Photography Quotes
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For me it is clear that photography prizes should be for those being photographed and not for the photographers.
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The dismal half-baked images of the average "reportage" and "documentary" photography are self dammning... the slick manner, the slightly obscure significance, the esoteric fear of simple beauty for its own sake - I am deeply concerned with these manifestations of decay. Gene Smith's work validates my most vigorous convictions that if the documentary photographs is to be truly effective it must contain elements of art, intensity, fine craft and spirituality. All these his work contains and we may turn to his work with gratitude, appreciation and great respect.
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As a teenager, I loved acting, painting, photography, and making films with my friend's Super 8 camera. But I always loved writing the best. I chose writing even before I knew poetry was available to me.
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When I was just starting out, I met Cartier-Bresson. He wasn't young in age but, in his mind, he was the youngest person I'd ever met. He told me it was necessary to trust my instincts, be inside my work, and set aside my ego. In the end, my photography turned out very different to his, but I believe we were coming from the same place.
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It has been important to me, as an historian of photography, to understand photography by photographing.
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Because powerful images are fixed in the mind more readily than words, the photographer needs no interpreter. A photograph means the same thing all over the world and no translator is required. Photography is truly a universal language, transcending all boundaries of race, politics and nationality.
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I think there's a general confusion that my work is about types of photography. But really that's just a tool to introduce some questions I have about seeing. What happens when all of these conditions and structures and histories and cultures and tools you have around you begin to fail? On the one hand there is an engagement with histories and cultures, and on the other, there is this very lonesome space of actually coming to terms with seeing.
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Don't you think that it is necessary to have a sense of brutality in photography?
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I was really into writing short fiction and also photography when I was a kid.
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Photography is one of the most authentic and integral modes of expression possible in this world in which we live.
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The relation of photography and language is a principal site of struggle for value and power in contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where images and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity.
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Then I moved down to the Bowery to this building where Debbie Harry lived. It was there that I started combining some clothes for her and continued doing the art and photography.
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To me photography can be simultaneously a record and a mirror or window of self-expression.
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Photography is a very important part of my life.
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There are no photographs while I'm reloading .
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You know, you get into the business of commercial photography, and that's all you do is photograph what you know. That's what you're hired for.
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This is the way photography can be cruel... in the sense that it describes everything, even the things we are not necessarily aware we're revealing.
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My photography has really always been about what I feel I'm getting out of it. What people on the outside get doesn't concern me.
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Photography is nature seen from the eyes outward, painting from the eyes inward. Photography records inalterably the single image, while painting records a plurality of images willfully directed by the artist.
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I got really excited about finding new ways of using video, and the immediacy is different, in a way, than painting and photography. The creativity comes with the editing. You can layer and cut and paste. I really love that it's like another form of making my smaller collages but in video form.
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The technique of 35mm photography appears simple. One is beguiled by the quick viewing and operation, and by the very questionable inclination to make many pictures with the hope that some will be good.
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Photography is without mercy - though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.
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Once you make decisions, you can't go back, but in photography, that process can continue. With film, you have to eliminate all the possibilities and make the one possibility work the best for you, so you have to become very creative with the direction you've chosen.
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Photography is my method for defining the confusing world that rushes constantly toward me. It is my defensive attempt to reduce our daily chaos to a set of understandable images.
