By Author: A-C
There are many teachers who could ruin you. Before you know it you could be a pale copy of this teacher or that teacher. You have to evolve on your own.
-- Berenice Abbott(1898-1991), U.S. photographer.
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
-- Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), U.S. photographer.
What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera . . . notes with relentless fidelity.
-- Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), U.S. photographer.
Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.
-- Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), U.S. photographer.
Photography helps people to see.
-- Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), U.S. photographer.
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
-- Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), U.S. photographer.
It is my intention to present -- through the medium of photography -- intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.
-- Ansel Adams (1902-1984), U.S. photographer, foreword to The Portfolios of Ansel Adams (Boston: NY Graphic Society/Little, Brown, 1981).
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.
-- Ansel Adams (1902-1984), U.S. photographer. From ÒA Personal Credo," vol. 58, American Annual of Photography (1944), reprinted in Photographers on Photography, ed. Nathan Lyons (1966).
A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.
-- Ansel Adams (1902-1984), U.S. photographer.
To the complaint, "There are no people in your photographs," there are always two people. The photographer and the viewer.
-- Ansel Adams (1902-1984), U.S. photographer.
I know some photographs that are extraodinary in their power and conviction, but it is difficult in photography to overcome the superficial power or subject; the concept and statement must be quite convincing in themselves to win over a dramatic and compelling subject situation.
-- Ansel Adams (1902-1984), U.S. photographer, Ansel Adams, An Autobiography
Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.
-- Ansel Adams (1902-1984), U.S. photographer.
-- Robert Adams (b. 1937), U.S. photographer.
[T]oday . . . photographers prefer disfigurement to adornment. It is now chic to do your worst to people.
-- Margaret Anderson (1886-1973), U.S. editor and memoirist. The Strange Necessity, part 1 (1969).
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.
-- Margaret Anderson (1886-1973), U.S. editor and memoirist. The Strange Necessity, part 1 (1969).
I was born to be an editor, I always edit everything. I edit my room at least once a week. Hotels are made for me. I can change a hotel room so thoroughly that even its proprietor doesn't recognize it. . . . I edit people's clothes, dressing them infallibly in the right lines. . . . I change everyone's coiffure -- except those that please me -- and these I gaze at with such satisfaction that I become suspect, I edit people's tones of voice, their laughter, their words. I change their gestures, their photographs. I change the books I read, the music I hear . . . It's this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor. I can't make things. I can only revise what has been made.
-- Margaret Anderson (1886-1973), U.S. literary editor and autobiographer. My Thirty Years' War, ch. 2 (1930).
You are a pest, by the very nature of that camera in your hand.
-- Princess Anne of England (b. 1950), to a photographer, quoted by John Pearson in The Selling of the Royal Family (Simon & Schuster, 1986).
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 labourer'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.
-- Anonymous, Macmillan's Magazine (London, September 1871).
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
-- Diane Arbus (1923-1971), U.S. photographer. Quoted in Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography, "Preface" (1985).
There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.
-- Diane Arbus (1923-1971), U.S. photographer. Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972).
It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the Fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation, had said, ÒAll right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up." And they did.
-- Diane Arbus (1923-1971), U.S. photographer. Remarks on a nudist camp, from classes given in 1971. Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972).
Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It's just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities. . . . Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it.
-- Diane Arbus (1923-1971), U.S. photographer. From class lectures given in 1971. Published in Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972).
I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.
-- Diane Arbus (1923-1971), U.S. photographer.
I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.
-- Diane Arbus (1923-1971), U.S. photographer.
Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.
-- Diane Arbus (1923-1971), U.S. photographer.
I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse.
-- Diane Arbus (1923-1971), U.S. photographer.
Some pictures are tentative forays without your even knowing it. They become methods. It's important to take bad pictures. It's the bad ones that have to do with what you've never done before. They can make you recognize something you hadn't seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again.
-- Diane Arbus (1923-1971), U.S. photographer.
Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.
-- Diane Arbus (1923-1971), U.S. photographer.
The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.
