Photograph Quotes
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The business of making a photograph may be said in simple terms to consist of three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet of paper on which the picture will be realized, and the experience which brings them together.
Aaron Siskind
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I don't photograph anyone if I can't meet with them first because if I don't do that, then they're just going to the dentist and they're filled with fear. They don't know who I am.
Carol Friedman
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The photograph contains and constrains within its own boundaries, excluding all else, a microcosmic analogue of the framing of space which is knowledge. As such it becomes a metaphor of power, having the ability to appropriate and decontextualize time and space and those who exist within it.
Elizabeth Edwards
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To me, photographs are like words and I generally will place many photographs together or print them one inside the other in order to construct a free-floating sentence that speaks about the world I witness.
David Wojnarowicz
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If you are intent on drawing or painting on your prints, you must first learn to draw and paint at least as well as you photograph.
Bill Jay
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Kodachrome, it gives us those nice bright colors Gives us the greens of summers Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah! I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph So momma, don't take my Kodachrome away.
Paul Simon
Simon & Garfunkel
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The photograph suggests that our image of reality is made up of images. It makes explicit the domination of mediation.
Andy Grundberg
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The moment you make a photograph you consign whatever you photograph to the past as that specific moment no longer exists, it is history. The photography that I practice takes place in a specific time and place, depicting real moments in people’s lives. In some ways I think of myself as a historian, but not of the word. History is most often written from a distance, and rarely from the viewpoint of those who endured it.
Chris Killip
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You learn to see by practice. It's Just like playing tennis, you get better the more you play. The more you look around at things, the more you see. The more you photograph, the more you realize what can be photographed and what can't be photographed. You just have to keep doing it.
Eliot Porter
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Every photograph that is made whether by one who considers himself a professional, or by the tourist who points his snapshot camera and pushes a button, is a response to the exterior world, to something perceived outside himself by the person who operates the camera.
Eliot Porter
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A good photograph, like a good painting, speaks with a loud voice and demands time and attention if it is to be fully perceived. An art lover is perfectly willing to hang a painting on a wall for years on end, but ask him to study a single photograph for ten unbroken minutes and he’ll think it’s a waste of time. Staying power is difficult to build into a photograph. Mostly, it takes content. A good photograph can penetrate the subconscious – but only if it is allowed to speak for however much time it needs to get there.
Ralph Gibson
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Facts cling to photographs like dust.
Andy Grundberg
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I think things are going to go right for me again. I'm not old. I'm old enough, but I photograph young, thank God, and I still have a public. I still get fan mail.
Betty Hutton
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Let's put it this way - I photograph what interests me all the time. I live with the pictures to see what that thing looks like photographed. I'm saying the same thing; I'm not changing it.
Garry Winogrand
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I have a special relationship with God. And when I take the right photograph, God gives me a little bing! in the camera. And then I know I'm on the right track.
William Klein
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What you photograph is responsible for how a photograph looks - the form, the design, whatever word you want to use.
Garry Winogrand
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The destination of the photograph is to reveal what something or somebody looked like, under a particular set of conditions, at a particular moment in time, and to transmit the results to others.
David Hurn
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Computer images, like camera images today, will be seen as representations of a simulated, second-degree reality with little or no connection to the unmediated world. This is one lesson we can learn from photographs, and especially from those of the last 25 years: images exist not to be believed, but to be interrogated.
Andy Grundberg
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If you've ever had to recall your past in some way and you open a drawer of old photographs that your parents kept, there are always pictures of you smiling and charming, and then a bunch of people you don't know who they are. Could be aunts, uncles, could be the postman for all you know. Who are these people? Your parents are never in the picture, because they are the ones taking them. So you've got these unrelated images that are disconnected from your memories.
Gail Zappa
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Photographs are diary entries That's all they can be. Photographs are just documentations of a day's event. At the same time, they drag the past into the present and also continue into the future. A day's occurrence evokes both the past and the future. That's why I want to clearly date my pictures. It's actually frustrating, that's why I now photograph the future
Nobuyoshi Araki
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There are things I photograph because I'm interested in those things.
Garry Winogrand
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As an emerging photojournalist in the early 70s, my focus was on trying to create stories for magazines to the exclusion of almost everything else. I wish someone had told me then that the most personally important pictures you’ll ever make are those about you and your life. I’m glad I had the chance to work for some great magazines, but I really miss those little everyday images, the ones that take place in and around your own life, which will never make the news. Don’t sell yourself short: photograph your own life, not just everyone else’s.
David Burnett
