Photographic Quotes

#1. The photographic image ... is a message without a code.

Roland Barthes

#2. [The child receives impressions like] a photographic exposure that can be developed after any interval of time and transformed into a picture.

Sigmund Freud

#3. Forgers can start with the same photographic images Warhol did, and sometimes knock off silkscreens only an expert can distinguish from the originals.

Michael Shnayerson

#4. If it were possible for any one person or group of persons to go through a photographic finishing plant's work at the end of a day, you could probably pull out the most extraordinary photographic exhibition we've ever seen. On almost any subject. The trouble is to find the things.

Edward Steichen

#5. Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance. Always, I am on the threshold.

W. Eugene Smith

#6. The question of naturalism is a fallacy, it does not exist ... The photographic image replaces naturalistic experience.

Sid Grossman

#7. Just because I use the photographic medium, that doesn't mean I'm a photographer.

Nikki S. Lee

#8. The particular features of the photographic method of detecting atomic particles enabled us to establish the existence of transient forms of matter which had escaped recognition by other methods.

Cecil Frank Powell

#9. Requiring valid, photographic identification is a common sense step to ensure voter integrity and sound elections.

Sonny Perdue

#10. Since the photographic medium has been digitized, a fixed definition of the term photography has become impossible.

Andreas Gursky

#11. In photography one should surely proceed from essence of the object and attempt to represent it with photographic terms alone.

Albert Renger-Patzsch

#12. (In response to a picture critic.)

I'm actually a very joyful person. But being a genius with a photographic memory mixed with a strong case of OCD makes for a difficult picture sometimes.

Calvin W. Allison

#13. I have about 1,000 hours of myself on tape in a vault in Los Angeles. But I also have a photographic memory about my jokes, because they're really about me; they're my stories.

Louie Anderson

#14. As we walked, I kept taking glances at her through the crowd, quick snapshots: a photographic series entitled Perfection Stands Still While Mortals Walk Past.

John Green

#15. We know that sensory phenomena are transcribed in the photographic emulsion in such a way that even if there is a causal link with the real phenomena, the graphic images can be considered as wholly arbitrary with respect to these phenomena.

Umberto Eco

#16. I would love to have a photographic memory. It would come in handy with the rants I'm given on Scrubs ... often on short notice!

John C. McGinley

#17. If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.

Gerhard Richter

#18. I would say that the emblematic photographic image is a picture from inside a room looking out. I think this defines photography. It's the metaphor for the notion of first sight. What one saw first.

Robert Polidori

#19. Nothing is ever the same twice because everything is always gone forever, and yet each moment has infinite photographic possibilities.

Michael Kenna

#20. She can't believe she is going to compose her first love letter. She can hardly bear the exposure as if her body is a photographic film spooling into sunlight and everything is too bright, too vulnerable, the moments in the film now lost for ever.

Tor Udall

#21. It's been an adventure just getting out to Saturn, .. Saturn is such an alluring photographic target. It's a joy, really, to be able to take our images and composite them in an artful way, which is one of my cardinal working goals. It's about poetry and beauty and science all mixed together.

Carolyn Porco

#22. Cinema, for me, has always been something like music composed with photographic images.

Roger Ebert

#23. An electron is no more (and no less) hypothetical than a star. Nowadays we count electrons one by one in a Geiger counter, as we count the stars one by one on a photographic plate.

Arthur Eddington

#24. I was making $50 a week as a house model at Christian Dior for nine months before I learned that photographic models made $50 an hour!

Lauren Hutton

#25. With all its technical sophistication, the photographic camera remains a coarse device compared to the human hand and brain.

Claude Levi-Strauss

#26. I do not object to retouching, dodging or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique.

Alfred Stieglitz

#27. I think that emotional content is an image's most important element, regardless of the photographic technique. Much of the work I see these days lacks the emotional impact to draw a reaction from viewers, or remain in their hearts.

Anne Geddes

#28. All of us have photographic memories, but spend a lifetime learning how to block off the things that are really in there.

Ray Bradbury

#29. Things have to be believable, not in a literal, photographic sense, but in an emotional sense - capturing the essence of the situation.

Michael Foreman

#30. I struck upon this kind of crazy idea that I was going to go to New York and stop 10,000 people on the streets and take their portrait and create kind of a photographic census of the city.

Brandon Stanton

#31. There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art.

Alfred Stieglitz

#32. The heart [of my work], the quintessential, remains the questioning of photographic truth. Be careful, be critical, doubt, and filter the information you receive.

Joan Fontcuberta

#33. I have this certain vision of the way I want my comics to look; this sort of photographic realism, but with a certain abstraction that comics can give. It's kind of a fine line.

Daniel Clowes

#34. One advantage of the discovery of the Photographic Art will be, that it will enable us to introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to faithfully copy from nature.

Henry Fox Talbot

#35. Photographic fantasy: more agile and faster in discoveries than murky subconscious processes!