-- Diane Arbus (1923-1971), U.S. photographer.
I used to have this notion when I was a kid that the minute you said anything, it was no longer true. Of course it would have driven me crazy very rapidly if I hadn't dropped it, but there's something similar in what I'm trying to say. That once it's been done, you want to go someplace else. There's just some sense of straining.
-- Diane Arbus (1923-1971), U.S. photographer.
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.
-- Diane Arbus (1923-1971), U.S. photographer. As quoted in On Photography, ch. 1, by Susan Sontag (1977).
If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, ÒI 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, ÒYou'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.
-- Diane Arbus (1923-1971), U.S. photographer. Remarks made in class, 1971. Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972).
For although memories, of a season, for example,
Melt into a single snapshot, one cannot guard, treasure
That stalled moment. It too is flowing, fleeting;
It is a picture of flowing, scenery, though living, mortal,
Over which an abstract action is laid out in blunt,
Harsh strokes.
-- John Ashbery (b. 1927), U.S. poet, critic. ÒSyringa."
I feel the carousel starting slowly
And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,
Photographs of friends, the window and the trees
Merging in one neutral band that surrounds
Me on all sides, everywhere I look.
-- John Ashbery (b. 1927), U.S. poet, critic. ÒSelf-Portrait in a Convex Mirror."
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.
-- Brooks Atkinson (1894-1984), U.S. critic, essayist. Once Around the Sun, entry for August 28 (1951).
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
-- W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden (1907-1973), British-born U.S. poet.
It's in trying to direct the traffic between Artiface [sic] and Candor, without being run over, that I'm confronted with the questions about photography that matter most to me.
-- Richard Avedon (b. 1923), U.S. photographer, on maintaining authenticity, NY Times, December 27, 1985.
All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
-- Richard Avedon (b. 1923), U.S. photographer.
I never cared for fashion much, amusing little seams and witty little pleats: it was the girls I liked.
-- David Bailey (b. 1938), British photographer. Independent (London, Nov. 5, 1990).
Everybody comes along at the right time. . . . Leonardo was lucky because he came along at the right time. Oscar Wilde was lucky because he came at the right time -- if he hadn't gone to court and been martyred he wouldn't be such a cult hero now. Or Jesus Christ -- if he came back now he would really be up the shit because there's no capital punishment.
-- David Bailey (b. 1938), British photographer. Quoted in Face (London, December 1984).
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 (b. 1938), British photographer.
My fashion pictures are documents just as much as my boat people or my pictures for Band-Aid of Sudan.
-- David Bailey (b. 1938), British photographer, International Herald Tribune November 15, 1985
When I die I want to go to Vogue.
-- David Bailey (b. 1938), British photographer, International Herald Tribune November 15, 1985
All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.
-- David Bailey (b. 1938), British photographer, International Herald Tribune November 15, 1985.
I don't know what too much film is, but I do know what's not enough. Not enough is when there are images you want to capture and you're out of film. I never want that to happen to me again.
-- Forrest H. R. Bard, Canadian photographer.
A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.
-- Brigitte Bardot (b. 1934), French film actress and animal-rights activist.
It is often said that it was the painters who invented Photography. . . . I say: no, it was the chemists. For the noeme "That-has-been" was only possible on the day when a scientific circumstance (the discovery that silver halogens were sensitive to light) made it possible to recover and print directly the luminous rays emitted by a variously lighted object. The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here . . . like the delayed rays of a star.
-- Roland Barthes (1915-1980), French writer and philosopher.
Ultimately -- or at the limit -- in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.
-- Roland Barthes (1915-1980), French writer and philosopher.
If I like a photograph, if it disturbs me, I linger over it. . . . I want to enlarge this face in order to see it better, to understand it better, to know its truth (and sometimes, naively, I confide this task to a laboratory). . . . I believe that by enlarging the detail "in series" (each shot engendering smaller details than at the preceding stage), I will finally reach [her] very being. . . . This is what happens when I judge a certain photograph "a likeness." . . . Yet on thinking it over, I must ask myself: Who is like what? Resemblance is a conformity, but to what? . . . Ultimately a photograph looks like anyone except the person it represents. For resemblance refers to the subject's identity, an absurd, purely legal, even penal affair; likeness gives out identity "as itself," whereas I want a subject -- in MallarmŽ's terms -- "as into eternity transforms it." Likeness leaves me unsatisfied.
