Photograph Quotes
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... photography, like all camera-made images such as film and video, effaces the marks of its making (and maker) at the click of a shutter. A photograph appears to be self-generated - as though it had created itself.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
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Research material can turn up anywhere - in a dusty old letter in an archive, a journal or some old photographs you find in a charity shop.
Sara Sheridan
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You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.
Ansel Adams
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Today a lot of things are so celebrity-oriented; it's only because it's celebrity and the photograph is lost. To me it's important to have an image that is a photograph first, not about necessarily who that person is.
Herb Ritts
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A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.
Ansel Adams
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So long as people expect paintings to be simply coloured photographs they get no individuality and, in the case of portraits, no characterisation.
William Dobell
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I always loved the idea that a photograph was a memory frozen in time.
Ed Gass-Donnelly
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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
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Of course, the camera is a far more objective and trustworthy witness than a human being. We know that a Brueghel or Goya or James Ensor can have visions or hallucinations, but it is generally admitted that a camera can photograph only what is actually there, standing in the real world before its lens.
Hannah Hoch
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The only thing that gets in the way of a really good photograph, is the camera.
Norman Parkinson
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There's no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class. I'm always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don't give a damn how it got made.
Minor White
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What is it that angers us?... We have been tricked. In essence, we have been lied to. The problem is not that the photograph has been manipulated, but that we have been manipulated by the photograph.
Errol Morris
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My caravan was like a café and it [had] nice light because the windows were on both sides. It was a good place to photograph.
Chris Killip
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Grigsby's marvelous exploration-a deep, wide, and beautiful inquiry into Sojourner Truth's use of technology-features more of her photographs than have ever been collected before. Among its many insights, I especially relished the analysis of Truth's illiteracy. Enduring Truths is art history with a wide-ranging concept of history left in. A terrific book, and one we've needed for a long time.
Nell Irvin Painter
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It doesn’t matter if you use a box camera or a Leica, the important thing is what motivates you when you are photographing. What I have tried to do is involve the people I was photographing. To have them realize without saying so, that it was up to them to give me whatever they wanted to give me . . . if they were willing to give, I was willing to photograph.
Eve Arnold
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When you approach something to photograph it, first be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence. Then don't leave until you have captured its essence.
Minor White
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I always think photographs abominable, and I don't like to have them around, particularly not those of persons I know and love. Those photographic portraits wither much sooner than we ourselves do, whereas the painted portrait is a thing which is felt, done with love.
Vincent Van Gogh
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You photograph with all your ideology.
Sebastiao Salgado
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What is a photograph? For me, a fragment of quick-silver, a lucid dream, a scribbled note from the subconscious to be deciphered, perhaps, over years. It is a monologue trying to become a conversation, an offering, an alibi, a salute.
Eva Rubinstein
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We do not see everything in the environment in the complete, totally resolved, explicit character of the photograph. We, in fact, prioritize our seeing.
Burton Silverman
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When you can't think of anything else, photograph graffiti, nudes, or plants.
Bill Jay
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I often had to pass over photographs because in a mass of animals invariably one would be wandering in the wrong direction, thereby disrupting the pattern I was trying to achieve. Today the ability to digitally alter this disruption is at hand.
Art Wolfe
