Expression In Photography Quotes & Sayings

Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution. — Ansel Adams

By exposing the multiplicity, the facticity, the repetition and stereotype at the heart of every aesthetic gesture, photography deconstructs the possibility of differentiating between the original and the copy. [Photography calls] into question the whole concept of the uniqueness of the art object, the originality of the author, the coherence of the oeuvre within which it was made, and the individuality of so-called self-expression. — Rosalind E. Krauss

Photography is not easy. You know it takes a painter or a sculpture or a musician years to perfect their technique. Then they're free to make an expression in a matter of moments. It takes moments for a photographer to perfect his technique. And then it takes years for him to make it into something that is truly creative and worthwhile. — Paul Caponigro

If the photographer isn't going to pay attention to the picture he is making, that if he thinks the camera is just a machine and not an avenue of expression, then he has no business asking anyone for anything, let alone their time and interest. Don't show the world, he said, invent the world. — Whitney Otto

More and more are turning to photography as a medium of expression as well as communication. The leavening of aesthetic approaches continues. While it is too soon to define the characteristic of the photographic style today, one common denominator, rooted in tradition, seems in the ascendancy. The direct use of the camera for what it can do best, and that is the revelation, interpretation, and discovery of the world of man and of nature. The greatest challenge to the photographer is to express the inner significance through the outward form. — Beaumont Newhall

Photoghraphic projects can be as short as an afternoon or as long as a lifetime. — George Barr

That the outer man is a picture of the inner, and the face an expression and revelation of the whole character, is a presumption likely enough in itself, and therefore a safe one to go on; borne out as it is by the fact that people are always anxious to see anyone who has made himself famous. Photography offers the most complete satisfaction of our curiosity. — Arthur Schopenhauer

We used the camera only as a means of expression and as a visual medium that offers possibilities found in no other artistic technique, possibilities that the eye cannot catch in their totality. We tried to establish a characteristic vision of photography. — Piet Zwart

They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. I say its closer to 675 or 700. — A.E. Samaan

As sounds in a musical composition can be used not to express physical objects but ideas, emotions, harmonies, rhythmic orders and most any expression of the human mind and spirit, so light can be used visually to express the mind and spirit. — Wynn Bullock

Anyone interested in design must be interested in other fields of expression - theater, ballet, photography, literature, music. — Lester Beall

Photography is one of the most authentic and integral modes of expression possible in this world in which we live. — Clarence John Laughlin

Photography has fooled the world. There's no more convincing fraud. Its images are nothing but the expression of the invisible man working behind the camera. They are not reality, they form part of the language of culture. — Edmundo Desnoes

My programme, The Art of Creative Expression, empowers young people with tools to express themselves. We teach photography, art and drama, but it's not just the medium that's important, it's about what you are trying to say. — Dawud Wharnsby Ali

Photography was the first foreign language of my artistic expression. — Jerzy Kosinski

As far as I am concerned, taking photographs is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from other means of visual expression. It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It is a way of life. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

And that desire-the strong desire to take pictures-is important. It borders on a need, based on a habit: the habit of seeing. Whether working or not, photographers are looking, seeing, and thinking about what they see, a habit that is both a pleasure and a problem, for we seldom capture in a single photograph the full expression of what we see and feel. It is the hope that we might express ourselves fully-and the evidence that other photographers have done so-that keep us taking pictures. — Sam Abell

Image quality is not the product of a machine, but of the person who directs the machine, and there are no limits to imagination and expression. — Ansel Adams

Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision ... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?' — Robert Adams

Laugh, love, dream, strive, smile, feel, joy, look, try, fail, read, walk, search, share, help, work, fun, learn, retry, sweat, cry, rest, wait, fear, hope, trust, pride ... when we have lived all of these, our photography might stop being a record of what our camera sees and become an expression of what we as photographers feel. — Steve Coleman

To do justice to modern technology's rigid linear structure, to the lofty gridwork of cranes and bridges, to the dynamism of machines operating at one thousand horsepower - only photography is capable of that. What those who are attached to the painterly style regard as photography's defect, the mechanical reproduction of form - is just what makes it superior to all other means of expression. — Albert Renger-Patzsch

The artistic methods of poetry, painting, photography, and writing share certain commonalities of deep composition: spirit, rhythm, thought, and scenery. — Kilroy J. Oldster

In every photographer there was a painter, a true artist, awaiting expression. — Pablo Picasso

At the heart of all photography is an urge to express our deepest personal feelings - to reveal our inner, hidden selves, to unlock the artist. Those of us who become photographers are never satisfied with just looking at someone else's expression of something that is dear to us. We must produce our own images, instead of buying postcards and photo books. We seek to make our own statements of individuality. — Galen Rowell

