Life Is A Photograph Quotes & Sayings

Who is the other woman whose photograph I do not have? If my mother was the first in my life, she was the last: my lover and my downfall, my hope and my despair. Her photographs I burned in an ashtray, one at a time - some might say to be rid of the evidence. Her name was Theresa Aden: Theresa like the saint; Aden like Eden, complete with snake. — Philip Sington

Photography seems to fix, but this is an illusion created by our short lives. A photograph is merely a note held for 200 years. — Douglas McCulloh

I've spent most of my life embracing violence in wars and revolutions. Even a famine is a form of violence. Because I photograph people in peril, people in pain, people being executed in front of me, I find it very difficult to get my head around the art narrative of photography. — Don McCullin

This is life. It is everywhere, and it is here for the taking. I am alive and I know this, now, in a more profound way than when I am doing anything else. These sights are ephemeral, fleeting treasures that have been offered to me and to me alone. No other person in the history of the world, anywhere in all of time and space, has been granted this gift to be here in my place. And I am privileged, through the camera, to take this moment away with me. That is why I photograph. — Bill Jay

Quickly, she pulls out a photograph from the same drawer. Two girls; one English, one Japanese. Their hair is in plaits, knees in the same position, peeking out under school skirts. There is no gap between their bodies. They look entirely different. Chinatsu is delicate, so flawless that she seems like a drawing, whereas Fleur is scrawny and ablaze with freckles. And yet, they look like sisters; the same posture, the same sadness in their eyes. She remembers that day. It was the worst and best of her life. — Sarah Dobbs

Would you want people walking up to you and pointing at your d
k? I can't believe I'm still talking about this. But I've worn underwear every day of my life and the fact that I'm painted as this exhibitionist is a little annoying. It's become a meme, I guess. Being someone who people want to photograph, you have to open yourself up to the positive and negative. It is what it is. If I get mad at it I'll look like a douchebag. But it's silly. — Jon Hamm

She said being human is being a young child on Christmas Day who receives an absolutely magnificent castle. And there is a perfect photograph of this castle on the box and you want more than anything to play with the castle and the knights and the princesses because it looks like such a perfectly human world, but the only problem is that the castle isn't built. It's in tiny intricate pieces, and although there's a book of instructions you don't understand it. And nor can your parents or Aunt Sylvie. So you are just left, crying at the ideal castle on the box which no one would ever be able to build — Matt Haig

When I ask to photograph someone, it is because I love the way they look and I think I make that clear. I'm paying them a tremendous compliment. What I'm saying is, I want to take you home with me and look at you for the rest of my life. — Amy Arbus

The Hubbell space telescope, it's first year up after they fixed it, categorized and counted 500 billion galaxies in any one photograph field of view of dark matter. That's like grains of sand at the beach and you've just got a handful. It's massive amounts. I'm sure that of all of the galaxies, and I'm sure the universe is teeming with life. — Alex Jones

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person. — Dan Chaon

I have been a photographer all my life ... and have made photographs of many things and for many reasons. But one thing that becomes more and more apparent is that I am simply only as good as my next photograph. That's the one that counts the most ... For this reason I find it a delight to face a new day, and to develop that new roll of film. It's a great way to live. — Ralph Gibson

Poetry is like a portrait of a moment or person, and the poem is almost like looking at a photograph; it slaps you in the face and kisses you at the same time. Nothing else does that, with that brevity. Songs try to do it, but that's three minutes. A poem, you read it and it kind of changes your life and you don't know how it happened and you can never forget it. It's like the best song lyric, the best line from a film-everything in the world that's short and great put together. — Warsan Shire

A memoir is meant to be an impression of life, and not a photograph. — Jennifer Finney Boylan

A photograph is a souvenir of life! — Deborah Smith

I think I've said this before many times - that photography allows you to learn to look and see. You begin to see things you had never paid any attention to. And as you photograph, one of the benefits is that the world becomes a much richer, juicier, visual place. Sometimes it is almost unbearable - it is too interesting. And it isn't always just the photos you take that matters. It is looking at the world and seeing things that you never photograph that could be photographs if you had the energy to keep taking pictures every second of your life. — Saul Leiter

The photograph is a tool used to take you back to a certain point in one's life, to remember a face or a place you once stood. I feel there is always something quite melancholic about a photograph. — Idris Khan

In my philosophy, the meaning of life derives from the people one has known and loved. I have met my share of evil people and know what they are capable of - I was at the liberation of Dachau - but I have always held that evil is not inherent in men and women. I still believe that within a caring society, only the best people will flourish. That is the spirit that has moved me to photograph. — Walter Rosenblum

Have you ever noticed how as an adult, all the bright colors go out of your life? Now that I'm not a kid anymore, things always look gray, like a clothesline draped with laundry that's been washed too many times and left to stand in the wind. I guess that's what growing up is ... it's a fading photograph. — Rebecca McNutt