-- Roland Barthes (1915-1980), French writer and philosopher, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard. (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), pp. 99-102.
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
-- Roland Barthes (1915-1980), French writer and philosopher.
The photographic image . . . is a message without a code.
-- Roland Barthes (1915-1980), French writer and philosopher.
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.
-- Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), French poet. From ÒSalon of 1859," sect. 2, CuriositŽs EsthŽtiques (1868). Reprinted in The Mirror of Art, ed. by Jonathan Mayne (1955).
. . . a new industry has arisen which contributes not a little to confirming stupidity in its faith and to ruining what might have remained of the divine in the French genius. The idolatrous crowd postulates an ideal worthy of itself and appropriate to its nature -- that is perfectly understandable. As far as painting and sculpture are concerned, the current credo of the sophisticated public, above all in France . . . is this: "I believe in Nature, and I believe that Art is, and cannot be other than, the exact reproduction of Nature. . . . Thus an industry that could give us a result identical to Nature would be the absolute of art." A vengeful God has granted the wishes of this multitude. Daguerre was his Messiah. And now the public says to itself: "Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the idiots!), then photography and Art are the same thing." From that moment our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal. . . . Some democratic writer ought to have seen here a cheap method of disseminating a loathing for history and for painting among the people.
-- Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), French poet.
Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.
-- Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French philosopher and media theorist.
Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.
-- AndrŽ Bazin (1918-1958), French film critic, ÒThe Ontology of the Photographic Image," What Is Cinema? (1958-1965, trans. 1967).
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.
-- Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870-1942), U.S. photographer. Quoted in PM (New York, April 1941).
Mrs Woolf's complaint should be addressed to her creator, who made her, rather than me.
-- Sir Cecil Beaton (1904-1980), British photographer, designer, and author, answering Virginia Woolf's protest about his drawing of her, quoted by Hugo Vickers in Cecil Beaton (Little, Brown 1985).
[He stared into the camera] like some sort of an animal gazing from across the back of its sty.
-- Sir Cecil Beaton (1904-1980), British photographer, designer, and author, on Winston Churchill, quoted by Hugo Vickers in Cecil Beaton (Little, Brown 1985).
The mirror in the hat store is triplicate, so that you see yourself not only head-on but from each side. The appearance that I present to myself in this mirror is that of three police-department photographs showing all possible approaches to Harry DuChamps, alias Harry Duval, alias Harry Duffy, wanted in Rochester for the murder of Nettie Lubitch, age 5.
-- Robert Benchley (1889-1945), U.S. writer, humorist. ÒMalignant Mirrors," in Love Conquers All (Henry Holt, 1922).
That then is the difference between film and theatre? Or should one not rather ask: what are the differences? Let us be content with the reply that the screen has two dimensions and the stage three, that the screen presents photographs and the stage living actors. All the subtler differences stem from these. The camera can show us all sorts of things -- from close-ups of insects to panoramas of prairies -- which the stage cannot even suggest, and it can move from one to another with much more dexterity than any conceivable stage. The stage, on the other hand, can be revealed in the unsurpassable beauty of three-dimensional shapes, and the stage actor establishes between himself and his audience a contact real as electricity.
-- Eric Bentley (b. 1916), British-born U.S. critic, editor. The Playwright as Thinker, ch. 1, Reynal (1946).
Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. . . . Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
-- Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), German critic, philosopher. ÒTechnical AidÓ (1928), reprinted in One-Way Street and Other Writings (1978).
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
-- Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), German critic, philosopher. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," sect. 13 (1936), reprinted in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (1968).
