Photography Quotes

So-called "realist" photography does not capture the "what is." Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.

Jean Baudrillard

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

Duane Michals

I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.

Pablo Picasso

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world

Arnold Newman

Basketball is like photography, if you don’t focus, all you have is the negative.

Dan Frisby

Basketball is like photography, if you don't focus, all you have is the negative.

Dan Frisby

Photography through the camera is an instrument of detection. We photograph not only what we know, but also what we don't know.

Lisette Model

I love the medium of photography, for with its unique realism it gives me the power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say, This is real, too.

Wynn Bullock

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.

David Bailey

When photography was invented it was thought to be an equivalent to truth, it was truth with a capital "T".

Vicki Goldberg

Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications,offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.

Ansel Adams

Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens

Karl Heiner

There is no art which affords less opportunity to execute expression than photography. Everything is concentrated in a few seconds, when after perhaps an hours seeking, waiting, and hesitation, the photographer sees the realization of his inward vision, and in that moment he has one advantage over most arts - his medium is swift enough to record his momentary inspiration

Sadakichi Hartmann

Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a pene- trating statement, which can be described in a very simple term - selectivity.

Berenice Abbott

Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.

John Szarkowski
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