” Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything. ”

Siskind, Aaron

A
” A photograph is a portrait painted by the sun ”

Anonymous
” As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs. ”

Abell, Sam
” Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past. ”

Abbott, Berenice
” I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term -- meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching -- there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster. ”

Adams, Ansel
” Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art. ”

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

Adams, Ansel
” Some photographers take reality...and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation. ”

Adams, Ansel
” Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment. ”

Adams, Ansel
” There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs. ”

Adams, Ansel
” ...today ...photographers prefer disfigurement to adornment. It is now chic to do your worst to people. ”

Anderson, Margaret
” Modern photographers can reduce bones to formlessness, and change a face of the most strange, exquisite and unfathomable beauty into the face of a clubwoman. ”

Anderson, Margaret
” A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. ”

Arbus, Diane
” If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid. ”

Arbus, Diane
” I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse. ”

Arbus, Diane
” A pleasant smell of frying sausages Attacks the sense, along with an old, mostly invisible Photograph of what seems to be girls lounging around An old fighter bomber, circa 1942 vintage. ”

Ashbery, John
” The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking. ”

Atkinson, Brooks
B
” 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. ”

Bailey, David
” The photographic image... is a message without a code. ”

Barthes, Roland
” If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature. ”

Baudelaire, Charles
” Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption. ”

Bazin, André
” Too many photographers try too hard. They try to lift photography into the realm of Art, because they have an inferiority complex about their Craft. You and I would see more interesting photography if they would stop worrying, and instead, apply horse-sense to the problem of recording the look and feel of their own era. ”

Beals, Jessie Tarbox
” The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. ”

Benjamin, Walter
” Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure. ”

Benn, Tony
” All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this -- as in other ways -- they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it. ”

Berger, John
” The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget. ”

Berger, John
” Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does. ”

Berger, John
” Human visual perception is a far more complex and selective process than that by which a film records. Nevertheless the camera lens and the eye both register images—because of their sensitivity to light—at great speed and in the face of an immediate event. What the camera does, however, and what the eye in itself can never do is to fix the appearance of that event. It removes its appearance from the flow of appearances and it preserves it, not perhaps forever but for as long as the film exists. The essential character of this preservation is not dependent upon the image being static; unedited film rushes preserve in essentially the same way. The camera saves a set of appearances from the otherwise inevitable supercession of further appearances. It holds them unchanging. And before the invention of the camera nothing could do this, except, in the mind’s eye, the faculty of memory. ”

Berger, John
” The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic. ”

Bogarde, Dirk
” The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera -- and himself. ”

Boorstin, Daniel J.
” The difference between a photograph and even the most realistic painting—say, one of Courbet’s landscapes—is that in the latter there has been selection, emphasis and some discreet distortion. The painter’s deep instinctive feeling for mass and force has rearranged everything. ”

Branan, Gerald
” It is not merely the likeness which is precious... but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing... the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think -- and it is not at all monstrous in me to say that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist's work ever produced. ”

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
” It is not at all monstrous in me to say ... that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest artist’s work ever produced. ”

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
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” I wish more people felt that photography was an adventure the same as life itself and felt that their individual feelings were worth expressing. To me, that makes photography more exciting. ”

Callahan, Harry
” I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied. ”

Cameron, Julia Margaret
” Photography has the capacity to provide images of man and his environment that are both works of art and moments in history. ”

Capa, Cornell
” Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has cast up in my time or is like to -- this art by which even the poor can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn't it be acting favorably on the morality of the country? ”

Carlyle, Jane Welsh
” Photography is my one recreation and I think it should be done well. ”

Carroll, Lewis
” The camera is a killing chamber, which speeds up the time it claims to be conserving. Like coffins exhumed and priced open, the photographs put on show what we were and what we will be again. ”

Conrad, Peter
” People believe that photographs are true and therefore cannot be art. ”

Cooley, Mason
” Photography knows how to authenticate its misrepresentations. ”

Cooley, Mason
D
” She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes. ”

Deford, Frank
” A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there -- even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity. ”

Doisneau, Robert
” The camera has an interest in turning history into spectacle, but none in reversing the process. At best, the picture leaves a vague blur in the observer's mind; strong enough to send him into battle perhaps, but not to have him understand why he is going. ”

Donoghue, Denis
” The magic of photography is metaphysical. What you see in the photograph isn't what you saw at the time. The real skill of photography is organized visual lying. ”

Donovan, Terence
E
” To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them. ”

Erwitt, Elliott
” Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. ”

