Quotes About Photography

A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.

I believed we could know what was happening to us. We were not excluded from our own lives. That is not my head on someone else's body in the photograph that's introduced as evidence. I didn't believe that nations play-act on a grand scale. I lived in the real.

What was the barn like before it was photographed?' he said. 'What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can't answer these questions because we've read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now.

We travel into or away from our photographs.

There may be as many people taking pictures as there are brides and grooms. One of them for every one of us. Clickety-click. The thought makes the couples a little giddy. They feel that space is contagious. They are here but also there, already in albums and slide projectors, filling picture frames with their microcosmic bodies, the minikin selves they are trying to become.

Then on the opposite page a different ad, for digital cameras, scrawled in artsy letters and signed Joan Miró: You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life

Even reloading a camera became difficult—and dangerous," says Johnson. "Acetate film becomes brittle in cold weather, and the edges are razor-sharp. Try loading frozen film into a camera during a howling blizzard with ice and snow particles trying to blast their way into the camera!

I have never taken a picture for any other reason than that at that moment it made me happy to do so.

I don't photograph anything I don't like. I do the flowers, I don't do the weeds.

If I could do it, I'd do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement…. A piece of the body torn out by the root might be more to the point.

It's not that photography recaptures the world you have been in; more that it creates a new one: photographs are like Post-It Notes reminding us of the deep architectonic forms of space and thought.

She is bending over her child. She can't leave her. The child is laid out in state on a table. She wants to take one more photograph of the child, probably the last. In life, the child would never sit still for a photograph. She says to herself, "I'm going to get the camera," as if saying to the child, "Don't move.

First of all, why in this free country of ours has "free speech" turned into "anything goes"? Why isn't it necessary to obtain permission from a child's parents to have a photo of that child published in a magazine, never mind the cover? We are used to seeing the adorable faces of celebrity babies on the covers of magazines, to see Suri Cruise and Violet Affleck and Preston and Jayden splashed all over the newsstand, but do we ever stop to wonder how those photos were obtained?

No amount of photography could replace the memories of a life lived, of lives observed and known, of lives elaborated in the mind and on the page.

The eye records. The eye takes vivid, unforgettable pictures.

All the bright people, stopped in the midst of life, looking with forced smile into the lenses, then to be filed away, their colors fading as the years pass, caught there in slide trays, stack loads, view cubes, until one day the camera person dies and the grandchild says, "Mom, I don't know any of these people. Or where these were taken even. There are jillions of them here in this big box and more in the closet. What will I do with them anyway?" "Throw them out, dear.

I have always questioned everything: education, the obligation to memorize, authority. Perhaps that is why I have photographed everything.

I've never made any picture, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.

Photographing is an emotional thing, a graceful thing. Photography allows me to wander with a purpose.

What I am interested in now is the landscape. Pictures without people. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually there are no people in my pictures. It is so emotional.

I'm not an equipment nut. I tend to use whatever's at hand. I have several cameras, of course, but I'm not emotional about any of them

The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.

Most of my photos are grounded in people, I look for the unguarded moment, the essential soul peeking out, experience etched on a persons face.

Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience.