Photographic Quotes & Sayings

A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image. — John Berger

The problem is, photographic dyes and printing inks aren't as good as paint, actually. — David Hockney

Given the lack of public skills in reading photographs, given that photographic content is sometimes buried in beauty, contemporary landscape photographers are often condemned to making pretty pictures. Dramatic clouds and sifting light can overwhelm more mundane information. Yet who can resist beautiful landscape pictures of one kind or another? Not I. — Lucy R. Lippard

If done well, I believe the photographic representation of the human subject has the potential to be more revealing than what is revealed by the eye alone, since the human glance is usually a momentary one. — Dawoud Bey

The whole flock is helping to raise her, with Total insisting on French lessons and Nudge making sure she doesn't look like a cave girl (even though we pretty much live in caves). But it's only Fang who spends as much time with her as I do, Fang who patiently teaches the fascinating facts his photographic brain remembers from all those fat books I shunned in school. Fang, because he's her father. — James Patterson

I have a deep love and respect for children and I cannot imagine photographic life without them playing a major part. I hope that through my work as a photographer, I have been able to pass on my appreciation of their beauty and charm. — Anne Geddes

I do have strong convictions and political opinions, but I don't think it's necessary to imbue my photographic work with them. I use photography as a vessel for visual material to flow through, to encourage conversation with the viewer. I try to present a catalyst and invite viewers to tell their own stories. — Michael Kenna

The moon develops the imagination, as chemicals develop photographic images. — Sheila Ballantyne

While the human gaze becomes more and more fixed, losing some of its natural speed and sensitivity, photographic shots, on the contrary, become even faster. — Paul Virilio

Let us not be afraid to allow for post-visualization. By post-visualization I refer to the willingness on the part of the photographer to revisualize the final image at any point in the entire photographic process. — Jerry Uelsmann

As we walked, I kept taking glances at her through the crowd, quick snapshots: a photographic series entitled Perfection Stands Still While Mortals Walk Past. — John Green

A photographic portrait needs more collaboration between sitter and artist than a painted portrait. — Alvin Langdon Coburn

Once we came to accept the photographic image as reality, the way to its future simulation was open. — Lev Manovich

Emotions retain a timeless photographic memory. Good or bad, you can never forget how a person makes you feel. — Carl Henegan

Light is my inspiration. My photographic images search for dimensions that words cannot touch- the result of intense responses to personal experiences. I do not wish to "record," but rather to touch upon the illusive meanings which I perceive and try to comprehend in this limitless universe. — Ruth Bernhard

Verbal representations of such places or scenes may, or may not, have the merit of accuracy; but photographic presentments of them will be accepted by posterity with an undoubting faith. — Alexander Gardner

I live a lonely photographic life here in Santa Fe. I do see Eliot Porter occasionally, and Ansel storms through every so often, otherwise I plug along in my old fashioned way. — Laura Gilpin

I don't particularly care about photographic authorship. Whether an astronaut who doesn't even have a viewfinder makes an image, a robotic camera, a military photographer, or Mike Light really doesn't matter. What matters is the context of the final photograph and the meaning it generates within that context. — Michael Light

Every photo takes him a hairsbreadth closer to her, to the essential core of Helle, a purified Helle that he will one day hand back to her on a sheet of photographic paper. Here, he imagines himself saying. This is you. She will look at the print and know herself, at last, and she will wonder how she missed herself all along. Helle, seeing Helle as clearly as she sees the rest of the world: this is something to be dreamed of. It — Lauren Groff

The New York book was a visual diary and it was also kind of personal newspaper. I wanted it to look like the news. I didn't relate to European photography. It was too poetic and anecdotal for me ... the kinetic quality of new york, the kids, dirt, madness - I tried to find a photographic style that would come close to it. So I would be grainy and contrasted and black. Id crop, blur, play with the negatives. I didn't see clean technique being right for New York. I could imagine my pictures lying in the gutter like the New York Daily News. — William Klein

When you start out, you're not really aware. I didn't have a sense of photographic history. — Herb Ritts

In most of my photographic pieces I have manipulated the quality of the evidence that people assign to photography, in order to subvert it, or to show that photography lies - that what it conveys is not reality but a set of cultural codes. — Christian Boltanski