The artistic performance of a stage actor is definitely presented to the public by the actor in person; that of the screen actor, however, is presented by a camera, with a twofold consequence. The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole. Guided by the cameraman, the camera continually changes its position with respect to the performance. The sequence of positional views which the editor composes from the material supplied him constitutes the completed film. It comprises certain factors of movement which are in reality those of the camera, not to mention special camera angles, close-ups, etc. . . . Also, the film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience's identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera.
-- Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), German critic, philosopher. ÒThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical ReproductionÓ (1936), reprinted in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (1968).
Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.
-- Tony Benn (b. 1925), British Labour politician. Quoted in Independent (London, October 21, 1989).
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.
-- John Berger (b. 1926), British author, critic. From ÒUses of Photography," in About Looking, Pantheon (1980).
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.
-- John Berger (b. 1926), British novelist, critic. ÒHow Fast Does It Go?" in Keeping a Rendezvous (1992).
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.
-- John Berger (b. 1926), British novelist, critic. ÒUses of Photography," About Looking, Pantheon (1980).
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.
-- John Berger (b. 1926), British novelist, critic. ÒUses of Photography," About Looking, Pantheon (1980).
My quest, through the magic of light and shadow, is to isolate, to simplify and to give emphasis to form with the greatest clarity. To indicate the ideal proportion, to reveal sculptural mass and the dominating spirit is my goal.
-- Ruth Bernhard (b. 1905), German-born U.S. photographer.
Light is my inspiration, my paint and brush. It is as vital as the model herself. Profoundly significant, it caresses the essential superlative curves and lines. Light I acknowledge as the energy upon which all life on this planet depends.
-- Ruth Bernhard (b. 1905), German-born U.S. photographer.
There is no such thing as taking too much time, because your soul is in that picture.
-- Ruth Bernhard (b. 1905), German-born U.S. photographer.
For me, the creation of a photograph is experienced as a heightened emotional response, most akin to poetry and music, each image the culmination of a compelling impulse I cannot deny. Whether working with a human figure or a still life, I am deeply aware of my spiritual connection with it. In my life, as in my work, I am motivated by a great yearning for balance and harmony beyond the realm of human experience, reaching for the essence of oneness with the Universe.
-- Ruth Bernhard (b. 1905), German-born U.S. photographer.
Every day I am aware of the flow and constant change; perhaps I am at the edge of discovering what more our bodies might be able to teach about the spirit of life. At least, I am always exploring and trying to understand our relationship to the whole universe.
-- Ruth Bernhard (b. 1905), German-born U.S. photographer.
I never question what to do, it tells me what to do. The photographs make themselves with my help.
-- Ruth Bernhard (b. 1905), German-born U.S. photographer.
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
-- William Blake (1757-1827), English poet, artist, engraver, and publisher.
When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are, infinite.
-- William Blake (1757-1827), English poet, artist, engraver, and publisher.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the Palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
-- William Blake (1757-1827), English poet, artist, engraver, and publisher, "Auguries of Innocence."
The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.
-- Dirk Bogarde (b. 1921), British actor. Quoted in Independent (London, January 28, 1990).
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.
-- Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914), U.S. historian. The Image, ch. 4 (1961).
The beauty of the past belongs to the past.
-- Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971), U.S. photographer and writer, on modern photojournalism, quoted by Mary Warner Marien, Christian Science Monitor, 5 Dec 86
Work to me is a sacred thing.
-- Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971), U.S. photographer and writer. Portrait of Myself, ch. 30 (1963).
On the day of my bombing mission, we were still in the great stone age of bombing. We were loading old-fashioned bombs into old-fashioned bombing planes -- our trusty B-17s were monarchs of the skies, although we didn't have enough of them.
The pilot was Major Tibbetts, a shy young man who, within less than three years, would be singled out from the most massive and still most secret group effort in history. His was the hand that plunged this planet into the atomic age. He made the super secret tests in Yucca Flat, and when the fateful day came, it was he who piloted the plane to the segment of sky that overhung Hiroshima, and here he tossed off the fateful black box that unleashed the furies which never in the life of our planet could be restrained.
