Quotes About Representation

To photograph people is to violate them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.

Image of an image of an image... But to record all the dips and upswings, in a sense falsifies them, and I start deluding myself and thinking all this is, or might be, real. Enough to play the game, or try to play it. A mistake to tally up the score.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.

To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

Una fotografía es a la vez una pseudopresencia y un signo de ausencia.

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.

I was thinking, Ursula said . . . that the difference between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can write, He's still alive. But in a painting or a photo you can't show 'still.' You can just show him being live.

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.

La historia de la fotografía podría recapitularse como la pugna entre dos imperativos diferentes: el embellecimiento, que proviene de las bellas artes, y la veracidad.

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.

A fotografia não se limita a reproduzir o real, recicla-o, o que constitui um processo-chave de uma sociedade moderna

La fotografía en un libro es, obviamente, la imagen de una imagen.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. - Susan Sontag

El contenido puede haber cambiado. Quizá sea ahora menos figurativo, menos lúcidamente realista. Pero aún se supone que una obra de arte es su contenido. O, como suele afirmarse hoy, que una obra de arte, por definición, dice algo («X dice que...», «X intenta decir que...», «Lo que X dijo...», etcétera, etcétera).

Cuando deciden la apariencia de una imagen, cuando prefieren una exposición a otra, los fotógrafos siempre imponen pautas a sus modelos. Aunque en un sentido la cámara en efecto captura la realidad, y no solo la interpreta, las fotografías son una interpretación del mundo tanto como las pinturas y los dibujos.

the reality has come to seem more and more what we are shown by camera

To the militant, identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions.

A portrait that declines to name its subject becomes complicit, if inadvertendy in the cult of celebrity that has fueled an insatiable appetite for the opposite sort of photograph: to grant only the famous their names demotes the rest to representative instances of their occupations, their ethnicities, their plights.

Eu estava pensando, Ursula disse a Quentin, que a diferença entre uma história e uma pintura ou uma fotografia é que numa história você pode escrever Ele continua vivo. Mas numa pintura ou numa foto não dá para representar esse continua. Você pode apenas mostrá-lo estando vivo. Ele continua vivo, Stephen disse.

The ballot is stronger than bullets.

There are four hundred and fifty films written by Black screenwriters/filmmakers every year. Sadly, of these, only three will ever see the light of day.

That is why historians surprise me. They seem to have no talent for the likeliness of any situation. They see history like a peepshow; with two-dimensional figures against a distant background.

Everything a gay man does makes a political statement. Everything matters: where you bank, where you shop, where you eat. When you hold your lover's hand in public