Quotes About Photography

Richard Avedon is a true genius of photography and one of the greatest artists of our time.

For the first time in the history of photography, we can study the real-time production of snapshot making - globally! (On Flickr and other photosharing websites)

The thing about being a photographer that's so cool is that you get to participate, but you also get to disappear. The camera is in front of your face all the time.

It's more difficult now, to be a Geographic photographer, than it was when I came along. And it wasn't easy at that time.

[In the late 80's] that's the first time I heard about that astonishing idea [that most photographs would be taken on telephones]. And now I've been watching the tsunami of images.

I now want to be a photographer of my time, and our common culture.

Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.

I often say I've spent more time with photography than I have with literature just in terms of hours.

I am not going to be dictated to by the size of the camera. I use everything from an 8 x 10 to a 35-mm. But I don't use these modern cameras which break down all the time !

Time is so fast that all times are past times! When you look at a photo of the past, you must know that you are already in the album, someone else is looking at your photo! All times are past times!

Digital [photography] has sped up the process to a point that it's a bit self-destructive. It is like driving by a new neighborhood without stopping for a walk. Special discoveries need time.

The only time I went out was to go to bars at night and all the pictures were taken with a flash because there was no light at all. However now I'm very interested in light.

As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords.

Perhaps one reason Navidson became so enamoured with photography was the way it gave permanence to moments that were often so fleeting.

Being photographed was dead time for the soul. Can the head think, while it does the same half smile under the same light frown? If this was all true, then Richard's soul was in great shape. No one photographed him any more, not even his wife. When the photographs came back from an increasingly infrequent holiday. Richard was never there..an elbow or earlobe on the edge of the frame, on the edge of life and love..

Most people feel that the world looks like the photograph. I've always assumed that the photograph is nearly right, but that little bit by which it misses makes it miss by a mile. This is what I grope at.

You mean who do I like? Oh, Mary Ellen Mark. Diane Arbus." "Arbus?" He scratched his head. "Wasn't it she who said, 'Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize'?

Give me down. And give me the Polaroids of the fifty geese that had to die in the process.

There was something about seeing my daughter riding her little Radio Flyer tricycle for the first time that made me want to stuff her back in my womb and refuse to let her ever leave the safety of my body again—but not before filling an entire digital memory card with pictures.

Probably the hardest thing in the world for a man is the simple observation and acceptance of what is. Always we warp our pictures with what we hoped, expected, or were afraid of. In Russia we saw many things that did not agree with what we had expected, and for this reason it is very good to have photographs, because a camera has no preconceptions, it simply sets down what it sees.

It's like he would take a photograph of Sam, and the photograph would be beautiful. And he would think that the reason the photograph was beautiful was because of how he took it. If I took it, I would know that the only reason it's beautiful is because of Sam.

I think its bad when the most honest way a boy can look at a girl is through a camera.

Si escuchas la canción Asleep, y piensas en esos días en los que hace un clima precioso que te hace recordar cosas, y piensas en los ojos más hermosos que has visto jamás, y lloras, y esa persona te devuelve el abrazo, entonces creo que verás la fotografía.