Photography Quotes - Page 107

I find the surface of a photograph a thing of beauty in and of itself, and it is this surface that makes a photograph unique relative to other two-dimensional media.

You can also see sometimes that the best pictures are the ones where you didn't try so hard, where you were just enjoying the process - and you didn't even know why you were making the picture. It felt right. If someone asked, 'Why are you making this picture?' you probably couldn't describe it very well - and that's why it needs to be a photograph.

I make photographs and still make photographs of the natural environment. It's a love because that was part of my life before I was involved in photography.

I tell you (dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well) a square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that were ever dipped in acid... Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against sculpture. That and no more. (1865)

Photography is the dominant and fascinating and only authentic folk art of the twentieth century.

I have been using the art of photography to research the ways in which the pictorial strategies of the Nineteenth Century color the way in which the American landscape is apprehended by today's viewers.

Photography, of course, is the perfect medium for the investigation. It can reveal the truth of present day specifics and particularities, while at the same time, by conscious choice of lighting and pictorial structure, suggest the aesthetic legacy of the past.

We don't have enough words for photography. Can you imagine writers having only one word for writing?

The fact is that the camera is literal if anything, which gives it something in common with a thermometer... Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture's true beauty. There is sleight of hand in photography... you make the viewer think he's seeing everything while at the same time you make him realize he's not. I try to make my pictures seem reasonable and then, at the last minute, pull the rug from beneath the viewer's feet, very gently so there's a little thrill.

To me, photography was a completely new medium, and I did not... feel the urge to transfer to it my ideas about painting.

Photography has always been a simple medium, compared to painting in oil or chipping at marble.

If you look at most photography, especially the pictures that grab you, they are not objective at all. Sometimes gut wrenching and sometimes lovely, but the moment someone decides to release the shutter, it is an editorial statement.

It's good to be around people who see [photography] as a reasonable enterprise when everyone in the neighborhood may think it's ridiculous. (On the benefit of teaching photography)

Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.

Photography has always been capable of manipulation. Even more subtle and more invidious is the fact that any time you put a frame to the world, it's an interpretation. I could get my camera and point it at two people and not point it at the homeless third person to the right of the frame, or not include the murder that's going on to the left of the frame. You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo. There's an infinite number of ways you can do this: photographs have always been authored.

Photography has always been capable of manipulation.

Then I thought, Whoa. If there are no photographs, then there is no history. I'm going to get in there. I'm going to make these pictures. We need a record.

Photography is a response that has to do with the momentary recognition of things. Suddenly you're alive. A minute later there was nothing there. I just watched it evaporate. You look one moment and there's everything, next moment it's gone. Photography is very philosophical.

It's really, really hard to make it as a fine-art photographer exclusively.

The transactions between me and the people that I photograph are very very collaborative.

I know the families that I photograph extremely well and have known them for a very long time.

Before, I'd photograph anything. I didn't think there was anything more or less obscene about any part of the body.

Photography mirrored the [nineteenth century] will towards rigor, towards defining details, the need for miniscule description, the long-distance optics, for technology at the service of truth, for concepts of credibility, of objectivity, the need to archive, for the consolidation of institutions like the museum, in short, towards a need to control memory.

There are religions in which the representation of the world is banned as an usurpation of the power of a God, creator of all things. It is very possible that photography is a trick of the devil and each shot is a sin.

Photography... has lived under the tyranny of its subject matter: the object has exercised an almost total domination.