color corrupts it absolutely. Consider the way color film usually renders blue sky, green foliage, lipstick red, and the kiddies' playsuit. These are four simple words which must be whispered: color photography is vulgar. — Walker Evans

In black and white you suggest, in color you state. — Paul Outerbridge

When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls! — Ted Grant

When a moment in front of me appears to be particularly special, whether it be by beauty or experience, I capture it. I usually find a reason to justify taking that photo - symmetry, or color, or contrast - and it's my hope that my photography sheds light onto what I see and do on a daily basis. — Connor Franta

Beware of color theories. Theories in color photography are dangerous. The plain fact that there are so many of them proves my point. — Ernst Haas

Photography has always been associated with death. Reality is colorful, yet early photography always took the color out of reality and made it black-and-white. Color is life; black-and-white is death. There was a ghost hidden in the invention of photography. — Nobuyoshi Araki