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Beaumont Newhall Quotes

We are not interested in the unusual, but in the usual seen unusually.

We are not interested in the unusual, but in the usual seen unusually.

Beaumont Newhall
Photography, Usual, Unusual

Over the years, photography has been to me what a journal is to a writer - a record of things seen and experienced, moments in the flow of time, documents of significance to me, experiments in seeing.

Beaumont Newhall
Photography, Years, Flow
Beaumont Newhall (1984). “In plain sight: the photographs of Beaumont Newhall”

If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.

Beaumont Newhall
Photography, Faithful, Historian

The present challenge to the photographer is to express inner significance through outward form.

Beaumont Newhall
Challenges, Photographer, Form

It has been important to me, as an historian of photography, to understand photography by photographing.

Beaumont Newhall
Photography, Important, Historian
Beaumont Newhall (1984). “In plain sight: the photographs of Beaumont Newhall”

More and more are turning to photography as a medium of expression as well as communication. The leavening of aesthetic approaches continues. While it is too soon to define the characteristic of the photographic style today, one common denominator, rooted in tradition, seems in the ascendancy. The direct use of the camera for what it can do best, and that is the revelation, interpretation, and discovery of the world of man and of nature. The greatest challenge to the photographer is to express the inner significance through the outward form.

Beaumont Newhall
Photography, Communication, Men

The fundamental belief in the authenticity of photographs explains why photographs of people no longer living and of vanished architecture are so melancholy.

Beaumont Newhall
Photography, People, Fundamentals
Beaumont Newhall (1982). “The history of photography: from 1839 to the present”, Bulfinch Press

Documentary is, therefore, an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give vivification to fact - to use Walt Whitman's definition of the place of poetry in the modern world.

Beaumont Newhall
Giving, Documentaries, Facts
Beaumont Newhall (1982). “The history of photography: from 1839 to the present”, Bulfinch Press

Wherever there is disaster, the newsman is there. If he cannot find disaster, he searches for the odd and the peculiar, the exotic and the unfamiliar. His photographs, seen by millions, make momentary events and strange occurrences all over the world our common property.

Beaumont Newhall
World, Events, Peculiar

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