FAQ—Quotations.
Some photographic quotes.
I enjoy keeping the quotes I hear in my travels and referring back to them, here are some I have collected that I find both inspirational and thought provoking. Thanks to all who have contributed so far. Keep 'em coming!
“I am not especially interested in anonymous photography, or pictorialist photography, or avant-garde photography, or in straight, crooked or any other subspecific category of photography; I am interested in the entire, indivisible, hairy beast — because in the real world, where photographs are made, these subspecies, or races, interbreed shamelessly and continually.”
John Szarkwoski
“Anyone can take pictures. What’s difficult is thinking about them, organizing them, and trying to use them in some way so that some meaning can be constructed out of them. That’s really where the work of the artist begins”
Lewis Baltz
"The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck"
Paul Virilio
Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it. < br/> Bertolt Brecht
"The first question must always be: Who is using this photograph, and to what end?"
David Levi-Strauss
“Explore on flickr gives you a good idea of the misery that is modern base-level digital photography.”
_barb_
“ …it is almost impossible for a single photograph to state both the problem and the solution. I want to make photographs whose very ambiguity provokes thought, rather than cuts it off prematurely. I want to make pictures that work on a more mysterious level, that approach the truth by a more circuitous route”
John Pfhal
“ In modern thought (if not in fact) nothing is that doesn't act so that is beckoned wisdom which describes the scratch but not the itch”
Anon
“Nobody exclaims: “Isn't that ugly!” I must take a photograph of it. ”
Susan Sontag
“Q: How is surfing the World Wide Web any better for you than watching television?
A: Often it is no better, since it all depends on where you go on the Web. But that is the difference: the Web is not centralised, and it is not pushed at you like television. You can actively go onto the Web and choose what you read and view without being held hostage by TV advertising. Instead of sitting back passively and just watching, you have active control of the process. That, in my opinion, is a HUGE difference!”
Rich Geib
“...no-one photographs anything to forget”
Sy the photo guy
“...the road to hell is paved with overly ambitious projects”
Unknown
“The only way to understand something is to be confronted by something that is difficult to understand.”
“ The coherent way of investigating any field is to examine it's possible relatedness to other things. Everything is shared by everything else; there are no discontinuities.”
Frederick Sommer
“The vastest things are those we may not learn. We are not taught to die, nor to be born, Nor how to burn With love. How pitiful is our enforced return To those small things we are the masters of.”
Mervyn Peake
“Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.”
Tom Waits [contributed by M Murphy]
“A picture is not worth 10,000 words to someone who doesn't possess a similar point of reference.”
Kris O'Donnell
“Art does not expect - at least at the beginning - to be looked at for the sake of verification, or of recognition; rather, art solicits contemplation as an end by itself”
Eulålia Bosch Taken from the book, "The pleasure of beholding The visitors Museum" page 22, published by, ACTAR
“...got the sizzle not the steak...”
Tom Waits
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust
“ghostdance dammit”
[bird] leigh williams
“Almost makes me feel like breaking out the lilo”
Kevin from "Seachange"
“The photographic process looks after itself when its natural inheritance is honoured. It can not understand any other way of working. But when what is passed on represents a loss, the process collapses.”
Les Walkling
“Landscape is a labyrinth of walls and boundaries and openings, many of them temporary or invisible, but all of them determining our behaviour and relationships”
Joe Deal
“How is the world governed? By machinery or magic?”
Joel Barlow
“It is vain to dream of wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigour of nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess of concord i.e. than I import into it.”
Henry David Thoreau
“To the romance the novel is what photography is to painting. Its distinguishing principle, probability, corresponds to the literal actuality of the photograph and puts it distinctly into the category of reporting; whereas the free wing of the romancer enables him to mount to such altitudes of imagination as he may be fitted to attain; and the first three essentials of the literary art are imagination, imagination and imagination.”
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914),“The Devil's Dictionary”, 1911
“...we are all part of the same compost heap. We are all the same decaying matter.”
Tyler Derdon
“...art is images you carry. You cannot carry nature with you, but you carry images of nature. When you go out to make a picture you find you are moved by something which is in agreement with an image you already held within yourself”
Frederick Sommer
“The field of action of a photograph should be that chessboard of the heart and mind upon which poetry and art have always operated”
Frederick Sommer
“...can you remember when being disappointed came as a surprise?”
unknown
“The materials of art have always influenced the image”
Arnold Gassan
“Correct orientation to the self and one's materials holds the key to a greater creation”
Paul Capronigro
“...some say he's doin' the obituary Mambo”
Tom Waits
“...there ain't no devil only God when he's drunk”
Tom Waits
“...there is something crazy about a culture in which the value of beauty becomes controversial”
Peter Schjeldahl
“Seeing ourselves as other see us”
Dianne Arbus
“It was his absence in the present not his loss in the past”
unknown
“The structure of images is found in the arrangement of our minds”
Frederick Sommer
“Some speak of a return to nature, I wonder where they could have been?”
Frederick Sommer
“What moves people to take pictures is something beautiful”
Susan Sontag
“Don't change your life change your channel”
T.I.S.M
The infamous Henri Cartier-Bresson's most quoted quotes.
- Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.
- Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.
- The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera.
- While we’re working, we must be conscious of what we’re doing.
- We must avoid however, snapping away, shooting quickly and without thought, overloading ourselves with unnecessary images that clutter our memory and diminish the clarity of the whole.
- Of course it’s all luck.
- As far as I am concerned, taking photographs is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from other means of visual expression. It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one’s own originality. It is a way of life.
You just have to live and life will give you pictures. - During the work, you have to be sure that you haven’t left any holes, that you’ve captured everything, because afterwards it will be too late.
- Think about the photo before and after, never during. The secret is to take your time. You mustn’t go too fast. The subject must forget about you. Then, however, you must be very quick.
- Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important.
- What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm – the relationship between shapes and values.
- Photography is nothing–it’s life that interests me.
- it is seldom indeed that a composition which was poor when the picture was taken can be improved by reshaping it in the dark room.
Date Modified? 04.04.2020 9:32