Quotes About Art And Photography

#1. Then I moved down to the Bowery to this building where Debbie Harry lived. It was there that I started combining some clothes for her and continued doing the art and photography.

Stephen Sprouse

#2. I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.

Walker Evans

#3. I was so impressed with the work we were doing and I was very involved ideologically in photography - that I arranged an exhibition at the College Art Association. The first exhibition I picked the photographs and so on and we had an exhibition in New York.

Ben Shahn

#4. To my father, art had no restrictions. He was a true 'American Primitive.' He greatly enjoyed sketching and photography, carrying a camera with him whenever he could,

John Carter Cash

#5. At Columbia there's no performing arts department, so I was searching for it everywhere I could, and I took some photography classes and I ended up becoming fascinated with Eastern Religion, and ultimately it seemed to encompass the more abstract mind that I have.

Jake Gyllenhaal

#6. I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)

Auguste Rodin

#7. Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste, and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt.

Walker Evans

#8. I think it's all absolute nonsense how people talk about photography as being an art. It's a very menial career that you do if you draw badly. Now they teach it at the Royal College of Art and get grand about it. It's the only course there that I don't understand.

Antony Armstrong-Jones

#9. Twentieth-century art has allowed me to see things in a cryptic way. I love the butterfly's wings, which disappear when folded and when open leave this brilliant, intense pronouncement of nature, 'Here I am.'

Emmet Gowin

#10. I would like to do all kinds of things: photography and art and designing; I want to help do charity things for animals and things like that.

Georgia May Jagger

#11. As sounds in a musical composition can be used not to express physical objects but ideas, emotions, harmonies, rhythmic orders and most any expression of the human mind and spirit, so light can be used visually to express the mind and spirit.

Wynn Bullock

#12. We are all photographers, that's how we remember things; with pictures in our minds. Some of us have good taste and passion to make it an art form and just a few warriors who know the technicalities and marketing make a living out of it.

Ben Tolosa

#13. I was always interested in photography and other forms of art.

Mikhail Baryshnikov

#14. My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty.

Julia Margaret Cameron

#15. That celebrated marriage of science and art, photography, seemed at the time to join together how we look at the world, art, with how we were coming to know it, science.

Joseph Kosuth

#16. All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.

Ansel Adams

#17. Only in art can you make something that no one wants and still be considered successful.

Bill Jay

#18. The video camera dominates art. It's a bore, it makes everything look a bit the same. If you look at things with a pencil and paper in your hand, you are going to see far more.

David Hockney

#19. I cannot draw to save my life, and I'm not a big art scholar, but I worked with many designers throughout my career - in theater, in dance, costume designers, set designers, and I have a lot of artist friends and I do photography, and I think it's kind of in my life.

Mikhail Baryshnikov

#20. Only in black and white can I see the design and textures. I don't consider color photography art. Black and white is an interpretation. Color is a duplication.

Clyde Butcher

#21. Your most important gear is your eye, heart and soul.

Marius Vieth

#22. The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.

Susan Sontag

#23. Photography is the art of anticipation, not working with memories, but showing their formation. As such, it has relentlessly usurped imaginative and critical prerogatives of older, slower literature and handmade visual art.

Peter Schjeldahl

#24. No one can really explain in a rational way what makes a good photograph or a bad photograph ... This is why the art world will not throw billions of dollars at photography the way it has at painting; and that is what makes it an exciting medium.

David Wojnarowicz

#25. A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.

Ansel Adams

#26. I'm afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through magazines and through slides and I think this is dreadful, this is anti-art because art is direct experience with something in the world and photography is just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art.

Carl Andre

#27. I have found my way, step by step, proceeding from touch points that have emerged, some through conscious choice and some through dream state discovery.

Leonard Nimoy

#28. My programme, The Art of Creative Expression, empowers young people with tools to express themselves. We teach photography, art and drama, but it's not just the medium that's important, it's about what you are trying to say.

Dawud Wharnsby Ali

#29. Photography is a magical kind of art that allows people to preserve time and moments, and to describe the world the way they see it.

Sahara Sanders

#30. Prayer Against the Darkness
Shekhina
Pray for us now
bound with scripture
and shielded with shawl
Armed with passion
and loving care
Pray for us now
against suffering, turmoil, and injustice
Pray for us now
against the chaos of the dark.

Leonard Nimoy

#31. Photography is a bridge between science and art. It brings to science what it needs most, the artistic sense, and to art the proof that nothing can be imagined which cannot be matched in the counterpoints of nature.

Ernst Haas

#32. Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers, however, have not understood 'information.' What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.

Vilem Flusser

#33. Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art.

Berenice Abbott

#34. I assumed from the outset that photography was already art, and that I and other people working in photography were artists. I understand now that this was a minority point of view.

