Quotes About Photography

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.

Fotografiar es esencialmente un acto de no intervención. La persona que interviene no puede registrar; la persona que registra no puede intervenir.

Images of the sufferings endured in war are so widely disseminated now that it is easy to forget how recently such images became what is expected from photographers of note.

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.

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.

From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had such an imperial scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratise all experiences by translating them into images.

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.

camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions

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.

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.

No sophisticated sense of what photography is or can be will ever weaken the satisfactions of a picture of an unexpected event seized in mid-action by an alert photographer.

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

Photographs had the advantage of uniting two contradictory features. Their credentials of objectivity were inbuilt. Yet they always had, necessarily, a point of view.

Hay algo depredador en la acción de hacer una foto. Fotografiar personas es violarlas, pues se las ve como jamás se ven a sí mismas, se las conoce como nunca pueden conocerse; transforma a las personas en objetos que pueden ser poseídos simbólicamente. Así como la cámara es una sublimación del arma, fotografiar a alguien es cometer un asesinato sublimado, un asesinato blando, digno de una época triste, atemorizada.

Photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.

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.

Whether the photograph is understood as a naïve object or the work of an experienced artificer, its meaning—and the viewer's response—depends on how the picture is identified or misidentified; that is, on words.

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time. —John Berger, English art critic

Photography captures a moment in time. Art captures time in a moment.

When I am having my picture taken, I channel Beyonce. In the studio, my inspiration is Adele.

We live in a difficult but inspiring world, and there is so much out there that I want to record.

I'm completely bathing suit-obsessed, and I love lurking on Instagram looking for the best bikinis.