John Pfahl Quotes

#1. 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 Pfahl

#2. People think the camera steals their soul. Places, I am convinced, are affected in the opposite direction. The more they are photographed (or drawn and painted) the more soul they seem to accumulate.

John Pfahl

#3. While making my picture window photographs, I came to think that every room was like a gigantic camera forever pointed at the same view.

John Pfahl

#4. As Estelle Jussim wrote, it is almost impossible for a single photograph to state both the problem and the solution.

John Pfahl

#5. It would have been possible to structure my photographs in such a way that no indicators of the present were discernible. However, I wanted to incorporate into the project as a whole the jostling of time-frames I would feel as I set up my tripod on various rocky promontories.

John Pfahl

#6. 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.

John Pfahl

#7. I often wondered why I was attracted to certain landscapes and not others and why my photographs (and depictions by other artists) looked the way they did, Archetypes imprinted on my mind started me on a search ...

John Pfahl

#8. 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.

John Pfahl

#9. I became wary of simple interpretations that assumed fixed and final meanings.

John Pfahl