Top 100 Quotes About A Photograph
#1. I don't believe that you can talk about a photograph being true or false. I don't think such a claim has any meaning.
Errol Morris
#2. That picture changed everything. I was not the same after I saw it and I couldn't go back to the man I'd been before seeing it either. Not after we met that night on the street. My whole world altered because of a photograph. A photograph of my beautiful American girl.
Raine Miller
#3. They looked happy, but, of course, that didn't say much. Everyone smiles for a photograph.
Marisha Pessl
#4. I have never seen a picture of my mother. My mother's family never owned a photograph of her, which tells you everything you need to know about where I'm from and what the world was like for the people who gave me life.
Marcus Samuelsson
#5. Photography allows you to be a part of the action and document stories. It is a perfect extension of my body. I can take it pretty much anywhere and tell a story with a photograph.
Chris Burkard
#6. I can't verbalize the internal meaning of pictures whatsoever. Some of my friends can at very mystical levels, but I prefer to say that, if I feel something strongly, I would make a photograph, that would be the equivalent of what I saw and felt.
Ansel Adams
#7. An eyewitness account is evidence that an artist has proposed a work of art. But documentary evidence (i.e. a photograph) is more conclusive.
Dieter Roth
#8. At the end of the day, it's only a photograph and if someone is going to get really upset about a photograph, then they have a lot of issues. I just roll with it and see what happens.
Rankin
#9. Sometimes you feel uncomfortable taking a photograph, but that's all part of the job.
Martin Parr
#10. Why can't a photograph be all four things at once? -be an art object; be a document, what ever that means exactly, but deal with content; be a formalist exploration; and operate on some, metaphor is not the right word but, resonant level..
Stephen Shore
#11. Kodachrome, it gives us those nice bright colors
Gives us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah!
I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph
So momma, don't take my Kodachrome away ...
Paul Simon
#12. It should be obvious why it's easier to copy someone else's painting, rather than work on site or even from a photograph. All the selection, rejection and design have already been done for you.
Ron Ranson
#13. 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
#14. Accurate drawing, accurate colour, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality in a mirror, if it could be caught, colour and all, would not be a picture at all, no more than a photograph.
Vincent Van Gogh
#15. The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.
Margaret Atwood
#16. It was the first time I had heard the truth of what happened that afternoon said in a voice that was not my own. Hearing what happened from Ann was like the difference between seeing your face in a mirror and seeing it in a photograph.
Scott Spencer
#17. The earth doesn't care where death occurs ... It's the artist, by coming in and writing about it or painting it or taking a photograph of it, that makes the earth powerful and creates death's memory. Because the land will not remember by itself, but the artist will.
Sally Mann
#18. I'm in love with the markets of the world. It's a photograph of a city, a culture.
Alain Ducasse
#19. It's harder to pick and choose when you're dead. It's like a photograph, you know. It doesn't matter as much.
Neil Gaiman
#20. Mostly, I worked so quickly, I didn't see the details of a photograph until it was printed.
Harold Feinstein
#21. I remember seeing a photograph of myself en pointe with my hand over my head and the other hand turned in under my breast curtseying. I took dance lessons at Miss Debbie's Dance Studio, and she put this picture of me in the storefront window. I was so unbelievably humiliated by the sight of myself.
Lisa Yuskavage
#22. The wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene [in a photograph] is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imagined plenitude.
Victor Burgin
#24. After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.
Ray Bradbury
#25. There was a time when photographers were thought to be socially secondary, and, hence, not dangerous. Lincoln was more important than Brady. It didn't occur to anyone to worry about the manner in which a photograph was taken.
George W. S. Trow
#26. There have to be at least two copies of a photograph, otherwise it's not a photograph.
Thomas Ruff
#27. A photograph is a click away. A good photograph is a hundred clicks away and a better one, a thousand clicks away
Kowtham Kumar K
#28. Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.
Susan Sontag
#29. To make a photograph is already the first artificial act.
Gerhard Richter
#30. It is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph.
Robert Frank
#31. At first glance a photograph can inform us. At second glance it can reach us.
Minor White
#32. A photograph to me is always a reminder of how the person was on a certain day in that certain light fixed. When I look at a watercolor of that same person, it seems to me alive, more open than a photograph.
