Photography quotes

Photography

3.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.

3.1K quotes

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Browse quotes that often appear alongside photography — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.

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Photography quotes (page 23 of 153)

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Robert Adams Photographer
Photography

"Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities: geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together, as in the best work of people like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact - the affection for life."

Thinking Taken Photography
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Robert Adams Photographer
Photography

"...I felt that photography ought to start with and remain faithful to the appearance of the world, and in so doing record contradictions. The greatest pictures would then... find wholeness in the torn world."

Photography Records Faithful
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Robert Adams Photographer
Photography

"There is always a subjective aspect in landscape art, something in the picture that tells us as much about who is behind the camera as about what is in front of it."

Art Photography Landscape
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Robert Adams Photographer
Photography

"... If we consider the difference between William Henry Jackson packing in his camera by mule, and the person stepping for a moment from his car to take a picture with his Instamatic, it becomes clear how some of our space has vanished; if the time it takes to cross space is a way by which we define it, then to arrive at a view of space 'in no time' is to have denied its reality."

Reality Space Photography
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Robert Adams Photographer
Photography

"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?'"

Thinking Artist Photography
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Stuart Franklin Photographer
Photography

"I have a huge respect for the dedication that many people have, on the other side of the Atlantic, to photography. You can count them on one hand here. There's less respect for a Magnum photographer in Britain than there is in America. It's a much more postmodern culture here."

People Photography Dedication
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Stuart Franklin Photographer
Photography

"Well, people from the "me" generation use photography to show off what they are doing, to show the world themselves and their friends. Those sort of diarized accounts have always been there. But the phenomena of making those diaries public is new, isn't it?"

People World Photography
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Stuart Franklin Photographer
Photography

"There was as big a reaction after the revelations about Assad's chemical weapons. Nevertheless, that photograph did strike a singular chord. Which leads us to a larger fact: we don't understand why certain photographs create such an upheaval in one's soul. You look at them and go, "Oh my gosh." And that doesn't happen with television. It's unique to photography. Photographs are unique in that they are a frame abstracted out of reality, out of, in this case, a civil war. A single event can carry so much weight. And that is extraordinary."

War Photography Unique
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Stuart Franklin Photographer
Photography

"I was always interested in drawing and painting. I enrolled in college to study painting. But I didn't have any livelihood when I graduated. My mother died very young, and I didn't have any home, so I had to find a way to earn a living. It seemed to me that photography - to the great disappointment, I have to say, of my painting teacher - could offer that. So I went and did a degree in photography, and then after that I could go out and get paid for work. For portraits, things like that."

Mother Teacher Photography
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Stuart Franklin Photographer
Photography

"Newspaper photographs nowadays are highly tautologous. You'll have an article about, say, stopping the war. And the photograph that will be used is literally a poster that reads "Stop The War." Or you'll have a story about a cash crisis in Barcelona, and the only picture you'll see is an ATM in Barcelona. The problem is actually systemic. On the one hand, you'll have a picture of a soda can to "illustrate" an article about the dangers of sugary drinks. On the other hand, anything that's reasonable in documentary photography is snapped up by the art world and we never see it."

Art War Photography
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Stuart Franklin Photographer
Photography

"There's an awful lot of work being done that no one ever sees, or that is only seen in the gallery world. I feel that the public are losing touch with the great stuff that's being done in photography."

World Done Photography
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Stuart Franklin Photographer
Photography

"Photography was increasingly being seen as something outside the art world. As a sort of illustration. They just fired the director of photography at the Sunday Times Magazine - that's where everyone went with their photo essays in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. It was the place to get published. It is an issue. And I feel it. There's no budget. The budget-holders are very often people who've been to the professional colleges where art is not taught. So art as a part of education is something that's missing - since Thatcher's day, anyway."

Art Photography Sunday
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Stuart Franklin Photographer
Photography

"The world of photography is very self-aware. Everybody is always looking around. So it's quite difficult to stand up with a megaphone and declare, "This is what I think." As a reasonably shy person, I found it difficult to do that."

Thinking Photography Shy
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Stuart Franklin Photographer
Photography

"We don't understand what photography is doing. We don't understand the power of its rhetoric. We don't understand why the Provoke photographers showed Tokyo city as a ghastly and alien city when it was really going through this period of mega-capitalist growth. It's a very, very, very powerful force, the photograph. People ask me why it has such an ability to captivate us. And I just don't know."

People Powerful Photography
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Stuart Franklin Photographer
Photography

"Photography for me has been tremendously good, because I'm not a very sociable person. I'm happy reading or sitting in the library or going for walks. So photography has brought me in contact with people and made me understand people in a way that I probably wouldn't have done if I hadn't been a photographer. And so I'm grateful for that, really."

Reading Photography Grateful
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Stuart Franklin Photographer
Photography

"In the same way, photography, for me, has fragmented. You do have people doing bodies of work - often with found photographs - that are quite hard to understand unless you got a very sophisticated visual history behind you. But there are different camps."

People Different Photography
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