Tod Papageorge Quotes

#1. I profoundly believe in - and teach - the proposition that photography is inherently a fiction-making process. Don't speak to me of the document; I don't really believe in it particularly now. A picture is not the world, but a new thing.

Tod Papageorge

#2. By being fictions and, at the same moment, returning their subjects to us with a compelling fidelity, both photographs and poems work with the same surprise ... both strike us as if they were simultaneously remembrances and revelations.

Tod Papageorge

#3. Cameras are like dogs, but dumb, and toward quarry, even more faithful. They point, they render, and defy the photographer who hopes.

Tod Papageorge

#4. I believe that the (distorting) mirror which is photography holds an intrinsic, even elemental, relation to writing.

Tod Papageorge

#5. If you accept the idea that photographers, or some of them, are actually artists, then you have to look at their work less as a document of something than as a personal vision of the world.

Tod Papageorge

#6. It's unarguable to say that every one of us has been moved by the beauty of what I have called snapshots, but for photographers they are charms and proverbs, and like lightening or wild strawberries ...

Tod Papageorge

#7. My argument against the set-up picture is that it leaves the matter of content to the imagination of the photographer, a faculty that, in my experience, is generally deficient compared to the mad swirling possibilities that our dear common world kicks up at us on a regular basis.

Tod Papageorge

#8. [The photograph] is fabricated out of the unfabricated dross of passing life (while paradoxically still trading on the indexical heft of that dross).

Tod Papageorge