Photography Language Quotes

#1. Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world.

Bruno Barbey

#2. In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.

Susan Sontag

#3. The ultimate role of photography as a contemporary language of visual communication consists of its capacity to slow down our fast and chaotic way of reading images.

Luigi Ghirri

#4. Photography is my only language.

Andre Kertesz

#5. Super 8 film is the language of silence.

Rebecca McNutt

#6. With photography a new language has been created. Now for the first time it is possible to express reality by reality. We can look at an impression as long as we wish, we can delve into it and, so to speak, renew past experiences at will.

Ernst Haas

#7. Photography was the first foreign language of my artistic expression.

Jerzy Kosinski

#8. Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

Susan Sontag

#9. Photography is and is not a language; language also is and is not a photography.

William J. Mitchell

#10. Even before I started photography, I began to see that there was a disjunction between available languages and reality.

Gilles Peress

#11. No language on earth speaks as comprehensively as photography, always providing that we follow the chemical and optic and physical path to demonstrable truth, and understand physiognomy.

August Sander

#12. The language that photography has is a formal language. Any photographer is doing something formal. If it's formal, then it must be an aesthetic way to communicate.

Sebastiao Salgado

#13. Photography speaks a universal language that does not need translation, and with an immediacy that the written word lacks. It freezes a moment in time, leaving an indelible image.

Bianca Jagger

#14. The relation of photography and language is a principal site of struggle for value and power in contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where images and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity.

William J. Mitchell

#15. Photography is a universal language, transcending the boundaries of race, politics, and nationality.

Arthur Rothstein

#16. Photography, like any other art, is a form of communication. The artist is not blowing bubbles for his own gratification, but is speaking a language, is telling somebody something.

William Mortensen

#17. If you take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of somebody who creates a new language in film by what he was able to accomplish with art direction, photography, lighting, etc., it is still a gold standard for science fiction.

Matthew Modine

#18. Photography is a language more universal than words.

Minor White

#19. Photography is light-writing, the language of images. Less abstract than written or spoken language, it selects images from the existing world of appearances and arranges them in patterns. The camera-eye doesn't think, it recognizes. It shows us what we already know, but don't know that we know.

David Levi Strauss

#20. The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.

Walker Evans

#21. Photography is a foreign language everyone thinks he speaks.

Philip-Lorca DiCorcia

#22. What the eye sees is a synthesis of who you are and all you have learned. This is what I would call the language of photography.

Graciela Iturbide

#23. I think photography is a universal language as far as storytelling goes, and I think that's what it's most successful at.

Mary Mattingly

#24. Photography has fooled the world. There's no more convincing fraud. Its images are nothing but the expression of the invisible man working behind the camera. They are not reality, they form part of the language of culture.

Edmundo Desnoes

#25. My work is my language and I don't discuss it very easily. It's difficult for me to verbalize my feelings, or to intellectualize my work. In fact, it used to annoy me when Ansel Adams and Paul Strand yak-yak-yakked about what photography meant, and I told them so.

Brett Weston

#26. I photograph from the heart. I adore little babies and I think that shows. My images are really very positive, very simple, and from the heart. Babies speak a universal language.

Anne Geddes

#27. Photography has clarity in the same way that language has. A word is precise, but its meaning can change based on the words around it: think tank, tank top.

Jason Fulford

#28. My passion is to open people's eyes to the sea using the power of photography as a universal language to convince the unconvinced among us that the oceans are fragile and finite.

David Doubilet

#29. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.

Roland Barthes

#30. One advantage of photography is that it's visual and can transcend language.

Lisa Kristine

#31. I'm not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic.

Sebastiao Salgado

#32. it was montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere animated photography, in short, creating a language.

Andre Bazin

#33. Photography is a medium, a language, through which I might come to experience directly, live more closely with, the interaction between myself and nature.

Paul Caponigro

#34. Right before 'American Dreams,' I started to pursue these avenues, like short films and getting into a couple night courses to really study photography and cinematography, and the language of visual storytelling.

Tom Verica

#35. Photography is full of symbolism, it's a symbolic language. You have to be able to materialize all your thoughts in one single image.

Sebastiao Salgado

#36. As the language or vocabulary of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted, shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.

Aaron Siskind

#37. I turned to photography because I thought it was the dominant language of our culture.

Sarah Charlesworth

#38. A landscape image cuts across all political and national boundaries, it transcends the constraints of language and culture.

Charlie Waite

#39. I'm very interested in the language of photography in relationship to painting.

Catherine Opie