Top 100 The Photograph Quotes
#1. There was no question about it- the girl in the photograph was staggeringly beautiful. She was Miss Canal Zone, a runner-up in the Miss Universe Contest
and in fact far more beautiful than the winner of the contests. Her beauty had frightened the judges.
Kurt Vonnegut
#2. I believed we could know what was happening to us. We were not excluded from our own lives. That is not my head on someone else's body in the photograph that's introduced as evidence. I didn't believe that nations play-act on a grand scale. I lived in the real.
Don DeLillo
#3. The photograph as an objective representation of reality simply does not exist. The photograph does not explain to you what is going on to the left or to the right or above or below the frame. Oftentimes, it doesn't even explain to you what is going on inside the frame.
Pedro Meyer
#4. The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.
Dorothea Lange
#5. Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good
Garry Winogrand
#6. When you look at nature, you see a hidden mystery that gives a special flavor to the photograph.
Abbas Kiarostami
#7. The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer's understanding of his subject and mastery of his process.
Edward Weston
#8. The photograph is kind of a proof - a proof that I actually met these people, that they actually have lives, and that they're worth considering.
Jim Goldberg
#9. The destination of the photograph is to reveal what something or somebody looked like, under a particular set of conditions, at a particular moment in time, and to transmit the results to others.
David Hurn
#10. A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks.
Richard Avedon
#11. The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#12. There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough - there has to be vision, and the two together can make a good photograph.
Robert Frank
#14. The photograph, now they are detached from their original surroundings, they are involved in a close world in which they only relate to each other: all the rest of 'reality' has vanished. This allows us to see those elements from a new point of view and perhaps to reach a better understanding ...
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#15. Photography is the most transparent of the art mediums devised or discovered by man. It is probably for this reason that it proves so difficult to make the photograph transcend its almost inevitable function as document and act as a work of art as well.
Clement Greenberg
#16. The photograph is a coarse fraud, and seems to delight only in taking the whole beauty out of the picture.
Henry Adams
#17. I feel it is the heart, not the eye, that should determine the content of the photograph. What the eye sees is its own. What the heart can perceive is a very different matter.
Gordon Parks
#18. In the blur of the photograph, time leaves its gleaming, snail-like track.
Wright Morris
#19. I see myself in [the] tradition of encounter and witness - a witness that sees the photograph as evidence.
Susan Meiselas
#20. It seems to me that before the photograph can exist as art it must, by its very nature choose whether it is to be a record or a testimony.
Yukio Mishima
#21. The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
Penelope Lively
#22. Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.
Matt Hardy
#23. The more story-appeal there is in the picture or in the photograph, the more people would look at your ad
David Ogilvy
#24. The magic possibility of framing a certain space and time is what brought me to photography. This process of recording elements of 3 dimensions in the flow of time, and fixing them in a 2 dimensional image, creates a new context for the elements of the photograph ...
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#25. [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
#26. The photograph that discovers and uncovers the world is harder to simulate than an image that simply illustrates one's ideas about it.
Fred Ritchin
#27. The point at which the photograph ceases to function as a metaphor is the point at which it is free to propose an experiential model.
Thomas Struth
#28. Making a definitive declaration of intent or meaning kills the photograph.
Daido Moriyama
#29. On the mantelpiece, the photograph of a chimpanzee and a statuette of the Buddha. This proximity, more accidental than intentional, makes me wonder over and over where my place might be between these two extrems, man's pre and transfiguration.
Cioran
#30. The photograph [of Che Guevara], for a civilization now accustomed to thinking in images, was not the description of a single event ... it was an argument.
Umberto Eco
#31. Taking the photograph is the easiest part for me
Duane Michals
#32. The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source.
Gerhard Richter
#33. Permanence can only be found in the immortality offered by the click of a camera. Like it or not, life moves on as fleetingly as the photograph is enduring.
Diane Keaton
#34. Those very same metadata are contained in millions of photographs posted to sale and auction sites such as Craigslist and eBay. For example, a photograph of a diamond ring or an iPad posted on Craigslist might have embedded with it the precise location of your home where the photograph was taken.