Salvador Dali

#36. Before Max Black, the future seemed boring and there wasn't much to think about. After Max Black, it was like I was looking at a negative, a stack of photographic paper, a jar full of emulsion, a paintbrush, and trays full of chemistry. There was now so much to do.
So much to do.

A.S. King

#37. I live a lonely photographic life here in Santa Fe. I do see Eliot Porter occasionally, and Ansel storms through every so often, otherwise I plug along in my old fashioned way.

Laura Gilpin

#38. The fundamental peculiarity of the photographic medium; the physical objects themselves print their image by means of the optical and chemical action of light.

Rudolf Arnheim

#39. There is no photograph more inherently photographic than another.

Walead Beshty

#40. I am a passionate lover of the snapshot, because of all photographic images it comes closest to truth.

Lisette Model

#41. My trick - is there one? Well, perhaps a bitter youth with many changes of occupation, with the necessity of trying everything from poetry to berry picking. These difficult early years probably constitute the sources of my modest photographic activity.

Martin Munkacsi

#42. Photographic cropping is always experienced as a rupture in the continuous fabric of reality.

Rosalind E. Krauss

#43. I used to be a photographer - and now I'm some kind of digital photographic artist.

Chris Jordan

#44. With the willingness of Time-Life and a team of historians, forensic anthropologists, photographic experts, and cutting edge technology, the means are at hand to recognize the participants in Alfred Eisenstaedt's beloved photograph.

Lawrence Verria

#45. I was actually privately in the White House like invited by Clinton to screen Independence Day, so I know how the private residence looks. I didn't snap a picture, but I have a photographic memory and then I could take a guided tour in the West Wing.

Roland Emmerich

#46. With every (informative) photograph, the photographic program becomes poorer by one possibility while the photographic universe becomes richer by one realization.

Vilem Flusser

#47. In every successful still photographic project that I have completed, there has always been a turning point in the story where I felt that perhaps I was working on something that could be very special.

Mary Ellen Mark

#48. To see something spectacular and recognise it as a photographic possibility is not making a very big leap. But to see something ordinary, something you'd see every day, and recognize it as a photographic possibility - that is what I am interested in.

Stephen Shore

#49. I'm so personally attached to all the characters I met and photographed over the years ... the anthology is like a photographic reliquary that could potentially preserve their grace, fierce joy, and restlessness.

Hedi Slimane

#50. Put your manuscript down, I'd recommend at least two months. Six would be ideal. You really need to get away from it long enough to change your mindset. Unless you have a photographic memory, this technique will work. You'll transform into the one thing you crave feedback from: a reader.

A.J. Flowers

#51. The question at hand is the danger posed to truth by computer-manipulated photographic imagery. How do we approach this question in a period in which the veracity of even the straight, unmanipulated photograph has been under attack for a couple of decades.

Martha Rosler

#52. Photographing attractive people who were doing attractive things in attractive places. (Summary of his photographic career)

Slim Aarons

#53. I don't think I think when I play. I have a photographic memory for chords, and when I'm playing, the right chords appear in my mind like photographs long before I get to them.

Earl Hines

#54. Ansel [Adams] always jumped over the fence to photograph, walked past the garbage. He always looked to get an immaculate view, and I spent my life stepping back to include the garbage in my photographic view.

Rondal Partridge

#55. Let us ... leave art to the artists, and let us try to use the medium of photography to create photographs that can endure because of their photographic qualities.

Albert Renger-Patzsch

#56. While the aesthetics of consumption (photographic or otherwise) requires a heroicized myth of the artist, the exemplary practice of the player-off codes requires only an operator, a producer, a scriptor, or a pasticheur.

Abigail Solomon-Godeau

#57. In 1967 there was no place for photography in a contemporary art gallery. It was almost impossible to get an art dealer to look at, let alone exhibit, anything photographic.

Mel Bochner

#58. Our camera does not produce pretty pictures, but exact duplications that, through our renunciation of photographic effects, turn out to be relatively objective. The photo can optically replace its object to a certain degree. This takes on special meaning if the object cannot be preserved.

Bernd Becher

#59. Sometimes my work needs to be photographic, sometimes it needs words, sometimes it needs to have a relationship with music, sometimes it needs all three and become a video projection.

Carrie Mae Weems

#60. In most of my photographic pieces I have manipulated the quality of the evidence that people assign to photography, in order to subvert it, or to show that photography lies - that what it conveys is not reality but a set of cultural codes.

Christian Boltanski

#61. If done well, I believe the photographic representation of the human subject has the potential to be more revealing than what is revealed by the eye alone, since the human glance is usually a momentary one.

Dawoud Bey

#62. The ideal photographic document would appear to be without author or art.

Lewis Baltz

#63. When you start out, you're not really aware. I didn't have a sense of photographic history.

Herb Ritts

#64. Every adventure I've ever had with love and photography has ended in a similar misadventure. As is often the case, the rush of longing detaches from its object of desire, and my photographic ghosts lead me back to myself, alone.

Justine Kurland

#65. Every movie is different. Every movie requires its own sort of photographic voice.

