Photography Quotes - Page 56

Photography is a life of learning. That's all I want from photography. I don't want the money. I don't need the fame. I don't need the admiration. I'd like all of those things, but I don't need them. Because what I get from photographing is learning. I have spent my life learning by looking through a lens.

A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.

In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The 'anything whatever' then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.

I was a Catholic boy, I went to church every Sunday. A church has a certain magic and mystery for a child. It still shows in how I arrange things. It's always little altars.

With photography, you zero in; you put a lot of energy into short moments, and then you go on to the next thing.

There is still time - in the lee, in the quiet, in the extraordinary light.

I'm not interested into victim photography. Photographing people suffering and putting it on a museum wall is too weird.

I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.

To some extent, the cult surrounding black-and-white photography is based on nostalgia.

Photography to me is an addiction. I get jittery after a couple of days without a camera. Everyone who knows me says I'm happiest when I'm shooting.

Photography, to me, is the dewdrop that reflects my inner and outer worlds simultaneously.

Photography... unites the obvious and the unconscious at the level of the limimal - the border between what we see and what we suspect.

But, o, photography! as no art is,Faithful and disappointing! That recordsDull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,And will not censor blemishes,Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards

The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.

And if you can find out something about the laws of your own growth and vision as well as those of photography you may be able to relate the two, create an object that has a life of its own, which transcends craftsmanship. That is a long road, and because it must be your own road nobody can teach it to you or find it for you. There are no shortcuts, no rules.

Photography is not easy. You know it takes a painter or a sculpture or a musician years to perfect their technique. Then they're free to make an expression in a matter of moments. It takes moments for a photographer to perfect his technique. And then it takes years for him to make it into something that is truly creative and worthwhile.

There's nothing worse than a brilliant beginning.

Photography has arrived at the point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject. In any case, a certain aspect of the subject now belongs to the domain of photography. So shouldn't painters profit from their newly acquired liberty, and make use of it to do other things?

Reaching a 'creative' state of mind thru positive action is considered preferable to waiting for 'inspiration'.

I have a hunch that our obsession with photography arises from an unspoken pessimism; it is our nature to believe the good things will not last. . . But photos provide a false sense of security> like our flawed memory, they are guaranteed to fade. . . . We take photographs in order to remember, but it is in the nature of a photograph to forget (pg 157)

Photography was seen as the enemy of all the values of late modernism... and as things turned out, it was.

Is photography an art? There is no point in trying to find out if it is an art. Art is old-fashioned. We need something else.

It's all the same. It's the same face. We always look for an idea, for the same face, for the same position. There is no such thing as a European or an African photography. It's all the same thing.

The idea that the snapshot would be thought of as a cult or movement is very tiresome to me and, I'm sure, confusing to others. It's a swell word I've always liked. It probably came about because it describes a basic fact of photography. In a snap, or small portion of time, all that the camera can consume in breadth and bite and light is rendered in astonishing detail: all the leaves on a tree, as well as the tree itself and all its surroundings.

Sometimes just the facts of the matter make it interesting.