After the war ended I ran into Tibbetts in Kansas. "Did you realize you were ushering a new era in the history of the universe?" I asked him. He answered, "I don't know . . . " "How did you feel?" "I was very anxious until it was clear that it was all OK." "No, I mean, how did you feel about all the people?" "I don't know. They're so poor and miserable it probably helps them since they'd only die anyway."
This statement was a striking example of the remoteness that troubled me. I could feel no emotion. And if I did feel, what? Pity? Regret? No, it was their lives or our lives. Their ideas or our ideas. The impersonality of modern warfare has become stupendous, grotesque. Even when in the heart of the battle one's ray of vision lights only a narrow slice of the whole and all the rest is remote, so indescribably remote.
The remoteness between killer and killed in this kind of warfare doubtless has to be there if those of who deal with war are going to carry on. But what are one's responsibilities? The jigsaw puzzle becomes so complex that no one can be sure which little piece is meant for him and where the edges lie. What should we feel . . . What can we do?
-- Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971), U.S. photographer and writer. Quoted in For the World to See: The Life of Margaret Bourke-White, by Jonathan Silverman, p. 195.
Usually I object when someone makes overmuch of men's work versus women's work, for I think it is the excellence of the results which counts.
-- Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971), U.S. photographer and writer.
If anyone gets in my way when I'm making a picture, I become irrational. I'm never sure what I am going to do, or sometimes even aware of what I do -- only that I want that picture.
-- Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971), U.S. photographer and writer.
Saturate yourself with your subject and the camera will all but take you by the hand.
-- Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971), U.S. photographer and writer.
The charm, one might say the genius of memory, is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.
-- Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), Anglo-Irish novelist. Vogue (New York, Sept. 15, 1955).
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.
-- Gerald Branan (1894-1987), British author. Thoughts in a Dry Season, Cambridge University Press (1978).
Photography is still a very new medium and everything must be tried and dared . . . photography has no rules. It is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.
-- Bill Brandt (1904-1983), British photographer.
Chance is always there. We all use it. The difference is a poor photographer meets chance one out of a hundred times and a good photographer meets chance all the time.
-- Brassa• (Gyula Halasz, 1899-1984), Hungarian photographer, sculptor, and author.
In the absence of a subject with which you are passionately involved, and without the excitement that drives you to grasp it and exhaust it, you may take some beautiful pictures, but not a photographic oeuvre.
-- Brassa• (Gyula Halasz, 1899-1984), Hungarian photographer, sculptor, and author.
Problem: To make what you see be seen, through the intermediary of a machine that does not see it as you see it. And to make what you understand be understood, through the intermediary of a machine that does not understand it as you do.
-- Robert Bresson (1901-1999), French film director, Notes on Cinematography (1977).
Make visible what, without you, might never have been seen.
-- Robert Bresson (1901-1999), French film director.
I long to have such a memorial of every being dear to me in the world. It is not merely the likeness which is precious in such cases -- 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, what my brothers cry out against so vehemently, that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist's work ever produced.
-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), British poet.
When I photograph, what I'm really doing is seeking answers to things.
-- Wynn Bullock (1902-1975), U.S. photographer.
A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.
-- Wynn Bullock (1902-1975), U.S. photographer.
Searching is everything -- going beyond what you know. And the test of the search is really in the things themselves, the things you seek to understand. What is important is not what you think about them, but how they enlarge you.
-- Wynn Bullock (1902-1975), U.S. photographer.
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 (1902-1975), U.S. photographer.
What you see is real -- but only on the particular level to which you've developed your sense of seeing. You can expand your reality by developing new ways of perceiving.
-- Wynn Bullock (1902-1975), U.S. photographer.
As I became aware that all things have unique spatial and temporal qualities which visually define and relate them, I began to perceive the things I was photographing not as objects but as events. Working to develop my skills of perceiving and symbolizing these event qualities, I discovered the principle of opposites. When, for example, I photographed the smooth, luminous body of a woman behind a dirty cobwebbed window, I found that the qualities of each event were enhanced and the universal forces which they manifested were more powerfully evoked.
