Quotes About Photography

Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife, by Walker Evans (version published in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men). From a print in a private collection, trimmed under Evans's direction and signed by him in 1971.

I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.'

A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory, Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit, she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors' homes, in galleries, on the walls of auction houses, and off the walls, in museum storage.

There's one Baldessari work I genuinely love and would like to own, maybe because of my Midwestern roots and love of driving alone. 'The backs of all the trucks passed while driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, California, Sunday, 20 January 1963' consists of a grid of 32 small color photographs depicting just what the title says.

As we made our way to the house, I could barely talk. I got Dad talking about the new car and his photography hobby and business, which he could talk about for hours. It was how I negotiated a lot of conversations with people at that time. I listened to every word, but only chimed in now and again to keep them going.

On deck, he encountered another young man, Thomas Sumner, of Atherton, England, who also had a camera. (Sumner bore no relation to Cunard's New York manager, Charles Sumner.) Both hoped to take photographs of the harbor. The day was cool and gray—"rather dull," as Sumner put it—and this caused the two to wonder what exposures to use. They fell to talking about photography.

It is true that in this time people set their faces hard for photographs, partly from custom, partly because of deficits in photographic technology, but this crowd might not have smiled for the better part of a century. The women seem suspended in a state somewhere between melancholy and fury and are surrounded by old men in strange beards that look as if someone had dabbed glue at random points on their faces, then hurled buckets of white hair in their direction.

the Kodak being a new kind of portable camera that eliminated the need for lens and shutter adjustments.

Anyone wishing to bring his own Kodak to the fair had to buy a permit for two dollars

He did get a lot of pictures like that. Or ones where women were mostly naked, but looked surprised by the fact.

And now this life that she had built again was coming to a term because he had not used iodine two weeks ago when a thorn had scratched his knee as they moved forward trying to photograph a herd of waterbuck standing, their heads up, peering while their nostrils searched the air, their ears spread wide to hear the first noise that would send them rushing into the bush.

There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.

We took 350 billion snaps in 2011 and an astonishing 1.5 trillion in 2013—more than all the photos ever taken before in all of history.

On one occasion she agreed to pose for photographs on the condition that she would then be left alone. Unfortunately during the photo session the light was behind her and made her cotton skirt seem see-through, revealing her legs to the world. "I knew your legs were good but I didn't realize they were that spectacular," Prince Charles is reported to have commented. "And did you really have to show them to everybody?

Próbuj? wyobrazi? sobie ?wiat przed fotografi? i nie potrafi?. Prawdopodobnie w ogóle nie istnia?, nieustannie przepada?,poch?oni?ty przez ruchliwe, nienasycone zmys?y, nic z niego nie zostawa?o.

My idea of a good picture is one that's in focus and of a famous person.

It must be hard to be a model, because you'd want to be like the photograph of you, and you can't ever look that way.

A picture means I know where I was every minute. That's why I take pictures. It's a visual diary.

She'd managed photographers who could make grown men cry, but Mrs Henry made her feel like a nervy six-year-old.

I had done some work when I was starting in with photography on westerns, and photographing them was the greatest pleasure I had. If I was ever qualified for anything, it would have had to do with making westerns. But as I started working on pictures with people like Katharine Hepburn, I got further away from the thing I really liked to do.

My main camera is a Nikon D3. I use a French camera from the 1800s for wet plate photography, I use a Hasselblad sometimes. But to me the camera really doesn't matter that much. I don't have a preference for film or digital.

I have no animus toward digital, though I still pretty much take everything on a silver-based negative, either a wet plate or just regular silver 8x10. But I've started messing a little bit with scanning the negative and then reworking it just slightly.

Most whale photos you see show whales in this beautiful blue water - it's almost like space.

I typically shoot underwater with my regular camera in an underwater housing, and then I usually have two big strobes that I use to light. But with whales, you're not going to be able to really light a 45-foot subject. Your strobes are only effective for maybe five or six feet underwater.