What artist has not experienced the feverish euphoria of composing the perfect thumbnail sketch, first draft, negative or melody - only to run headlong into a stone wall trying to convert that tantalizing hint into the finished mural, novel, photograph, sonata. The artist's life is frustrating not because the passage is slow, but because he imagines it to be fast. — David Bayles

It is a strange phenomenon, how absence is the only authentic vessel of the past, how otherwise it is forgotten, overlooked for its continuity and perdurability - every sensory detail of the past breathes through its emptiness the way the light of a match illuminates the darkness; otherwise all is darkness, all is presence, everything in its place and thus unnoticed, whereas the past is missing, the part cut out of the photograph, the part the present attempts to seal over with the future, seeking to close the hole, pandering to the illusion of movement and change when in reality all of life is in flux, particle for particle, atom for atom, void for void, thought for thought. — John M. Keller

I have been so very, very fortunate in my life. I've met or been in contact with several of my childhood heroes. I've interacted with people all over this planet, and even though I couldn't possibly hope to remember all their names, I remember a photograph, a poem, a sound, a joke, kind words of encouragement. All is not lost. — Wayne Gerard Trotman

I think that the exactitude of the photograph has a sort of compelling nature based in its power to duplicate life. But to me the real power of photography is based in death: the fact that somehow it can enliven that which is not there in a kind of stultifying frightened way, because it seems to me that part of one's life is made up of a constant confrontation with one's own death. — Barbara Kruger

Permanence can only be found in the immortality offered by the click of a camera. Like it or not, life moves on as fleetingly as the photograph is enduring. — Diane Keaton

To me a photograph is a page from life, and that being the case, it must be real. — Weegee

It scares me how hard it is to remember life before you. I can't even make the comparisons anymore, because my memories of that time have all the depth of a photograph. It seems foolish to play games of better and worse. It's simply a matter of is and is no longer. — David Levithan

A photograph is a photograph, a picture, an image, an illusion complete within itself, depending neither on words, reproductive processes or anything else for its life, its reason for being. — Roy DeCarava

Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second. — Marc Riboud

Each time I make a photograph I celebrate the life I love and the beauty I know and the happiness I have experienced. All my photographs are made like that responding to my intuition ... After all these years, I am still motivated by the radiance that light creates when it transforms an object into something magical. What the eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black-and-white image is yet another transformation. What exactly exists, we may never know. — Ruth Bernhard

Artists with the lack of proper education and experience of working from life will copy whatever is visible on the photograph, without knowing what's underneath. As a result, instead of creating the in-depth and full of character portrait, they draw a mask with no soul. — Igor Babailov

These memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow
a vast, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires
but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us. They are completely lost to us. They arise no more; we are dead and they stand remote on the horizon, they are a mysterious reflection, an apparition that haunts us, that we fear and love without hope. They are unattainable and we know it.
And even if these scenes of our youth were given back to us, we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in memory; but the man himself it is not. — Erich Maria Remarque

All of those thousands upon thousands of photographs my father had taken. Think of them instead. Each one a record, a testament, a bulwark against forgetting, against nothingness, against death. Look, this happened. A thing happened, and now it will never un happen. Here it is in a photograph: a baby putting its tiny hand in the wrinkled palm of an octogenarian. A fox running across a woodland path and a man raising a gun to shoot it. A plane crash. A comet smeared across a morning sky. A prime minister wiping his brow. The Beatles, sitting at a cafe table on the Champs-Elysees on a cold January day in 1964, John Lennon's pale face under the brim of a fisherman's cap. all these things happened, and my father committed them to a memory that wasn't just his own, but the world's. My father's life wasn't about disappearance. His was a life that worked against it. — Helen Macdonald

In this fleeting life, there is nothing stronger than a visual idea or moment stopped in time forever. And nothing does this better than a black-and-white photograph. — Richard Olsenius

But one needs to bear in mind that things are not always what they seem and, contrary to the dead stillness of a photograph, reality is in a state of perpetual flux. — Audur Ava Olafsdottir

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

Life is a movie; death is a photograph. — Susan Sontag

She is bending over her child. She can't leave her. The
child is laid out in state on a table. She wants to take one more photograph of the child, probably the last. In life, the child would never sit still for a photograph. She says to herself, "I'm going to get the camera," as if saying to the child, "Don't move. — Lydia Davis

In taking that photograph, I understood something I will never forget: how I wished to arrest all the beauty that came before me. Not the classical beauty of symmetry and exact proportions or the fancy of fashion, which is ever-changing with the seasons, but the beauty of a soul, that inner life that reveals itself so seldom, just for an instant, and only if you look closely and learn to see with an open heart. — Elizabeth Ross

A photograph is just a little, teeny-weeny, small piece of life. I feel like I see so much more than what I can actually get. — Annie Leibovitz

Life is a photograph too, so thank you,
for not removing yourself from the picture just yet. — Meggie Royer