-- Wynn Bullock (1902-1975), U.S. photographer.
I feel all things as dynamic events, being, changing, and interacting with each other in space and time even as I photograph them.
-- Wynn Bullock (1902-1975), U.S. photographer.
I now measure my growth as a photographer in terms of the degrees to which I am aware of, have developed my sense of, and have the skills to symbolize visually the four-dimensional structure of the universe.
-- Wynn Bullock (1902-1975), U.S. photographer.
Everything went together perfectly, and this is what I mean by knowing. I didn't have to analyze anything. I just recognized what was in front of me. All I had to do was set up and take the picture.
-- Wynn Bullock (1902-1975), U.S. photographer.
In a photograph, if I am able to evoke not alone a feeling of the reality of the surface physical world but also a feeling of the reality of existence that lies mysteriously and invisibly beneath its surface, I feel I have succeeded. At their best, photographs as symbols not only serve to help illuminate some of the darkness of the unknown, they also serve to lessen the fears that too often accompany the journeys from the known to the unknown.
-- Wynn Bullock (1902-1975), U.S. photographer.
Mysteries lie all around us, even in the most familiar things, waiting only to be perceived.
-- Wynn Bullock (1902-1975), U.S. photographer.
The urge to create, the urge to photograph, comes in part from the deep desire to live with more integrity, to live more in peace with the world, and possibly to help others to do the same.
-- Wynn Bullock (1902-1975), U.S. photographer.
A person is quite different from a tree or rock or stream. By introducing the nude into my pictures, I started perceiving all the things I was photographing in new ways. In contrast or opposition to each other, things became much more significant and interesting, revealing many more qualities than I had ever dreamed of knowing and expressing. By using the nude, I stopped thinking in terms of objects. I was seeing things, instead, as dynamic events, unique in their own beings yet also related and existing together within a universal context of energy and change.
-- Wynn Bullock (1902-1975), U.S. photographer.
Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation." Creative viewing.
-- William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), U.S. author.
The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.
-- Samuel Butler (1612-1680), British poet and satirist.
There are two distinct roads in photography -- the utilitarian and the aesthetic, the goal of the one being a record of facts, and the other an expression of beauty
-- Charles H. Caffin (1854-1918), U.S. art and photography critic. Photography as a Fine Art (1901).
To be a photographer, one must photograph. No amount of book learning, no checklist of seminars attended, can substitute for the simple act of making pictures. Experience is the best teacher of all. And for that, there are no guarantees that one will become an artist. Only the journey matters . . .
-- Harry Callahan (1912-1999), U.S. photographer.
The close-up has no equivalent in a narrative fashioned of words. Literature is totally lacking in any working method to enable it to isolate a single vastly enlarged detail in which one face comes forward to underline a state of mind or stress the importance of a single detail in comparison with the rest. As a narrative device, the ability to vary the distance between the camera and the object may be a small thing indeed, but it makes for a notable difference between cinema and oral or written narrative, in which the distance between language and image is always the same.
-- Italo Calvino (1923-1985), Italian author, critic. ÒCinema and the Novel: Problems of Narrative," The Uses of Literature, trans. Patrick Creagh, Harcourt Brace (1986).
When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty to them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has almost the embodiment of a prayer.
-- Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), British photographer.
I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied.
-- Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), British photographer, Annals of my Glass House. As quoted in On Photography, "Appendix," by Susan Sontag (1977).
If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough.
-- Robert Capa (Andr‡s Friedmann, 1913-1954), Hungarian photojournalist, quoted in Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History.
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 Òcast upÓ in my time or is like to -- this art by which even the ÒpoorÓ can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn't it be acting favourably on the morality of the country?
-- Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801-1866), Scottish poet. Letter, October 21, 1859. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (1970).
It [photography] is my one recreation and I think it should be done well.
-- Lewis Carroll (Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898), British mathematician, author, and photographer.
