Quotes About Reality

La foto del amante escondida en la billetera de una mujer casada, el cartel fotográfico de una estrella de rock fijado sobre la cama de una adolescente, el retrato de propaganda del político prendido a la solapa del votante, las instantáneas de los hijos del taxista en la visera: todos los usos talismánicos de las fotografías expresan una actitud sentimental e implícitamente mágica; son tentativas de alcanzar o apropiarse de otra realidad.

La cámara transforma a cualquiera en turista de la realidad de otras personas, y a la larga de la propia.

A câmera faz com que todos sejam turistas na realidade alheia e, eventualmente, na sua própria.

Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and an object of surveillance (for rulers).

To look at something which is "empty" is still to be looking, still to be seeing something—if only the ghosts of one's own expectations.

El acto fotográfico, un modo de certificar la experiencia, es también un modo de rechazarla: cuando se confina a la búsqueda de lo fotogénico, cuando se convierte la experiencia en una imagen, un recuerdo. El viaje se transforma en una estrategia para acumular fotos. La propia actividad fotográfica es tranquilizadora, y mitiga esa desorientación general que se suele agudizar con los viajes.

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.

Strictly speaking, nothing that's said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can't ever say it.)

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

La más antigua experiencia del arte tiene que haberlo percibido como encantamiento o magia; el arte era un instrumento del ritual (las pinturas de las cuevas de Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, La Pasiega, etcétera). La primera teoría del arte, la de los filósofos griegos, proponía que el arte era mímesis, imitación de la realidad.

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.

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

The flâneur is not attracted to the city's official realities but to its dark seamy corners, its neglected populations—an unofficial reality behind the façade of bourgeois life that the photographer "apprehends," as a detective apprehends a criminal.

The lover's photograph hidden in a married woman's wallet, the poster photograph of a rock star tacked up over an adolescent's bed, the campaign-button image of a politician's face pinned on a voter's coat, the snapshots of a cabdriver's children clipped to the visor--all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.

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

It is often asserted that "the West" has increasingly come to see war itself as a spectacle. Reports of the death of reality—like the death of reason, the death of the intellectual, the death of serious literature—seem to have been accepted without much reflection by many who are attempting to understand what feels wrong, or empty, or idiotically triumphant in contemporary politics and culture.

La percepción del mundo comienza como una sinécdoque — ver la parte por el todo. La estructura del verdadero aprendizaje consiste en hallar totalidades cada vez más verdaderas, s[in] perder la percepción concreta de las partes.)

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.

There's no changing the way people are. No one changes, everyone knows that.

photographs are a means of making "real" (or "more real") matters that the privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore.

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

What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged, and always disappointed.

The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: 'There is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.

It used to be thought, when the candid images were not common, that showing something that needed to be seen, bringing a painful reality closer, was bound to goad viewers to feel more. In a world in which photography is brilliantly at the service of consumerist manipulations, no effect of a photograph of a doleful scene can be taken for granted.