David Ayer

#66. If I give someone a horsetail he will have no difficulty making a photographic enlargement of it - anyone can do that. But to observe it, to notice and discover its forms, is something that only a few are capable of.

Karl Blossfeldt

#67. I have a photographic memory; I just haven't developed it yet.

Jonathan Winters

#68. My life is really a history of observing forms and taking in imagery. I don't mean in a photographic way, I mean in a way of feeling them structurally,

Jim Dine

#69. I am convinced that any photographic attempt to show the complete man is nonsense. We can only show, as best we can, what the outer man reveals. The inner man is seldom revealed to anyone, sometimes not even the man himself.

Arnold Newman

#70. The photogram, or camera-less record of forms produced by light, which embodies the unique nature of the photographic process, is the real key to photography.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

#71. From as far back as I can remember, I was always insecure about my looks, whether it was my flat chest, my skinny legs, or how to cope with my body as it changed. With hindsight, I can see I was different. I was given a body that worked for photographic modelling and a photogenic face.

Twiggy

#72. The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste.

Susan Sontag

#73. Despite the limitations and problems inherent to photographic representation (and especially the representation of politics), it remains for me the most powerful and engaging medium today - one central to the development of cultural dialogue.

Richard Misrach

#74. In the absence of a subject with which you are passionately involved, and without the excitement that drives you to grasp it and exhaust it, you may take some beautiful pictures, but not a photographic oeuvre.

Brassai

#75. The majority of photographers still seek artistic effects, imitating other mediums of graphic expression. The result is a hybrid product that does not succeed in giving their work the most valuable characteristic it should have, - photographic quality.

Tina Modotti

#76. I am interested in the relationships and play between an unfamiliar picture/object context and the familiar photographic image.

Robert Heinecken

#77. I have a photographic memory.

Tom Holland

#78. A photographic portrait needs more collaboration between sitter and artist than a painted portrait.

Alvin Langdon Coburn

#79. The (photographic) negative is the equivalent of the composers score and the print is the equivalent of the conductors performance.

Ansel Adams

#80. When your bank account is so overdrawn that it is positively photographic, steps must be taken.

Dorothy Parker

#81. For the birth of something new, there has to be a happening. Newton saw an apple fall; James Watt watched a kettle boil; Rontgen fogged some photographic plates. And these people knew enough to translate ordinary happenings into something new ...

Alexander Fleming

#82. Any familiarity with photographic history shows that manipulation is integral to photography.

Martha Rosler

#83. The photographic frame is no longer used as a documentary window into undisturbed private lives, but as a stage on which the subjects consciously direct themselves to bring forward hidden information that is not normally displayed on the surface.

Arthur Tress

#84. Just like some people's instinct to photograph is triggered by vacation ... assignments might be that to me and that's why I've built my life around assignments. That was the way to live the photographic life.

Sam Abell

#85. Over the years a photo-mania developed. At times, photographic images have signaled a way forward and gotten me out of a bind.

Leon Golub

#86. I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are.

Georgia O'Keeffe

#87. When we are reading, a voice comes to us as in the dark and whispers, "Imagine!" Samuel Beckett
as told by Bill Moyer in the Foreword he wrote for, The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by Robert Dawson. Afterword by Ann Patchett

Samuel Beckett

#88. To see in a thousandth of a second what indifferent people come close to without noticing - that is the principle of photographic reportage. And in the thousandth of a second that follows, to take the photo of what one has seen - that is the practical side of reportage.

Martin Munkacsi

#89. How I wished I'd have had a camera of my own, a mad mental camera that could register pictorial shots, of the photographic artist himself prowling about for his ultimate shot - an epic in itself. (On the road with Robert Frank, 1958)

Jack Kerouac

#90. I use zero photography. I have a photographic memory and a complete knowledge of anatomy and physiology, and an interest in grasping the moment of what is happening, not just the outside, but the inside out.

Richard MacDonald

#91. If I go out with no make-up and a tracksuit on, nobody comes up to me. And if they do, I won't do a photo because I wouldn't want any photographic evidence.

Paloma Faith

#92. The painting of tomorrow will use the photographic eye as it has used the human eye.

Louis Aragon

#93. The day burned orange, like a photographic negative, and it would be a few days more before my eyes could adjust. It was like something out of science fiction.

Krystyna Chiger

#94. Over the past two decades, the boundary between photography and other media like painting, sculpture, or performance has become increasingly porous. It would seem that each medium has absorbed the other, leaving the photographic residing everywhere, but nowhere in particular.

Geoffrey Batchen

#95. We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus.

Sigmund Freud

#96. I'm never going to go to Mars, but I've helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

Ray Bradbury

#97. I come at a subject from a profoundly photographic level. I am not interested in pictures that ultimately don't work as pictures.

Michael Light

#98. Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

Susan Sontag

#99. He knows that I have a photographic memory ... and that I'm a hacker.

Stieg Larsson

#100. I was brought in, not in the photographic department at all, I was brought in on a thing called Special Skills. I was to do posters, pamphlets, murals, propaganda in general, you know.

Ben Shahn