Quotes & Sayings About Emotion And Photography

[Photography] is always like a state of grace, like the appearance of something that I hadn't foreseen, that surprises me and stops me. If I only did what I had in mind, there would be no emotion. It would be like keeping one's eyes shut rather than open, like theorizing rather than seeing. — Sarah Moon

Good pictures. Tragedy and violence certainly make powerful images. It is what we get paid for.But there is a price extracted with every such frame: some of the emotion, the vulnerability, the empathy that makes us human, is lost every time the shutter is released. — Greg Marinovich

Story Climax is the fourth of the five-part structure. This crowning Major Reversal is not necessarily full of noise and violence. Rather, it must be full of meaning. If I could send a telegram to the film producers of the world, it would be these three words: "Meaning Produces Emotion." Not money; not sex; not special effects; not movie stars; not lush photography. — Robert McKee

But before all else a work of art is the creation of love. Love for the subject first and for the medium second. Love is the fundamental necessity underlying the need to create, underlying the emotion that gives it form, and from which grows the unfinished product that is presented to the world. Love is the general criterion by which the rare photograph is judged. It must contain it to be not less than the best of which the photographer is capable. — Eliot Porter

Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good — Garry Winogrand

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. — Richard Avedon

Photography doesn't teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see. — Berenice Abbott

Art is nothing more than creating an emotion in your own form. — Shannon L. Alder

[David Lean's] images stay with me forever. But what makes them memorable isn't necessarily their beauty. That's just good photography. It's the emotion behind those images that's meant the most to me over the years. It's the way David Lean can put feeling on film. The way he shows a whole landscape of the spirit. For me, that's the real geography of David Lean country. And that's why, in a David Lean movie, there's no such thing as an empty landscape. — Martin Scorsese

My emotions, instincts, and interests are all with nature. — Eliot Porter

The art of news photography is creating compelling, graphic compositions that communicate environment and emotion. Strung together, they take the viewer on a progression of discovery until the mystery is revealed. — Rich Underwood

Emotion or feeling is really the only thing about pictures I find interesting. Beyond that is is just a trick. — Christopher Anderson

It is the unexpected and the surprise quality of a personal vision, rather than the emotion, which make people respond to a photograph. — Alexey Brodovitch

Trauma and pain are the foundations of art. I believe that. When tragedy strikes, however, a muralist or a watercolorist has the opportunity to be a human being in the moment and an artist afterward. Faced with the death of a loved one, a sculptor or portraitist can first grieve, suffer, and heal--then create. Most artists go through life this way. They can react normally to the trials and tribulations of the human experience. They can pass through the world with compassion and comradeship. They can make their art later. Outside, elsewhere, beyond. But photography is immediate. It does not offer the luxury of time. Faced with blood, death, or transformation, a photographer has no choice but to reach for the camera. An artist first, a human being afterward. Photography is a neutral record of all events, a chronicle of things both sublime and terrible. By necessity, this work is made without emotion, without connection, without love. — Abby Geni

Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

The purpose of photography is to create an emotion about the world through what has been carefully seen and selected. — Eli Siegel

A photograph of a woman crying tells me nothing about grief. Or a photograph of a woman ecstatic tells me nothing about ecstasy. What is the nature of these emotions? The problem with photography is that it only deals with appearances. — Duane Michals

The truth is that you have to fight your way through brutal, ugly realities in order to find that moment of clarity, that one slant of light or shift in emotion that yields unexpected art. That's just as true for life as it is for crime scene photography. — Maggie Ybarra

Guys don't understand great art. They don't care that sometimes the camera has power beyond the photographer to record emotion that only the heart can see. They're threatened when the camera jumps ahead of me. Todd Kovich was pissed when I brought my Nikon to the prom, but I'd missed too many transcendent shots over the years to ever take a chance of missing one again. A prom, I told him, had a boundless supply of photogenic bozos who could be counted on to do something base. — Joan Bauer