Photography Interpretation Quotes & Sayings

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

Visual ideas combined with technology combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold it's own; if it doesn't, the thing collapses. — Arnold Newman

The context in which a photograph is seen affects the meaning the viewer draws from it. — Stephen Shore

The reason I often say, for me, photography is analogous to poetry, for my kind of work more so than journalism, is because it's so open to interpretation. And I'm very happy having different interpretations of it. — Alec Soth

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

My point is that meaning is always personal, changeable and subjective. There is no 'correct' interpretation of a photograph. — Bill Jay

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

Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable. — Edith Grossman

Only in black and white can I see the design and textures. I don't consider color photography art. Black and white is an interpretation. Color is a duplication. — Clyde Butcher

If art is the poetic interpretation of nature, photography is the exact translation; it is exactitude in art or the complement of art. (1854) — Charles Negre

All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object. — Jean Renoir

The greatest field of photography, for the literary interpretation of life, consists, to my mind, in its latent power to create, as it were, death for a single second. Any thing or person is, at will, made to die for a moment of time so immeasurably small that the return to life is effected without consciousness of the great adventure. (1928) — Pierre Mac Orlan

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. — Susan Sontag