Lewis Baltz

#35. Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me.

William Eggleston

#36. I began drawing as a very young child and had a grandfather who experimented with photography, so those things constituted my first exposure to art.

Sigmar Polke

#37. We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer.

Criss Jami

#38. 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

#39. I want to take some quite incredible photographs that have never been taken before ... pictures which are simple and complex at the same time, which will amaze and overwhelm people ... I must achieve this so that photography can begin to be considered a form of art.

Alexander Rodchenko

#40. The observer must learn to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of objects.

Wassily Kandinsky

#41. There is more in art, with an apology to that much abused word, as applied to photography, than startling display lines, on mounts and signs announcing artist Photographer, Artistic Photography Studio, etc., and the lower the standard the more frantic the claim ...

Gertrude Kasebier

#42. I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography - that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms.

Joel Meyerowitz

#43. I enjoy fashion photography and textiles, that whole aspect of it. As more of an art form, I like Proenza Schouler. Those guys are really cool because they seem to have an interesting approach to it all.

Gia Coppola

#44. The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

Edward Steichen

#45. My greatest aim has been to advance the art of photography and to make it what I think I have, a great and truthful medium of history.

Mathew Brady

#46. God creates the beauty. My camera and I are a witness.

Mark Denman

#47. Before the people at large, and for that matter, the artists themselves, understand what photography really means, as I understand that term, it is essential for them to be taught the real meaning of art.

Alfred Stieglitz

#48. For me, pointing and clicking my phone is absolutely fine. People say that isn't the art of photography but I don't agree.

Annie Lennox

#49. I went to university in Colorado and studied art history. I did some photography classes there, although it felt really pretentious.

Pamela Hanson

#50. What is important is that our optical awareness rids itself of classical notions of beauty and opens itself more and more to the beauty of the instant and of these surprising points of view that appear for a brief moment and never return; those are what make photography an art.

Raoul Hausmann

#51. Art does not in fact prove anything. What it does do is record one of those brief times, such as we each have and then each forget, when we are allowed to understand that the Creation is whole.

Robert Adams

#52. I was born in the '60s and grew up in the '70s - not exactly the best decade for food in British history. It was horrendous. It was a time when, as a nation, we excelled in art and music and acting and photography and fashion - all creative skills ... all apart from cooking.

Heston Blumenthal

#53. Art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#54. Then in college, besides economics, I also majored in studio art and got involved in photography and making short films and acting. But I didn't know you could make a living that way.

Brit Marling

#55. Unlike the photography and prints, I never catalogued, kept track of or exhibited the sketches. I sold some occasionally, but never saw myself as a graphic artist. They became more important to me thanks to the exhibition, however, and I realized that these drawings were quite interesting after all.

Gerhard Richter

#56. But O, Photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing!

Philip Larkin

#57. The discussion about whether photography is or isn't art is dated and of no interest. Your work makes you an artist, not your title.

Peter Lindbergh

#58. What's so incredibly amusing with photography is that while seemingly an art of the surface, it catches things I haven't even noticed. And it pains me not to have seen things in all their depth.

Jacques-Henri Lartigue

#59. Is photography art? ... The pure definition of the word 'art' alone is too vague today to break one's brain and soul about it. Let us take a little vacation from this word.

Ernst Haas

#60. Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

Susan Sontag

#61. Photography is the dominant and fascinating and only folk art of the twentieth century.

John Rothenstein

#62. Contemporary art photography is paradoxical. Anyone can look at it and form an opinion about what they see. Yet it usually represents aesthetic and theoretical positions that only a small minority of well-informed viewers can access.

Lucy Soutter

#63. She believed photography to be the greatest of all art forms because it was simultaneously junk food and gourmet cuisine, because you could snap dozens of pictures in a couple of hours, then spend dozens of hours perfecting just a couple of them.

Tommy Wallach

#64. ( ... ) photography opened up quite a little Pandora's box, kiddies. ( ... ) Once we no longer had to depend on drawing and painting to record our existence - once they became an option - they mutated ... into a form of expression. And Art for its own sake, God help us, was born.

Chip Kidd

#65. I take pleasure in working with the non-art photographs that reside in public archives, essentially authorless and owned by the world itself, because I find the world of fine art photography to be pretty silly and pretentious.

Michael Light

#66. It is my hope that photography may fall in line with all the other arts and with her infinite possibilities, do things strange and more fascinating than the most fantastic dreams.

Alvin Langdon Coburn

#67. The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial ... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art.

Clement Greenberg

#68. I like to work in the real world, so I do a lot of searching or just simple looking. But I'm not above tweaking reality and making something up. I don't think there are any rules in art. It's not so much what you see as it is the significance you, the artist, see in it.