Marc Goodman
#35. It's never as good the second time. Things don't get better. You can't always go back, a lot of it has been erased. The photograph is a record of it having existed.
George A Tice
#36. This was the photograph, I knew, that had already burned its way into my dreams and my shadows, into that part of my mind that I have no control over. Its image would reappear in all its wanton cruelty for the rest of my life, particularly when I was least prepared for it.
Dennis Lehane
#37. The camera itself, the photograph itself, calls up death.
Nobuyoshi Araki
#38. I do not photograph for ulterior purposes. I photograph for the thing itself - for the photograph - without consideration of how it may be used.
Eliot Porter
#39. Some people ... cling to the idea that the photograph is an inherently real or honest image and as such is always on a different plane from an obviously subjective form of visual communication such as painting.
Tibor Kalman
#40. Remembered what Dai Bingguo had said to me when he pulled out the photograph of his granddaughter: "This is what we're in it for." It
Hillary Rodham Clinton
#41. You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.
Neil Postman
#42. They looked cheerful in the photograph, Lenin and his wife. As though they had a new refrigerator in their drawing room, and a down payment on a DDA flat.
Arundhati Roy
#43. The photograph is married to the eye,
Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth ...
Dylan Thomas
#44. [The photograph] is the object itself ... [It] shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.
Andre Bazin
#45. Everything is a subject. Every subject has a rhythm. To feel it is the raison detre. The photograph is a fixed moment of such a raison detre, which lives on in itself.
Andre Kertesz
#46. 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
#47. The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#48. The photograph isn't good enough. It's not real enough.
David Hockney
#49. A photographer must be aware of and concerned about the words that accompany a picture. These words should be considered as carefully as the lighting, exposure and composition of the photograph.
Arthur Rothstein
#50. The departure of our boys to foreign parts with the ever-present possibility that they might never return, taught the real value of photography to every father and mother. To many a mother the photograph of her boy in his country's uniform was the one never-failing consolation.
Louis Fabian Bachrach Jr.
#51. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
Roland Barthes
#52. When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer.
Julia Margaret Cameron
#53. I do believe in angels and I believe that a lot of these people I'm supposed to meet. The photograph serves as evidence; it causes me to reflect on when I met this person.
Jamel Shabazz
#54. [The photographs] were there simply to indicate a radical art that had already vanished. The photograph was necessary only as a residue for communication.
Dennis Oppenheim
#55. Mostly the subject of the photograph, which can be anyone really, coming down the street - someone that has no idea. "Heroism" in photography, just like in a novel, is for everyone.
Hedi Slimane
#56. Every photograph is the result of a physical imprint transferred by light reflections onto a sensitive surface. The photograph is thus a type of icon, or visual likeness, which bears an indexical relationship to its object.
Rosalind E. Krauss
#57. If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.
Beaumont Newhall
#58. Often I have struggled for days to get the image of the photograph to overlap the spirit I see. It is an awesome responsibility, and a lonely one.
Ruth Bernhard
#59. The photograph should be more interesting or more beautiful than what was photographed
Garry Winogrand
#60. Most people feel that the world looks like the photograph. I've always assumed that the photograph is nearly right, but that little bit by which it misses makes it miss by a mile. This is what I grope at.
Martin Gayford
#61. To extend the depth of what has been called 'art' into photography requires ... making available to the spectator the amazing transformations the subject undergoes to become the photograph.
Michael Snow
#62. I realize that as I get more experience as I get older, my perception changes and that feeds the photograph.
Stephen Shore
#63. When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.
Roland Barthes
#64. 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
#65. Photographs are still always depictions, it's just that for my generation the model for the photograph is probably not reality any more, but images we have of that reality.
Thomas Ruff
#66. The photograph, the clothes, the sets - this was about 1974, and I started hanging out with my friend Richard Sold, who was playing in a band with Patti Smith.
Stephen Sprouse
#67. The photograph ... is not a picture of something, but is an object about something.
Robert Heinecken
#68. As I was walking up the stairs to dad's old room, and I was looking at the photographs, I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories. That someone actually took the photograph, and the people in the photograph had just eaten lunch or something.
