Photography quotes
3.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside photography — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Black and white photography is truly quite a 'departure from reality', and the transition from one aspect of visual magic to another was not as complete as many imagine."
"A photograph is not an accident - it is a concept."
"The term accessories has come to include a host of photographic gadgets of questionable value."
"...one sees differently with color photography than black-and-white... in short, visualization must be modified by the specific nature of the equipment and materials being used."
"I think there is a period of esthetic discovery that happens to a man and he can do all sorts of things at white heat."
"The world of the cinema and of painting are very different; precisely, the possibilities of photography and the cinema reside in that unlimited fantasy which is born of things themselves... a piece of sugar can become on the screen larger than an infinite perspective of gigantic buildings."
"Art does not in fact prove anything. What it does do is record one of those brief times, such as we each have and then each forget, when we are allowed to understand that the Creation is whole."
"The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope. This is not to say that he is unconcerned with the truth."
"If I like many photographers, and I do, I account for this by noting a quality they share - animation. They may or may not make a living by photography, but they are alive by it."
"A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once."
"So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful."
"Lifes light. Life is light. You can make light do anything you want to. Photography means 'light writing'."
"I often think we do not take this business of photography in a sufficiently serious spirit. Issuing a photograph is like marriage: you can only undo the mischief with infinite woe."
"Photography is the product of complete alienation."
"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."
"I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot."
"The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off."
"Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world."
"DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)"
"I never had any ambition to do anything commercial, anything journalistic. I wanted to be an artist, and I wanted to be an artist whose work was done in the medium of photography. It may be debatable to this day whether I ever succeeded in achieving that ambition, but the point is, I never had any uncertainty about that."
