Quotes About Images

To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.

People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens - because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulation: that is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.

A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.

La necesidad de confirmar la realidad y dilatar la experiencia mediante fotografías es un consumismo estético al que hoy todos son adictos. Las sociedades industriales transforman a sus ciudadanos en yonquis a las imágenes; es la forma más irresistible de contaminación mental.

If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

Ordinary language fixes the difference between handmade images like Goya's and photographs by the convention that artists make drawings and paintings while photographers take photographs. But the photographic image, even to the extent that it is a trace (not a construction made out of disparate photographic traces), cannot be simply a transparency of something that happened. It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

A necessidade de comprovar a realidade e de engrandecer a experiência através das fotografias é uma forma de consumismo estético a que todos nos entregamos. As sociedades industriais transformam os seus cidadãos em viciados de imagens; trata-se da mais irresistível forma de poluição mental

The most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads - as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world.

Uma sociedade torna-se moderna quando uma das suas principais atividades é produzir e consumir imagens, quando as imagens, que influenciam extraordinariamente a determinação das nossas exigências para com a realidade e são elas mesmas um substituto cobiçado da experiência autêntica, passam a ser indispensáveis para a saúde da economia, para a estabilidade da política e para a procura da felicidade privada.

People can turn off not just because a steady diet of images of violence has made them indifferent but because they are afraid.

cada vez es menos factible reflexionar sobre nuestra experiencia siguiendo la distinción entre imágenes y cosas, entre copias y originales

our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence is being sapped by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images

Sufrir es una cosa; otra es convivir con las imágenes fotográficas del sufrimiento, que no necesariamente fortifican la conciencia ni la capacidad de compasión. También pueden corromperlas. Una vez que se han visto tales imágenes, se recorre la pendiente de ver más. Y más. Las imágenes pasman. Las imágenes anestesian.

This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads-as an anthology of images.

Compassion, stretched to its limits, is going numb. So runs the familiar diagnosis. But what is really being asked for here? That images of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week? More generally, that we work toward what I called for in On Photography: an ecology of images? There isn't going to be an ecology of images. No Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock. And the horrors themselves are not going to abate.

Nature is God's work, so I say nature motifs are just as spiritual, just as inspirational, as biblical images.

I've always been better at informing the audience through images than through words, but I took on a script that was so dialogue-intensive, that the words had to do all the informing.

The acceptance of the facts of African-American history and the African-American historian as a legitimate part of the academic community did not come easily. Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact.

As touch-screens have become more popular, they have retrained how we interact with images we see on many surfaces.

At first the ancient images of the Goddess did not interest me.

Power doesn't just exist. It is threaded through different mechanisms of control. I'm interested in those complexities. But I want to address that in very forthright language and sometimes with images.

If the chemistry is right between star and photographer and the geometry of the pictures pleases the star, often the two people end up with a long-term professional friendship during which they continue to work together and to produce highly personal images.