Francesco Clemente
#33. Photography teaches us to see, and we can see whatever we wish. When I take a photograph, I make a wish. I was always looking for beauty.
George A Tice
#34. In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.
Tom Clancy
#35. You look at it [a photograph] and all around the real world is humming, buzzing and moving, and yet in this little frame there is stillness that looks like the world. That connection, that collision, that interfacing, is one of the most astonishing things we can experience.
Joel Meyerowitz
#36. It is the unexpected and the surprise quality of a personal vision, rather than the emotion, which make people respond to a photograph.
Alexey Brodovitch
#37. [Making movies] you're not trying to capture reality, you're trying to capture a photograph of reality.
Stanley Kubrick
#38. Some photographers take reality ... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.
Ansel Adams
#40. To the vast majority of people a photograph is an image of something within their direct experience: a more-or-less factual reality. It is difficult for them to realize that the photograph can be the source of experience, as well as the reflection of spiritual awareness of the world and of self.
Ansel Adams
#41. All of our media is made of language: our films, our music, our images, and of course our words. How different this is from analog production, where, if you were somehow able to peel back the emulsion from, say, a photograph, you wouldn't find a speck of language lurking below the surface.
Kenneth Goldsmith
#42. All alone - shorn of context, without captions - a photograph is neither true nor false ... For truth, properly considered, is about the relationship between language and the world, not about photographs and the world.
Errol Morris
#43. A photograph has picked up a fact of life, and that fact will live forever.
Raghu Rai
#44. I never took a photograph. Instead, I became a good listener.
Ruth Bernhard
#45. 'Changes in Latitudes' began when I was looking at a photograph of a sea turtle swimming underwater. I had such a strong feeling for the beauty of this ancient creature, at home in the sea. On the spot, I wanted to swim with that turtle. I began to imagine a character who would do just that.
Will Hobbs
#46. What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#47. Amber starts off as sap from a tree," Joseph said in the dark. "And sometimes insects get caught in it, and over millions of years the amber turns into a gemstone, but it traps the insect inside."
"Oh."
"A photograph is sort of like that, don't you think?
Brian Selznick
#48. You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.
Ansel Adams
#49. Life is a photograph too, so thank you,
for not removing yourself from the picture just yet.
Meggie Royer
#50. When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.
Richard Avedon
#51. My point is that meaning is always personal, changeable and subjective. There is no 'correct' interpretation of a photograph.
Bill Jay
#52. In a photograph a person's eyes tell much, sometimes they tell all.
Alfred Eisenstaedt
#53. I can see the character in a photograph, in the way a guy stands or holds his hands, the way he buckles his belt. I fantasize a lot looking at photographs. I'm sure that doesn't work for many people.
Richard Gere
#54. A word is a thought, of course. But any image, including a photograph, may become an instrument of sufficiently lucid cogitation.
Peter Schjeldahl
#55. Sometimes you think you know more than you really do - people, events, things that are true and things that are not. Sometimes you think you know yourself. But then, surprise, it is someone else who shows you what is really there, like the truth a photograph shows.
Patricia MacLachlan
#56. A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera 'saw' a piece of time and space.
Garry Winogrand
#57. When is a pilgrim like a photograph? When the blend of acids and sentiment is just right.
Anne Carson
#58. It comes down to risk, again and again. If you risk coming out, if you risk making pictures that aren't good, you might discover something in a photograph that is the key. The very doorway to your own interest.
Joel Meyerowitz
#59. Our conviction that we are free to choose what we make of a photograph hides the complicity to which we are recruited in the very act of looking.
Victor Burgin
#60. The person who looks at a photograph as a complete picture, unable to say anything about anything except the facts which existed at the moment of exposure, does not see very far.
Francis Meadow Sutcliffe
#61. To enter Europe, you must have a valid passport with a photograph of yourself in which you look like you are being booked on charges of soliciting sheep.
Dave Barry
#62. If you ask people to remember a painting and a photograph, their description of the photograph is far more accurate than that of the painting. Strangely enough, there is a physical element intertwined with the painting. It shakes loose an emotional element within the viewer.
Luc Tuymans
#63. To me a photograph is a page from life, and that being the case, it must be real.
Weegee
#64. With a painting, you're taking basic building blocks and making something that's more complex than what you started with. It is a synthetic process. A photograph does the opposite: It takes the world, and puts an order on it, simplifies it.
