Quotes About Photographs

Some days, I would find what seemed like entire family trees, torn from once-treasured albums and dumped in disorganized bins, selling 10 for a dollar. I wondered how people could give up pictures of their great-grandparents for complete strangers to paw through - or why complete strangers would want them.

Many of the critics today get airline tickets, hotel accommodation, bags, beautiful photographs, gifts and other expenses paid by the distributors, and then are supposed to write serious articles about the movie.

As ephemeral as our footprints were in the sand along the river, so also were those moments of childhood caught in the photographs. And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it, and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures telling our brief story, but what will last, beyond all of it, is the place.

Research material can turn up anywhere - in a dusty old letter in an archive, a journal or some old photographs you find in a charity shop.

Taking photographs is not something that happens only in a moment I press the button. It is a full-time occupation. For me there is difference between leisure and work.

How can my old photographs fail to create in me a feeling of emptiness and sorrow? They make me acutely aware that this second deprivation will be final this time.

I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.

The notion of time bothers me. You look at thirty-year-old photographs and realize how the time has passed.

But there were those photographs, and the world was full of Mrs. Grundy. He might have to back up a little bit on the incompetence of the Junior E, but Mrs. Grundy would be behind him a hundred per cent on the morals issue—when he released some of the photographs, and titillated her nasty imagination by reference to others too indecent to release.

Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.

She was not quite as arresting in photographs as she was in the flesh, for her beauty was sprung directly from her soul, and proved that physical features count little unless they are illumined from within.

There are photographs of both of us, taken at about the same time: I am eighteen, she is nearly forty. Today I could almost be her mother and the grandmother of that sad-eyed girl. I am so sorry for them – for me because I am so young and I understand nothing; for her because her future is closed and she has never understood anything.

Elmer Gantry never knew who set him thirty dimes, wrapped in a tract about holiness, nor why. But he found the sentiments in the tract useful in his sermon, and the thirty dimes he spent for lovely photographs of burlesque ladies.

Looking at old photographs inundates you with a flood of nostalgic emotions! And you can't be sure where you want to swim in the deluge of memories!

Our dead become the photographs and words we hang on the walls, but they also hang on the walls of our hearts, the windows of our lips, and the sobs in our voices.

I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it's such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her.

It was hard to define the expression he found in Lulu's photographs, an expression she must have had in life. It wasn't sadness, but rather the sullen expression of a little girl who keeps to herself in the school playground and watches her schoolmates play. He would have been hard put to explain in what way she had been attractive, but he sensed it and he had often, in spite of himself, questioned such girls more gently than others.

The photographs creates a discourse between us and the world, but a discourse that is never neutral, not even in - a photographs taken by a satellite or a surveillance camera. And even if the camera and the photographer were neutral, the viewer is not.

Everything rational and sensible abandons me when I try to throw out photographs. Time and time again, I hold one over a wastebasket, and then find it impossible to release my fingers and let the picture drop and disappear.

Yet all of his memories were fading like old photographs.

I look back at photographs and I remember at the time I thought I was not very attractive.

Much like photographs, I also love the idea that ghosts are memories frozen in time. We can be haunted by both just as horrifically. One really becomes a metaphor for the other.

For me, photographs take their power from memory and emotion. A picture tells its own story, shaped by the mood or insights of the person you are at the time you see it.

I have an abiding faith in the fact that time will change the value of photographs. What you see today may be so familiar to everyone that they don't immediately appreciate or value it.