Quotes About Photography

Motherhood has most definitely changed me and my life. It's so crazy how drastic even the small details change - in such an amazing way. Even silly things, like the fact that all of my pictures on my cell phone used to be of me at photo shoots - conceited, I know! - but now every single picture on my phone is of Mason.

I try to keep my filters simple. I don't do anything major to my photos.

Alfred Eisenstaedt

No photographer is as good as the simplest camera.

There's something really appealing about the simplicity of black-and-white images.

It's true what the natives say. Every time someone takes your picture, the camera steals a little bit of your soul." "That explains Bette Davis.

two photographers who accompanied him, Sonny Miller and Jeff Hornbaker.

Did you bring your camera?" Gracie grabbed her trusty Polaroid from under her arm and held it out. Light from the streetlamp glinted off the narrow lens.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

to take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.

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.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs—especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past—are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature - tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.

Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing – which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.

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.

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

La sabiduría esencial de la imagen fotográfica afirma: «Ésa es la superficie. Ahora piensen —o más bien sientan, intuyan— qué hay más allá, cómo debe de ser la realidad si ésta es su apariencia».

Queremos que el fotógrafo sea un espía en la casa del amor y de la muerte y que los retratados no sean conscientes de la cámara, se encuentren con la guardia baja.

Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle.