Photograph Quotes
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Friendship based solely upon gratitude is like a photograph; with time it fades.
Elisabeth of Wied
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I have always done the opposite of what I was trained to do... Having little technical background, I became a photographer. Adopting a machine, I do my utmost to make it malfunction. For me, to make a photograph is to make an anti-photograph.
William Klein
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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
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I’ve always assumed that the abstract qualities of [my] photographs are obvious. For instance, I can turn them upside down and they’re still interesting to me as pictures. If you turn a picture that’s not well organized upside down, it won’t work.
William Eggleston
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As time went by we developed a sort of ideology without ever formulating it as such. I've always said that we are documenting the sacred buildings of Calvinism. Calvinism rejects all forms of art and therefore never developed its own architecture. The buildings we photograph originate directly from this purely economical thinking.
Bernd Becher
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You've got a number of things that take place that are peculiar to still photography. One: how a picture looks - what you photograph is responsible for how a photograph looks. In other words, it's responsible for the form.
Garry Winogrand
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It’s an immensely liberating feeling when you’re out in the landscape, concentrating on creating a photograph, and you’re absolutely flying
Charlie Waite
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Accurate drawing, accurate colour, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality in a mirror, if it could be caught, colour and all, would not be a picture at all, no more than a photograph.
Vincent Van Gogh
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A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.
Marcel Proust
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A technically perfect photograph can be the world's most boring picture.
Andreas Feininger
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Teaching is only interesting because you struggle with trying to talk about photographs, photographs that work, you see.
Garry Winogrand
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What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.
Karl Lagerfeld
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If all your life means to you is water running over rocks, then photograph it, but I want to create something that would not have existed without me.
Minor White
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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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I think that there isn't a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability... They do not tell stories - they show you what something looks like. To a camera.
Garry Winogrand
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I imagined Dad beside me: “It’s pretty,” he’d say. “But pretty isn’t enough for a great photograph. Show me why I care. What’s the story?
Cynthia Lord
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Photographs now speak in an eloquent way about the nature of vision itself. The philosophical implications of sight, of being able to see the world in three-dimensional terms, becomes very important within the context of the artistic photograph. The riddle of space and time is somehow stated with a little bit more clarity by virtue of seeing in-between the heartbeats.
Ralph Gibson
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I started out as a fashion photographer. One cannot say that I was successful but there was enough work to keep me busy. I collaborated with Harper's Bazaar and other magazines. I was constantly aware that those who hired me would have preferred to work with a star such as Avedon. But it didn't matter. I had work and I made a living. At the same time, I took my own photographs. Strangely enough, I knew exactly what I wanted and what I liked.
Saul Leiter
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“The eyes sparked a lot of things for me, it could be somebody remembering something they had witnessed or heard about, or it could be the person in the photograph that was experiencing a tragedy or it could also be the spectator looking on from a safe distance.”
Alex Prager
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I came across a photograph of him not long ago... his black face, the long snout sniffing at something in the air, his tail straight and pointing, his eyes flashing in some momentary excitement. Looking at a faded photograph taken more than forty years before, even as a grown man, I would admit I still missed him.
Willie Morris
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With a woman I try to photograph her beauty; with a man I try to show his character. Once I photographed a man with a big nose (Jimmy Durante), and emphasized his nose, and he was very pleased with the picture. That could not happen with a woman. The most intelligent woman will reject a portrait if it doesn't flatter her.
Philippe Halsman
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All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives… The photograph… is only the most peremptory of a huge modern accumulation of documentary evidence… which simultaneously records a certain apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory. Out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity… which, because it cannot be “remembered”, must be narrated.
Benedict Anderson