Evans, Walker
F
” When you find yourself beginning to feel a bond between yourself and the people you photograph, when you laugh and cry with their laughter and tears, you will know you are on the right track. ”

Fellig, Arthur
” Now the hand-painted image of a person is costly because the time of a well-trained artist is required to make it. The time spent by the painter is time spent seeing as well as making. Literally thousands of separate perceptions must be consolidated into a single image by the portrait painter. Even where the style is naturalistic and the technique meticulous, the necessary process of amalgamation entails synthesis, generalization, exag geration, and simplification. Hence, much as we admire the painter’s craft, we know that it changes optical data. The invention and perfection of photography has taught us to see how painters change what they see. Oddly enough, we are less conscious of the fact that the camera also changes reality. Beyond that, most of us do not realize how much the photographer manipulates what the camera sees because we have been thoroughly conditioned to believe in the photographer’s—as opposed to the painter’s—mode of representing reality. For practical purposes this means that we regard photographic imagery as truthful while painterly imagery is viewed, at best, as poetic. ”

Feldman, Edmund Burke
” I hate cheap pictures. I hate pictures that make people look like they’re not worth much, just to prove a photographer’s point. I hate when they take a picture of someone pickin’ their nose or yawning. It’s so cheap. A lot of it is a big ego trip. You use people as props instead of as people. ”

Freedman, Jill
G
” I’d been in Burbank for three days, trying to suffuse a really dull-looking rocker with charisma.... It is possible to photograph what isn’t there; it’s damned hard to do, and consequently a very marketable talent. ”

Gibson, William
” Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second. ”

Godard, Jean-Luc
” Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story. ”

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von
” The photographic enthusiast likes to lure us into a darkened room in order to display his slides on a silver screen. Aided by the adaptability of the eye and by the borrowed light from the intense projector bulb, he can achieve those relationships in brightness that will make us dutifully admire the wonderful autumn tints he photographed on his latest trip. As soon as we look at a print of these photographs by day, the light seems to go out of them. It is one of the miracles of art that the same does not happen there. The paintings in our galleries are seen one day in bright sunshine and another day in the dim light of a rainy afternoon, yet they remain the same paintings, ever faithful, ever convincing. To a marvelous extent they carry their own light within. For their truth is not that of a perfect replica, it is the truth of art. ”

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

Haas, Ernst
K
” No painting can tell the truth of a single instant; no snapshot can do anything else. ”

Kouwenhoven, John A.
L
” It's weird that photographers spend years or even a whole lifetime, trying to capture moments that added together, don't even amount to a couple of hours. ”

Lalropui Keivom, James
” Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. ”

Lange, Dorothea
” The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera. ”

Lange, Dorothea
” One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. ”

Lange, Dorothea
” But o, photography! as no art is, Faithful and disappointing! ”

Larkin, Philip
” calm and dry, It holds you like a heaven, and you lie Unvariably lovely there, Smaller and clearer as the years go by. ”

Larkin, Philip
” Those flowers, that gate, These misty parks and motors, lacerate Simply by being over; you Contract my heart by looking out of date. ”

Larkin, Philip
” All your ages Matt and glossy on the thick black pages! ”

Larkin, Philip
” I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important. ”

Lartigue, Jacques-Henri
” Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true. ”

Lartigue, Jacques-Henri
” When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can. ”

Lawrence, D.H. (David Herbert)
” When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph. ”

Leibovitz, Annie
” Photographers never have much incentive to show the world as it is. ”

Leith, William
” [Photography] makes its images by means anybody and everybody uses for the banal purposes, just as poetry makes its structures, its indivisibilities of music and meaning, out of the same language used for utilitarian purposes, for idle chatter, or for uninspired lying. Because of this resemblance in the conditions of the two arts—because the camera, like language, is put to constant nonartistic use, quotidian use by nonspecialists, as the painter’s materials (though often misused) are not—a poet finds, I think, a kind of simulation and confirmation in experiencing the work of photographic artists that is more specific, closer to his poetic activity, than the pleasure and love he feels in looking at paintings. ”

Levertov, Denise
” Perishability in a photograph is important in a picture. If a photograph looks perishable we say, "Gee, I'm glad I have that moment." ”

Loengard, John
M
” Any one who knows what the worth of family affection is among the lower classes, and who has seen the array of little portraits stuck over a laborer's fireplace will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the tendencies, social and industrial, which every day are sapping the healthier family affections, the sixpenny photograph is doing more for the poor than all the philanthropists in the world. ”

Magazine, Macmillan
” Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child. ”

