"I like photographers-you don't ask questions."
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Photography quotes
Photography
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Photography quotes (page 24 of 153)
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"The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias."
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"By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is."
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"In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all."
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"Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs ... But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real. ... 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it."
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"Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others."
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"Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made."
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"In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs."
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"Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed."
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"The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all."
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"People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad."
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"Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty."
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"When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese."
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"You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it."
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"photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing."
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"As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art."
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"To us, the difference between the # photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as separating photography as art from # photography as document. But both are logical extensions of what photography means: note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world, from every possible angle."
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"... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve."
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"Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world."
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"The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality."
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