I am certain that over the course of your own life, you have noticed that people's rooms reflect their personalities. In my room, for instance, I have gathered a collection of objects that are important to me, including a dusty accordion on which I can play a few sad songs, a large bundle of notes on the activities of the Baudelaire orphans, and a blurry photograph, taken a very long time ago, of a woman whose name is Beatrice. These are items that are very precious and dear to me. — Lemony Snicket

And even if these scenes from our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might be amongst them and move in them; we might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in the memory; but the man himself it is not. — Erich Maria Remarque

Once more he became silent, staring before him with sombre eyes. Following his gaze, I saw that he was looking at an enlarged photograph of my Uncle Tom in some sort of Masonic uniform which stood on the mantlepiece. I've tried to reason with Aunt Dahlia about this photograph for years, placing before her two alternative suggestions: (a) To burn the beastly thing; or (b) if she must preserve it, to shove me in another room when I come to stay. But she declines to accede. She says it's good for me. A useful discipline, she maintains, teaching me that there is a darker side to life and that we were not put into this world for pleasure only. — P.G. Wodehouse

When a person looks at a photograph you've taken, they will always think of themselves, their own life experience. They will relate your photograph to their memories. That interplay is where a picture comes alive and grows into something. They function like invitations. — Jason Fulford

Photographers usually want to photograph facts and things. But I'm interested in the nature of the thing itself. A photograph of someone sleeping tells me nothing about their dream state; a photograph of a corpse tells me nothing about the nature of death. My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient. — Duane Michals

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

One of the things that I most believe in is the compose and wait philosophy of photography. It's a very satisfying, almost spiritual way to photograph. Life isn't' knocking you around, life isn't controlling you. You have picked your place, you've picked your scene, you've picked your light, you've done all the decision making and you are waiting for the moment to come to you. — Sam Abell

A photograph is analogous to a plaster cast taken from life, which is always inferior to a good statue. — Jean-Francois Millet

If I've learned anything in Kabul, it is that human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries. But I find comfort in it, in the idea of a pattern, of a narrative of my life taking shape, like a photograph in a darkroom, a story that slowly emerges and affirms the good I have always wanted to see in myself. It sustains me, this story. — Khaled Hosseini

There is a moment in every photograph's life when it has been exposed but not developed. The light from the enlarger has shone through the negative and made its impression on the paper, but without the magic of developer, the paper will stay white and no one will ever see what that impression is. — A.S. King

For me, the creation of a photograph is experienced as a heightened emotional response, most akin to poetry and music, each image the culmination of a compelling impulse I cannot deny. Whether working with a human figure or a still life, I am deeply aware of my spiritual connection with it. In my life, as in my work, I am motivated by a great yearning for balance and harmony beyond the realm of human experience, reaching for the essence of oneness with the Universe. — Ruth Bernhard

What I'm feeling, I think, is joy. And it's been some time since I've felt that blinkered rush of happiness, This might be one of those rare events that lasts, one that'll be remembered and recalled as months and years wind and ravel. One of those sweet, significant moments that leaves a footprint in your mind. A photograph couldn't ever tell its story. It's like something you have to live to understand. One of those freak collisions of fizzing meteors and looming celestial bodies and floating debris and one single beautiful red ball that bursts into your life and through your body like an enormous firework. Where things shift into focus for a moment, and everything makes sense. And it becomes one of those things inside you, a pearl among sludge, one of those big exaggerated memories you can invoke at any moment to peel away a little layer of how you felt, like a lick of ice cream. The flavor of grace. — Craig Silvey

That's what makes it a good photograph. You think you know what's going on in her head. but the truth? No matter how good a photograph is, you can never tell what's going on in the person's mind. There's no way to get from here to there. — David Levithan

We realize, though, because we must, that remembrance is finite. It crosses only so many generations before it fades to indistinction. One man remembers his father and perhaps his grandfather and the details of the lives that were lived. But it's harder to see further back in time. I know the name of my great-grandfather, but our living time did not intersect. We did not walk the earth at the same time. Thus, to me he's a photograph; a story I heard my grandfather tell. He's not a life I remember. And my children may not know him at all, unless by chance they can find him in a book. In time, he will be forgotten entirely, just as we all will with enough revolutions of the earth around the slowly expiring sun. Each fragile heart now beating will one day stop ... We are little more than one tree's growth of leaves in hillside forest. We will enjoy our brief moment in the sun, only to fall away with all the other to make way for the next bright young generation. — Phillip Lewis

This is how people behave when their dailiness is destroyed, when for a few moments they see, plain and unadorned, one of the great shaping forces of life. Calamity fixes them with her mesmeric eye, and they begin to scoop and paw at the rubble of their days, trying to pluck the memory of the quotidian - a toy, a book, a garment, even a photograph - from the garbage heaps of the irretrievable, of their overwhelming loss. — Salman Rushdie

Art has no place in modern life. It will continue to exist as long as there is a mania for the romantic and so long as there are people who love beautiful lies and deception ... Every modern cultured man must wage war against art, as against opium ... Photograph and be photographed. — Alexander Rodchenko