Stephen Shore
#65. Everybody feels like they need a photograph because we're in a generation where, if you don't document it, it didn't occur. So you've got to stop and take a picture with everybody.
Jesse Eisenberg
#66. [A photograph] should do something to the beholder; either give a more complete appreciation of beauty, or, if nothing else, even a good mental kick in the pants.
Paul Outerbridge
#67. A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.
Salman Rushdie
#68. Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph, is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk.
Edward Weston
#69. A photograph is just a tiny slice of a subject. A piece of them in a moment. It seems presumptuous to think you can get more than that.
Annie Leibovitz
#70. There is a big difference between The Merchant of Venice and a photograph of two males of different races in an erotic pose on a marble table top.
Jesse Helms
#71. On every door the management had placed a photograph of the person so they could find their room. As he went by he saw face after face of someone who used to be young.
Fannie Flagg
#72. A photograph is worth a thousand words, provided it is accompanied by only ten words.
Edward Steichen
#73. Memoir isn't the summary of a life; it's a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It's not; it's a deliberate construction.
William Zinsser
#74. The viewer must bring their own view to a photograph.
Fay Godwin
#75. I think most serious photographers understand that there's this large gap between the world and how the world looks through a photograph.
Stephen Shore
#76. I still dream of the day when I will take a photograph so beautiful that it can be called love.
Jan Saudek
#77. When I'm editing, it's such a tough call, and I get challenged on it all the time. You've got to go with your gut - sometimes when you look at a photograph, you just know it's the shot. Sometimes it's about the connection, or about the simplicity of the composition.
Russell James
#78. A photograph of poverty is not a photograph but it is a knife that sticks into the hearts of everyman who looks at it!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#79. Many cherish the idea that a photograph is an exact presentment of nature, and accept without question the paradox that a photograph cannot lie. Actually there never was a more unmitigated liar.
Walter J. Phillips
#80. What's the importance of a photograph if you know the writer's work? But people still want the image, don't they? The writer's face is the surface of the work. It's a clue to the mystery inside.
Don DeLillo
#81. Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took.
Rebecca McNutt
#82. A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
John Berger
#83. A photograph captures a magical moment for the future to ponder.
Debasish Mridha
#84. I admit that I am hopelessly hooked on the printed newspaper. I love turning the pages and the serendipity of stumbling across a piece of irresistible information or a photograph that I wasn't necessarily intending to read.
Jill Abramson
#85. If someone is nice enough to come up to you and tell you how much they enjoy your work, and all they want in return is to take a photograph and for you to chat for five minutes, then I am delighted to do that.
Daniel Portman
#86. In all my work there's this notion of the melancholic. You can make a photograph about the sublime, but you can't make the sublime itself.
John Divola
#87. There is a word we haven't used yet: virginity ... To make a photograph, the plate must be virgin, but your eye as well.
Edouard Boubat
#88. A photograph is not merely a substitute for a glance. It is a sharpened vision. It is the revelation of new and important facts.
Sid Grossman
#89. It scares me how hard it is to remember life before you. I can't even make the comparisons anymore, because my memories of that time have all the depth of a photograph. It seems foolish to play games of better and worse. It's simply a matter of is and is no longer.
David Levithan
#90. This is a photograph of me as I wish I looked all the time. Then I might have a chance of getting in Hollywood.
Anne Frank
#91. A photograph is not necessarily a lie, but it isn't the truth either. It's more like a fleeting, subjective impression.
John Berger
#92. He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.
David Nicholls
#94. A theory is no more like a fact than a photograph is like a person.
E.W. Howe
#95. Unlike a photograph, my girl faces are blurry. I want them to be blurry. I always make myself stop from putting them right, for what will it mean? Right for whom? By whose hands? The face of a girl should be blurry. Like she's running.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#96. Time's arrow is the loss of fidelity in compression. A sketch, not a photograph. A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original.
Ken Liu
#97. Thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards - never while actually taking a photograph.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#98. Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes known, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.
Fred Hoyle
#99. Find the most puzzling kind of art you can think of, and then go out and try to approximate it with your camera. Take a photograph that corresponds to it. (Assignment to students.)
John Baldessari
#100. The poignancy of a photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred
Allen Ginsberg
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