IT SEEMS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE, but there was once a time when human beings did not feel the need to share their every waking moment with hundreds of millions, even billions, of complete and utter strangers. If one went to a shopping mall to purchase an article of clothing, one did not post minute-by-minute details on a social networking site; and if one made a fool of oneself at a party, one did not leave a photographic record of the sorry episode in a digital scrapbook that would survive for all eternity. But now, in the era of lost inhibition, it seemed no detail of life was too mundane or humiliating to share. In the online age, it was more important to live out loud than to live with dignity. Internet followers were more treasured than flesh-and-blood friends, for they held the illusive promise of celebrity, even immortality. Were Descartes alive today, he might have written: I tweet, therefore I am. — Daniel Silva

I have world class photographic red-eye pretty much all the time. As a general rule, if it's taken with a flash, I look like I am possessed by the blazing forces of darkness, at least in the eye department. — Neil Gaiman

Photographic cropping is always experienced as a rupture in the continuous fabric of reality. — Rosalind E. Krauss

The photographer must bear the responsibility for his work and its effect ... [for] photographic journalism, because of its tremendous audience reached by publications using it, has more influence on public thinking than any other branch of photography. — W. Eugene Smith

It is through our technology that we have been able to fly far away from earth to learn, in truth, how precious it is. It is no coincidence that our awakening to the special nature of our world and to its uniquely balanced environment and its limitations coincided with our first glimpse of earth from outer space, through the eyes of astronauts, television cameras and photographic equipment. — Dixie Lee Ray

Sometimes my work needs to be photographic, sometimes it needs words, sometimes it needs to have a relationship with music, sometimes it needs all three and become a video projection. — Carrie Mae Weems

We're so conditioned to the syntax of the camera that we don't realize that we are running on only half the visual alphabet ... It's what we see every day in the magazines, on billboards and even on television. All those images are being produced basically the same way, through a lens and a camera. I'm saying there are many, many other ways to produce photographic imagery, and I would imagine that a lot of them have yet to be explored. — Adam Fuss

Everyone has a photographic Memory, some just don't have film. — Steven Wright

We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus. — Sigmund Freud

I would love to have a photographic memory. It would come in handy with the rants I'm given on Scrubs ... often on short notice! — John C. McGinley

If it were possible for any one person or group of persons to go through a photographic finishing plant's work at the end of a day, you could probably pull out the most extraordinary photographic exhibition we've ever seen. On almost any subject. The trouble is to find the things. — Edward Steichen

It wasn't even a matter of what I was photographing, as what had happened to me in the process. When I discovered that I could look at the horror of Belsen
4000 dead and starving lying around
and think only of a nice photographic composition, I knew something had happened to me and I had to stop. I felt I was like the people running the camp
it didn't mean a thing. — George Rodger

Just because I use the photographic medium, that doesn't mean I'm a photographer. — Nikki S. Lee

Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot - or will not - achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography. — Roland Barthes

One of my friends at the Compound has a photographic memory. Everything she ever sees, reads, or hears, she remembers forever in perfect detail. — Kasie West

I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are. — Georgia O'Keeffe

The problem is almost everybody is just recording the world with home photographic toys, not doing metaphor or ideas. We have a photographic culture that's not conditioned to think in terms of symbol. — James Balog

The particular features of the photographic method of detecting atomic particles enabled us to establish the existence of transient forms of matter which had escaped recognition by other methods. — Cecil Frank Powell

He knows that I have a photographic memory ... and that I'm a hacker. — Stieg Larsson

The theory arrived neither full-blown, like an orphan on the doorstep, nor sharply defined, like a spike through a shoe; nor did it develop as would a photographic print, crisp images gradually emerging from a shadowy soup. Rather, it unwound like a turban, like a mummy bandage; started with the sudden loosening of a clasp, a scarab fastener, and then unraveled in awkward spirals from end to frazzled end. — Tom Robbins

Photographing attractive people who were doing attractive things in attractive places. (Summary of his photographic career) — Slim Aarons

(In response to a picture critic.)