He [Hungarian photographer Martin Munkacsi] made me suddenly realize that photographs could reach eternity through the moment.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson (b. 1908), French photographer, International Herald Tribune, November 15, 1985
Think about the photo before and after, never during. The secret is to take your time. You mustn't go too fast. The subject must forget about you. Then, however, you must be very quick.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson (b. 1908), French photographer.
Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson (b. 1908), French photographer.
To take photographs means to recognize -- simultaneously and within a fraction of a second -- both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson (b. 1908), French photographer.
In photography, the smallest thing can become a big subject, an insignificant human detail can become a leitmotiv. We see and we make seen as a witness to the world around us; the event, in its natural activity, generates an organic rhythm of forms.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson (b. 1908), French photographer.
The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson (b. 1908), French photographer.
The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson (b. 1908), French photographer.
To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson (b. 1908), French photographer.
During the work, you have to be sure that you haven't left any holes, that you've captured everything, because afterwards it will be too late.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson (b. 1908), French photographer.
A photographer is part pick-pocket and part tightrope dancer.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson (b. 1908), French photographer.
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
-- Agatha Christie (1891-1976), English detective story writer.
The eyes, like sentinels, hold the highest place in the body. [Lat., Oculi, tanquam, speculatores, altissimum locum obtinent.]
-- Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero, c. 106-43 BC), Roman orator and philosopher of the New Academy, De Natura Deorum (bk. II, 56).
The photographer's palette [is] a thousand shades of gray.
-- H. E. Clark, on a friend's black-and-white photographs, Christian Science Monitor, 14 Apr 86
He carefully picked his cast of clouds, watched them intently as they swirled in before the lens and hoped the sun would break in concert.
-- H. E. Clark, on a friend's black-and-white photographs, Christian Science Monitor 14 Apr 86
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-- Sir Arthur C. Clarke (b. 1917), British science fiction writer.
Unchecked, the tourist will climb over the fence and come right into your house to take pictures of you in your habitat. Cities mindful of tourists have built elaborate Òtourist trapsÓ which, luckily, work. Tourists are kept confined to these, and few escape. There is, of course, the type known as the Òintrepid tourist." This one has to be watched carefully or he can become most annoying. Little wonder these are so often the target of terrorists. If there is an aspect of benign terror about the tourist, there is also a great deal of tourist in the terrorist. Terrorists travel with only one thing in mind, just like the tourist, and the specifics of places escape them both. Terrorists travel for the purpose of shooting unsuspecting foreigners, just as tourists travel for the purpose of shooting them with a camera.
-- Andrei Codrescu (b. 1947), Romanian-born poet, radio commentator. ÒThe Tourist," Raised by Puppets, Addison-Wesley (1990).
Photographs are of course about their makers, and are to be read for what they disclose in that regard no less than for what they reveal of the world as their makers comprehend, invent, and describe it.
-- A(llan) D(ouglass) Coleman (b. 1943), U.S. photography critic, historian, and theorist.
Photography knows how to authenticate its misrepresentations.
-- Mason Cooley (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist. City Aphorisms, Thirteenth Selection (New York, 1994).
Mars and Venus are at it again. This time, Hephaestus is standing by with a private detective, a photographer, and a lawyer.
-- Mason Cooley (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist. City Aphorisms, Fourteenth Selection (New York, 1994).
People believe that photographs are true and therefore cannot be art.
-- Mason Cooley (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist. City Aphorisms, Thirteenth Selection (New York, 1994).
Old photograph: amid the set poses of her family, a young girl smiles and raises her hand a little.
-- Mason Cooley (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist. City Aphorisms, Fifth Selection (New York, 1988).
The camera is a killing chamber, which speeds up the time it claims to be conserving. Like coffins exhumed and prised open, the photographs put on show what we were and what we will be again.
Peter Conrad (b. 1948), Australian critic, author. ÒSeeing Tasmania," pt. 5, Down Home: Revisiting Tasmania (1988).
A painter works with color as the medium, a photographer works with light.
-- Carlotta M. Corpron (1901-1988), U.S. photographer.
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