Keith Carter

#69. I myself happen to find, on the basis of experience and nothing else, that photography can be a high art.

Clement Greenberg

#70. We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see.

Michelangelo Antonioni

#71. I was an artistic dilettante for a while, in photography and collage and the visual arts.

Thomas F. Wilson

#72. As an allegorical art, then, photography would represent our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable and stabilizing image.

Craig Owens

#73. The art of news photography is creating compelling, graphic compositions that communicate environment and emotion. Strung together, they take the viewer on a progression of discovery until the mystery is revealed.

Rich Underwood

#74. [Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008] helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art - not to mention between art and life.

Michael Kimmelman

#75. I am interested in computers and technology, and art, photography, and design.

William Landay

#76. I took courses at USC in film editing and art direction and photography when I was still in high school.

Ray Harryhausen

#77. I've spent most of my life embracing violence in wars and revolutions. Even a famine is a form of violence. Because I photograph people in peril, people in pain, people being executed in front of me, I find it very difficult to get my head around the art narrative of photography.

Don McCullin

#78. If the photographer isn't going to pay attention to the picture he is making, that if he thinks the camera is just a machine and not an avenue of expression, then he has no business asking anyone for anything, let alone their time and interest. Don't show the world, he said, invent the world.

Whitney Otto

#79. I don't like how women's bodies are Page 3 news. I just don't think that's big news. Women's bodies are women's bodies, and that's that. And I love to see beautiful - the female form in great art and great photography.

Eliza Doolittle

#80. Many people misunderstand me - I'm quite happy to be called a photographer. All of a sudden, the art world has caught up with photography, and they are trying to hijack us.

Don McCullin

#81. How aware were photographers in the past of other visual arts? "No photographer of any distinction at all could approach his work without some awareness of what was going on in other visual media, and for that matter neither the painter nor the draughtsman could ignore photography."

Aaron Scharf

#82. Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us.

Paul Gauguin

#83. The art is the challenge which you must meet every day: the technique you should learn to control with time. The science and the art of photography are really one, and not opposed to each other.

Yousuf Karsh

#84. Some photographers could vomit on a piece of paper and call it art, you know ... Hang it in the Guggenheim, or whatever. Sell a print for two hundred pounds? But I can't do that. I just
Maybe I have too much respect for walls ... or something.

Pansy Schneider-Horst

#85. After I left school, where I studied art, photography and textiles at A-level, I started doing an apprenticeship in interior design, but I wasn't really enjoying it very much, so I decided to do something creative, and in 2009, I began blogging.

Zoe Sugg

#86. Originally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts it is the most democratic, in so far as it's instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth.

Gregory Crewdson

#87. What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

John Berger

#88. Outstanding past work in photography, and in fact in all the arts, is very important to today's photographers. But it should be used for inspiration and not for imitation. These works should be something to be built upon, not to be repeated.

Alexey Brodovitch

#89. I love being photographed, or I should say I love the art of photography. It's about people taking photographs of you, stealing them, and then presuming or assuming or captioning. Words can never be taken back, photographs can never be taken back, nothing can ever be taken back.

Madonna Ciccone

#90. Photography has all the rights, and all the merits,
necessary for us to turn towards it as the art of our time.

Alexander Rodchenko

#91. I had a growing feeling that most of the best art of the world in painting and sculpture had been done, and that this newest form [photography] was more related to the progress and tempo of modern science of the eye.

Paul Outerbridge

#92. But now the train had finally begun to move, and Albie had switched the fearless truth-telling eye of his camera lens from his untied laces to the walls of the tunnels under east London, because you can never have enough pictures of dirty concrete.

David Nicholls

#93. 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

#94. The painters have no copyright on modern art! ... I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be - compared to painting - it has different means and aims.

Edward Weston

#95. When painting portraits a lot of people say, 'Why not get a photograph of the person?' Photography is wonderful and it is an art form in itself, but ... my portrait is a culmination of elements ... a truer image of a person than just the 'click' of a snapshot.

Jamie Wyeth

#96. I love photography, and I love the art of photography.

Helen Mirren

#97. Photography is an art of observation - it's about creating something extraordinary out of the ordinary. You choose a frame and then wait until the right time for something magical to come along and fill it.

Elliott Erwitt

#98. I've always thought photography is not so much of an art form but a way of communicating and passing on information.

Don McCullin

#99. You only do exercises in art school. That's not the real thing. A little bit tells you so much. You have to find your own self. And you don't know what you are! But that's what you have to search for.

Harry Callahan

#100. We've lost these qualities, these abilities to do something by hand. Some illustrators have it still, but it's just not art. We have photography. We have cameras and computers that do it better and faster.

Gerhard Richter