I'm actually a very joyful person. But being a genius with a photographic memory mixed with a strong case of OCD makes for a difficult picture sometimes. — Calvin W. Allison

Exhilaratingly new and unmistakably familiar, like a childhood memory that felt dreamlike until photographic evidence was found in an old box in the attic. — Lauren Kate

I believed it was necessary to investigate photography, dismantle it, jettison all the non-essential components, and begin again with a stripped down but more powerful idea of what is, or could be photographic. — Lewis Baltz

Neither camera, nor lens, nor film determine the quality of pictures; it is the visual perception of the man behind the mechanism which brings them to life. Art contains the allied ideas of making and begetting, of being master of one's craft and able to create. Without these properties no art exists and no photographic art can come into being — Helmut Gernsheim

In 1967 there was no place for photography in a contemporary art gallery. It was almost impossible to get an art dealer to look at, let alone exhibit, anything photographic. — Mel Bochner

The photogram, or camera-less record of forms produced by light, which embodies the unique nature of the photographic process, is the real key to photography. — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

I struck upon this kind of crazy idea that I was going to go to New York and stop 10,000 people on the streets and take their portrait and create kind of a photographic census of the city. — Brandon Stanton

Here lies our comrade, Kemmerich, who a little while ago was roasting horse flesh with us and squatting in the shell-holes. He it is still and yet it is not he any longer. His features have become uncertain and faint, like a photographic plate from which two pictures have been taken. Even his voice sounds like ashes. — Erich Maria Remarque

I am convinced that any photographic attempt to show the complete man is nonsense. We can only show, as best we can, what the outer man reveals. The inner man is seldom revealed to anyone, sometimes not even the man himself. — Arnold Newman

In April 1981, at my request, my mother went to a detective agency. She hired them to follow me, to report my daily activities, and to provide photographic evidence of my existence. — Sophie Calle

There's a reason why the story of the ghetto should never come with a photo. The Third World slum is a nightmare that defies beliefs or facts, even the ones staring right at you. A vision of hell that twists and turns on itself and grooves to its own soundtrack. Normal rules do not apply here. Imagination then, dream, fantasy. You visit a ghetto, particularly a ghetto in West Kingston, and it immediately leaves the real to become this sort of grotesque, something out of Dante or the infernal painting of Hieronymus Bosch. It's a rusty red chamber of hell that cannot be described so I will not try to describe it. It cannot be photographed because some parts of West Kingston, such as Rema, are in the grip of such bleak and unremitting repulsiveness that the inherent beauty of the photographic process will lie to you about just how ugly it really is. — Marlon James

Photographic data ... is still and ESSENTIALLY THE SAFEST POETIC MEDIUM and the most agile process for catching the most delicate osmoses which exist between reality and surreality. The mere fact of photographic transposition means a total invention: the capture of a secret reality. — Salvador Dali

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was. — Stanley Kubrick

The digital image annihilates photography while solidifying, glorifying and immortalizing the photographic. — Lev Manovich

What my eyes seek in these encounters is not just the beauty traditionally revered by wildlife photographers. The perfection I seek in my photographic composition is a means to show the strength and dignity of animals in nature. — Frans Lanting

Producing a photographic document involves preparation in excess. There is first the examination of the idea of the project. Then the visits to the scene, the casual conversations, and more formal interviews - talking, and listening, and looking, looking ... And finally, the pictures themselves, each one planned, talked, taken and examined in terms of the whole. — Aaron Siskind

Damn it, why couldn't I have a photographic memory!"
"Thank God you don't," Caleb exclaimed in a disgusted tone.
"What makes you say that?" Reuben demanded hotly.
"Because then she'd be calling you Ruby, and I'd have to be sick to my stomach. — David Baldacci

The freeze of a photographic gesture, the fix of an action, how an arm twists, how a smile gets momentarily stabilized or exaggerated - to try to get some of this is important ... The photofix inflects the almost literal shaping of a figure, changes of movement or potential movement, and a sense of occurrence or event. — Leon Golub

There is a strong link between synesthesia and photographic memory (technically called eidetic memory) or at least heightened memory (hypermnesis). Many synesthetes used their synesthesia as a mnemonic aid. — Richard E. Cytowic

In every successful still photographic project that I have completed, there has always been a turning point in the story where I felt that perhaps I was working on something that could be very special. — Mary Ellen Mark