Mailer, Norman
” He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co- ordinate grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, “Give me the co-ordinates.”... The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea.... Hot dog! ”

Mailer, Norman
” If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph. ”

Malcolm, Janet
” I see no cameras! Where are the cameras? ”

Mary, Queen of Great Britain
” One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt. ”

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

Michals, Duane
” Think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody's face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways. ”

Michals, Duane
” I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell. ”

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

Newman, Arnold
” Look, I'm not an intellectual - I just take pictures. ”

Newton, Helmut
” The romance and mystery is [sic] gone. Computer-processed images have no delicacy, no craftsmanship, no substance, and no soul. No love. ”

Nibblett, Kim
” Why is it that no photograph of a person has the depth a painted portrait can have? The two embody different quantities of time. A photograph is a “snapshot,” whether or not it was posed; it shows one particular moment of time and what the person looked like right then, what his surface showed. During the extended hours a painting is sat for, though, its subject shows a range of traits, emotions, and thoughts, all revealed in differing lights. Combining different glimpses of the person, choosing an aspect here, a tightening of muscle there, a glint of light, a deepening of line, the painter interweaves these different portions of surface, never before simultaneously exhibited, to produce a fuller portrait and a deeper one. The portraitist can select one tiny aspect of everything shown at a moment to incorporate into the final painting. ”

Nozick, Robert
P
” Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject. ”

Porter, Eliot
” The way in which the photograph records experience is also different from the way of language. Language makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a word or sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or listener is deprived of what was said before, and after. But there is no such thing as a photograph taken out of context, for a photograph does not require one. In fact, the point of photography is to isolate images from context, so as to make them visible in a different way. ”

Postman, Neil
R
” I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive. I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence. ”

Ray, Man
” No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases. ”

Ruskin, John
S
” That the outer man is a picture of the inner, and the face an expression and revelation of the whole character, is a presumption likely enough in itself, and therefore a safe one to go on; borne out as it is by the fact that people are always anxious to see anyone who has made himself famous. Photography offers the most complete satisfaction of our curiosity. ”

Schopenhauer, Arthur
” The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off. ”

Shaw, George Bernard
” The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off. ”

Shaw, George Bernard
” Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything. ”

Siskind, Aaron
” We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect... but, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs. ”

Siskind, Aaron
” Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness. ”

Smith, W. Eugene
” In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it. ”

Sontag, Susan
” ... one of art photography’s most vigorous enterprises—[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate—but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve. ”

Sontag, Susan
” As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. ”

Sontag, Susan
” ... [photographs] trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. ”

Sontag, Susan
” A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. ”

Sontag, Susan
” So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful. ”

Sontag, Susan
” The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates. ”

Sontag, Susan
” Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph. ”

Sontag, Susan
” To photograph is to confer importance. ”

Sontag, Susan
” ... 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. ”

Sontag, Susan
” Photographs may be more memorable than moving images because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again. ”

Sontag, Susan
” It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph—only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones. ”

Sontag, Susan
” To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern organic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. ”

Sontag, Susan
” The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. ”

Sontag, Susan
” It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph -- only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones. ”

Sontag, Susan
” Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man. ”

Steichen, Edward
” I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything. ”

Steinbeck, John
” It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness. ”

Strand, Paul
” Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees. ”

Strand, Paul
” Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good. ”

Stevens, Wallace
” The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process—a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made—constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken. ”

Szarkowski, Jean
T
” Part of the portrait painter’s art, we must be careful to note, is to produce a sort of synthesis, something more various, richer, than even an astute photographer (now or yesterday) can catch by snapping a shutter in a camera. The portrait painter must be skilled in human observation, he must actually be moved by his subject as well as by his profession. True, an ambitious photographer might spend as much clock time as a painter in “studying” his subject, looking for the right shade of mood and the right chiaroscuro to articulate it. Yet this method, the photographic one, must necessarily rely too much on the subject’s timed cooperation, since, materially speaking, all the photographer can record is a single moment, no matter how tactically approached and psychologically prepared that moment be. ”

Tyler, Parker
V
” Photography suits the temper of this age -- of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately. ”

Weston, Edward
” Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he may communicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader’s realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole. ”

White, E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)
” I'm always mentally photographing everything as practice. ”

White, Minor
” For half a century photography has been the "art form" of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? to the designer of the camera? To the finger on the button? tso the law of averages? ”

Vidal, Gore
” We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman. ”

Wittgenstein, Ludwig