Quotes & Sayings About Colour Photography

The prejudice many photographers have against colour photography comes from not thinking of colour as form. You can say things with colour that can't be said in black and white ... Those who say that colour will eventually replace black and white are talking nonsense. The two do not compete with each other. They are different means to different ends. — Edward Weston

Perhaps the central question about [Eliot] Porter's work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His brother, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, wrote in a 1960 review of [Porter's] colour photographs: 'There is no subject and background, every corner is alive,' and this suggests what an ecological aesthetic might look like. — Rebecca Solnit

That was why, later on, he began to lose interest in photography: first when colour took over, then when it became plain that the old magic of light-sensitive emulsions was waning, that to the rising generation the enchantment lay in a techne of images without substance, images that could flash through the ether without residing anywhere, that could be sucked into a machine and emerge from it doctored, untrue. He gave up recording the world in photographs then, and transferred his energies to saving the past. — J.M. Coetzee

If I didn't have a conviction that a serious painter can portray Nature more profoundly than the best colour photography, I'd probably give it all up or go abstract or take up photography. — E. J. Hughes

The problem of direct colour photography has been facing us since the turn of the last century. — Gabriel Lippmann

There's only one rule in photography - never develop colour film in chicken noodle soup. — Freeman Patterson

Not only does a lens distort forms, but the ordinary plate makes an unholy mess of colour in its tone relations. Yellow becomes black, and blue white. Black sunflowers against a white sky - what a travesty! — Walter J. Phillips

Being unable to retrace our steps in Time, we decided to move forward in Space. Shall we never be able to glide back up the stream of Time, and peep into the old home, and gaze on the old faces? Perhaps when the phonograph and the kinesigraph are perfected, and some future worker has solved the problem of colour photography, our descendants will be able to deceive themselves with something very like it: but it will be but a barren husk, a soulless phantasm and nothing more. "Oh for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still!" - Wordsworth Donisthorpe, inventor of the kinesigraph camera — Catherynne M Valente