I've a great sense of privacy. WRiters have to have an angle. If you say less than what you m ight tell your husband or your doctor, then You're 'mysterious'...Basically, I don't like the one-sided talk about myself. I don't enjoy the process of cross-examination: I find it absolutely sapping, I've been made mistrustful by being burned." -Audrey Hepburn
Audrey Hepburn, A Photographic Celebration — Suzanne Lander

For the birth of something new, there has to be a happening. Newton saw an apple fall; James Watt watched a kettle boil; Rontgen fogged some photographic plates. And these people knew enough to translate ordinary happenings into something new ... — Alexander Fleming

I think that no one human being would have been able to look at [a hypothetical photographic record of the Nazi gassing of Jews] ... I would have preferred to destroy it. It is not visible. — Claude Lanzmann

If I give someone a horsetail he will have no difficulty making a photographic enlargement of it - anyone can do that. But to observe it, to notice and discover its forms, is something that only a few are capable of. — Karl Blossfeldt

One of the secrets of being a great photographic model, as it is for a great film actor, is that you let the camera in. It's an intimacy that the model or actor creates with the lens, that then transmits itself to the viewer. — Mary Harron

I have a photographic memory. — Tom Holland

I have a photographic memory; I just haven't developed it yet. — Jonathan Winters

In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long. — W.G. Sebald

No matter how physically faint, a photograph involuntarily whisper of something exquisitely carnal. The weeks, the years, whatever stretches of time separating our present from the photographs retire into the transparence of the shot and seem erased by it. We almost have to shake ourselves to overcome the feeling that we peer out at the other place, in that different age. Yet we are always aware of this illusory dislocation, for such is the ambiguity, in principle, that seduces us over and over again in the photographic experience. — Max Kozloff

In the absence of a subject with which you are passionately involved, and without the excitement that drives you to grasp it and exhaust it, you may take some beautiful pictures, but not a photographic oeuvre. — Brassai

An interlude of false innocence has passed. Today, as we enter the post-photographic era, we must face once again the ineradicable fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real, and the tragic elusiveness of the Cartesian dream. We have indeed learnt to fix the shadows, but not to secure their meanings or to stabilize their truth values; they still flicker on the walls of Plato's cave. — William J. Mitchell

In my photographic work I'm generally attracted to places that contain memories, history, atmospheres and stories. I'm interested in the places where people have lived, worked and played. I look for traces of the past, visual fingerprints, evidence of activities - they fire my imagination and connect into my own personal experiences. Using the analogy of the theater, I would say that I like to photograph the empty stage, before or after the performance, even in between acts. I love the atmosphere of anticipation, the feeling in the air that events have happened, or will happen soon ... — Michael Kenna

When the object that is produced, the photographic image has the ability to make tears come to your eyes; to inspire you to the point where you have to catch your breath, then nothing else matters. — John Sexton

I suspect it is for one's self-interest that one looks at one's surroundings and one's self. This search is personally born and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs. The camera is not merely a reflecting pool and the photographs are not exactly the mirror, mirror on the wall that speaks with a twisted tongue. Witness is borne and puzzles come together at the photographic moment which is very simple and complete. The mind-finger presses the release on the silly machine and it stops time and holds what its jaws can encompass and what the light will stain. — Lee Friedlander

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

I come at a subject from a profoundly photographic level. I am not interested in pictures that ultimately don't work as pictures. — Michael Light

Forgers can start with the same photographic images Warhol did, and sometimes knock off silkscreens only an expert can distinguish from the originals. — Michael Shnayerson

With crystals we are in a situation similar to an attempt to investigate an optical grating merely from the spectra it produces ... But a knowledge of the positions and intensities of the spectra does not suffice for the determination of the structure. The phases with which the diffracted waves vibrate relative to one another enter in an essential way. To determine a crystal structure on the atomic scale, one must know the phase differences between the different interference spots on the photographic plate, and this task may certainly prove to be rather difficult. — Max Von Laue

I used to be a photographer - and now I'm some kind of digital photographic artist. — Chris Jordan

In photography one should surely proceed from essence of the object and attempt to represent it with photographic terms alone. — Albert Renger-Patzsch