Stephen Chbosky
#69. When I saw the photograph I realized for the first time why the obituaries had so disturbed me.
I had allowed other people to think he was dead.
I had allowed him to be buried alive.
Joan Didion
#70. 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
#71. In a Cafe
I watched a man in a cafe fold a slice of bread as if he were folding a birth certificate or looking at the photograph of a dead lover.
Richard Brautigan
#72. What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
Roland Barthes
#73. The photograph fulfills my deep need to stop things from disappearing.
Dorothy Bohm
#74. The two sensibilities, the visual and the verbal, have always been linked for me - in fact, while reading a particularly evocative passage, I will imagine what the photograph I'd take of that scene would look like, even with burning and dodging notes. Maybe everyone does this.
Sally Mann
#75. It's not enough that [the photograph] is beautiful. If it doesn't move my heart, it won't move anyone else's heart.
Rinko Kawauchi
#76. Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.
Jacques Derrida
#77. The photograph contains and constrains within its own boundaries, excluding all else, a microcosmic analogue of the framing of space which is knowledge. As such it becomes a metaphor of power, having the ability to appropriate and decontextualize time and space and those who exist within it.
Elizabeth Edwards
#78. We know that photographs inform people. We also know that photographs move people. The photograph that does both is the one we want to see and make.
Sam Abell
#79. Enza studied the photograph of her parents on their wedding day as if it were a map. In a sense it was, as they were creating a destination, a life together.
Adriana Trigiani
#80. Her copy of the photograph had been lost, and Hildebranda's was almost invisible, but they could both recognize themselves through the mists of disenchantment: young and beautiful as they would never be again.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#81. The photograph is a tool used to take you back to a certain point in one's life, to remember a face or a place you once stood. I feel there is always something quite melancholic about a photograph.
Idris Khan
#82. The photograph of my brother that is in this album shows a young man, beautiful and perfect in the way of young people, for young people are always perfect and beautiful until they are not, until the moment they just are not.
Jamaica Kincaid
#83. I like to capture moments. It's like a photograph. Ten years from now you look at the photograph and you don't remember it but rather the whole week or month around the photo.
Keren Ann
#84. Content to me is very important, but I like it when [the photograph] is also enigmatic. If you don't know what it is you begin to speculate, and that is what I want.
John Gutmann
#85. Robert was concerned with how to make the photograph, and I with how to be the photograph.
Patti Smith
#86. Tobias took the photograph. At least, that's what I saw. Most likely I still had the photograph in my hand, but I couldn't feel it there, now I perceived Tobias holding it. It's strange, the way the mind can change perception.
Brandon Sanderson
#87. My work never directly addresses the literal subject matter of the photograph, but attempts to ask questions about vision itself.
Uta Barth
#88. It was as if my eyes were a camera and I was photographing the moment, knowing that I would keep the photograph forever.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#89. The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
Roland Barthes
#90. You want to make the photograph work in every way possible. Doesn't matter where it is in the world.
William Eggleston
#91. In the photograph by my bed my mother is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again.
Sue Monk Kidd
#92. Judging by the photograph it seemed like I hadn't been there at all. As if it was my camera that had been on holiday, and not me.
Ida Lokas
#93. I never look for a photograph. The photograph finds me and says, I'm here! and I say, Yes, I see you. I hear you.
Ruth Bernhard
#94. The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.
Susan Sontag
#95. The nineteenth-century way of looking at the photograph was as a mirror for the memory, and at that time the photographs almost looked like mirrors, with their polished metallic surfaces.
Peter C Bunnell
#96. 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
#97. The formal artistic gesture is already expressed in the act of taking the photograph.
Luigi Ghirri
#98. The photograph may be presented as finely and artistically as you will; but to merit serious consideration, must be directly connected with the world we live in.
Berenice Abbott
#99. We have faith in the photograph not only because it works on a physically descriptive level, but in a broader sense because it confirms our sense of omnipresence as well as the validity of the material world.
Fred Ritchin
#100. The photograph suggests that our image of reality is made up of images. It makes explicit the domination of mediation.
Andy Grundberg