In photography we must learn to seek, not the 'picture,' not the aesthetic of tradition, but the ideal instrument of expression, the self-sufficient vehicle for education. — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression ... In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotif. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

The beauty of women was the first expression of my photography. — Alberto Korda

The photographer's problem is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium, for it is precisely here that honesty no less than intensity of vision is the pre-requisite of a living expression. The fullest realization of this is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation, through the use of straight photographic methods. — Paul Strand

The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances. — Andre Breton

It is the purpose of life that each of us strives to become actually what he or she is potentially. Each photographer, then, should be obsessed with stretching towards that goal through an understanding of others and the world we inhabit. When that happens, the results, like photographs, are really the expressions of the life of the maker. — David Hurn

Photography is unlike any other art form. In the other arts there is always a continuous interplay between the artist and his art. He has the painting or sculpture before him. What we have tried to do is to provide a medium for "artistic expression" to anyone with only a reasonable amount of time. By giving him a camera system with which he need only control his selection of focus, composition and lighting, we free him to select the moment and to criticize immediately what he has done. We enable him to see what else he wants to do on the basis of what he has just learned. — Edwin Land

Photography is the typical means of expression of a society founded on a civilization of technicians, conscious of the aims it has set for itself ... Its power of exactly reproducing external reality, a power inherent in its technique, lends it a documentary character and makes it appear as the most faithful and impartial process for the reproduction of social life. — Gisele Freund

I was given a small camera as a wedding gift from a very dear friend. My first pictures were taken on my honeymoon. As soon as I became familiar with the camera, I was intrigued with the possibilities of expression it offered. It was like a discovery for me. — Aaron Siskind

There is no art which affords less opportunity to execute expression than photography. Everything is concentrated in a few seconds, when after perhaps an hours seeking, waiting, and hesitation, the photographer sees the realization of his inward vision, and in that moment he has one advantage over most arts - his medium is swift enough to record his momentary inspiration. — Sadakichi Hartmann

Photographers who carry 60 pounds of equipment up a hill to photograph a view are not suffering enough, although their whining causes enough suffering among their listeners. No, if they really expect us to respect their search for enlightenment and artistic expression, in [the] future they will drag the equipment up the hill by their genitals and take the view with a tripod leg stuck through their foot. — Bill Jay

To me photography can be simultaneously both a record and a mirror or window of self-expression the camera is generally assumed to be unable to depict that which is not visible to the eye and yet, the photographer who wields it well can depict what lies unseen in his memory. — Eikoh Hosoe

( ... ) photography opened up quite a little Pandora's box, kiddies. ( ... ) Once we no longer had to depend on drawing and painting to record our existence - once they became an option - they mutated ... into a form of expression. And Art for its own sake, God help us, was born. — Chip Kidd

My focus is anything that allows me to express myself. Rap, dance, photography. Those are my forms of expression. — Keith Stanfield

The personality and style of a photographer usually limits the type of subject with which he deals best. For example Cartier-Bresson is very interested in people and in travel; these things plus his precise feeling for geometrical relationships determine the type of pictures he takes best. What is of value is that a particular photographer sees the subject differently. A good picture must be a completely individual expression which intrigues the viewer and forces him to think. — Alexey Brodovitch

I started photography more or less by accident when I was already 27. I was taken on as an assistant by a photographer who was a friend of a friend and I very quickly understood the potential of expression in photography. — Peter Lindbergh

Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us. — Ansel Adams

If you want to write you should learn the alphabet. You write and write and in the end you hava a beautiful, perfect alphabet. But it isn't the alphabed that is important. The important thing is what you are writing, what you are expressing. The same thing goes for photography. Photographs can be technically perfect and even beautiful, but they have no expression. — Andre Kertesz

The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art. — Alfred Stieglitz

Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times - the pulse of today. — Berenice Abbott

Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant. We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory. The writer has time to reflect. He can accept and reject, accept again; and before committing his thoughts to paper he is able to tie the several relevant elements together. There is also a period when his brain "forgets," and his subconscious works on classifying his thoughts. But for photographers, what has gone is gone forever. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one badass flower, captured in time-lapse photography, going from bud to wild radiant blossom in ten seconds flat. — Jandy Nelson

It was around the age of 18 when I started to feel like I had learned everything I could learn from being a model - modeling is a really incredible form of expression, but I got into modeling because I loved fashion so much and I really loved photography. — Jaime King

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. — Ansel Adams

I realize that we all do express ourselves, but those who express that which is always being done are those whose thinking is almost in every way in accord with everyone else. Expression on this basis has become dull to those who wish to think for themselves. — Harry Callahan

Photography ... is either an expression of a cosmic vision, an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing - to me. (1919) — Paul Strand

A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety. — Ansel Adams