I think that emotional content is an image's most important element, regardless of the photographic technique. Much of the work I see these days lacks the emotional impact to draw a reaction from viewers, or remain in their hearts. — Anne Geddes

[Constance Bennett] never tired of acting, said Peter Plant. She liked it, she enjoyed it, and she worked very hard at it. When she was making a film, she would really be busy preparing for the next day's scenes. I would visit her for half an hour, and then she would go back to her script. She had what her father had, a photographic memory. Richard Bennett, I understand, could read a play through once, and he knew the whole play, and everyone else's cues. I have the good fortune to have inherited that, and it's made many people think me more intelligent than I am. — Eve Golden

My father was famous for his photographic memory. He was in the OSS. They trained him to be captured on purpose and to read upside down and backwards and commit to memory every document in Germany he saw as he was being interrogated - every schedule on every wall. So, that photographic memory somehow made its way to me when I was young. — Mark Helprin

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks. — Richard Avedon

The question at hand is the danger posed to truth by computer-manipulated photographic imagery. How do we approach this question in a period in which the veracity of even the straight, unmanipulated photograph has been under attack for a couple of decades. — Martha Rosler

It was the face of spring, it was the face of summer, it was the warmness of clover breath. Pomegranate glowed in her lips, and the noon sky in her eyes. To touch her face was that always new experience of opening your window one December morning, early, and putting out your hand to the first white cool powdering of snow that had come, silently, with no announcement, in the night. And all of this, this breath-warmness and plum-tenderness was held forever in one miracle of photographic is chemistry which no clock winds could blow upon to change one hour or one second; this fine first cool white snow would never melt, but live a thousand summers. — Ray Bradbury

Throughout their lifetime, most women learn to be uncomfortable with their physical appearance. They create a
mask of makeup that is intended to "fix" their "imperfections." They identify so much with this mask they reject their true beauty.
Feminine Transitions encourages women to remove their masks and love their true selves, completely. — Alyscia Cunningham

A photographic close-up is perhaps the purest form of portraiture, creating a confrontation between the viewer and the subject that daily interaction makes impossible, or at least impolite. — Martin Schoeller

The only thing I can hope the viewer will get from the work is something about the structure of the work. It would be asking too much, I think, for them to get my exact intention. But if - through the construct of language, the way things are juxtaposed - there is some sort of disruption of the way you would normally go about reaching photographic images ... if that is happening, that's fine. — Lorna Simpson

Requiring valid, photographic identification is a common sense step to ensure voter integrity and sound elections. — Sonny Perdue

Photography begins not in the camera but in the
mind and the eye. The real work is one of noticing and appreciating, seeing things clearly and differently, and
sharing that vision with others. I have developed my
vision and my photographic craft in order to bring
the beauty of nature to light in a fresh way that
can inspire and nourish people. — Bill Atkinson

In common with other artists the photographer wants his finished print to convey to others his own response to his subject. In the fulfillment of this aim, his greatest asset is the directness of the process he employs. But this advantage can only be retained if he simplifies his equipment and technic to the minimum necessary, and keeps his approach from from all formula, art-dogma, rules and taboos. Only then can he be free to put his photographic sight to use in discovering and revealing the nature of the world he lives in. — Edward Weston

It's been an adventure just getting out to Saturn, .. Saturn is such an alluring photographic target. It's a joy, really, to be able to take our images and composite them in an artful way, which is one of my cardinal working goals. It's about poetry and beauty and science all mixed together. — Carolyn Porco

I was actually privately in the White House like invited by Clinton to screen Independence Day, so I know how the private residence looks. I didn't snap a picture, but I have a photographic memory and then I could take a guided tour in the West Wing. — Roland Emmerich

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects)- a material vestigate of its subject in a way that no painting can be ... Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross. — Susan Sontag

Since the photographic medium has been digitized, a fixed definition of the term photography has become impossible. — Andreas Gursky

I started as a black-and-white teenage photographer, and I'm still there decades after. In some ways, the genre is almost gone. I am thinking of true, stubborn, lifetime black-and-white photographers, as opposed to black-and-white as a photographic commodity. — Hedi Slimane