I have seized the light. I have arrested its flight.
-- Louis Jacques MandŽ Daguerre (1789-1851), French scenic designer, photographer, and inventor.
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.
-- Robert Doisneau (1912-1994), French photographer. Weekend Guardian (London, April 4, 1992).
Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.
-- Robert Doisneau (1912-1994), French photographer. Weekend Guardian (London, April 4, 1992).
Chance is the one thing you can't buy. . . . You have to pay for it and you have to pay for it with your life, spending a lot of time, you pay for it with time, not the wasting of time but the spending of time.
-- Robert Doisneau (1912-1994), French photographer. Weekend Guardian (London, April 4, 1992).
Si tu fais des images, ne parle pas, n'Žcris pas, ne t'analyse pas, ne rŽponds ˆ aucune question. [If you take photos, don't speak, don't write, don't analyze yourself, and don't answer any questions.]
-- Robert Doisneau 1912-1994), French photographer.
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.
-- Denis Donoghue (b. 1928), Irish educator, author. ÒRadio Talk," The State of the Language (1980).
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 organised visual lying.
-- Terence Donovan (b. 1936), British photographer. Guardian (London, November 19, 1983).
My picture-taking and picture-making are as different as day and night. I take my pictures quite unconsciously. I see them in my mind and. . . it is done without thinking. I feel the exposure. My only concern is to be ready for that moment of truth, always ready to grasp it quickly before it's gone, or to wait patiently until that split-second when it appears.
-- Nell Dorr (1895-1988), U. S. photographer.
There are as many photographs possible from a single negative as the artist can imagine. I can never bear to finish with a negative, to say, "This is it." Tomorrow I can come and make new pictures from that negative. This is the thing I love most of all: the making of the final picture. No one else can do that for me, nor do I ever completely satisfy myself.
-- Nell Dorr (1895-1988), U. S. photographer.
Through dinner she felt a gradual icy coldness stealing through her like novocaine. She had made up her mind. It seemed as if she had set the photograph of herself in her own place, forever frozen into a single gesture.
-- John Dos Passos (1896-1970), U.S. novelist, poet, playwright, painter. Manhattan Transfer, Houghton Mifflin Company (1925 and 1953).
Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.
-- George Eastman (1854-1932), U.S. inventor and manufacturer.
I am fooling only myself when I say my mother exists now only in the photograph on my bulletin board or in the outline of my hand or in the armful of memories I still hold tight. She lives on in everything I do. Her presence influenced who I was, and her absence influences who I am. Our lives are shaped as much by those who leave us as they are by those who stay. Loss is our legacy. Insight is our gift. Memory is our guide.
-- Hope Edelman (20th century), U.S. author. Motherless Daughters, epilogue, 1994.
A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of mother or father taken many years ago. You see them as you remember them. But as people live on, they change completely. That is why I think a photograph can be kind.
-- Albert Einstein (1879 -1955), scientist, recalled on the centenary of his birth, Christian Science Monitor, March 6, 1979.
I don't like to work with assistants. I'm already one too many; the camera alone would be enough.
-- Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898-1995), Prussian-born U.S. photographer, on his 50-year career as a Life magazine photographer, New York magazine, September 15, 1986.
It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.
-- Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898-1995), Prussian-born U.S. photographer.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
-- T. S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot (1888-1965), U.S.-born British poet and critic, from "Little Gidding."
Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the otherest.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. "Uses of Great Men," in Representative Men (1850).
It would never occur to anyone at Gourmet to take the kind of sleek, witty food photographs I associate with the Life "Great Dinners" series, or the crammed, decadent pictures the women's magazines specialize in. Gourmet gives you a full-page color picture of an incredibly serious rack of lamb persille sitting on a somber Blue Canton platter by Mottahedeh Historic Charleston Reproductions sitting on a stiff eighteenth-century English mahogany table from Charles Deacon & son -- and it's no wonder I never cook anything from this magazine: the pictures are so reverent I almost feel I ought to pray to them.
-- Nora Ephron (b. 1941), U.S. author and humorist. Scribble Scrabble, ch. 19 (1978). Written in 1976 about Gourmet, a very elegant magazine with a self-consciously upper-class ambience.
It's logical to say that what I do is an act of faith. Other people might call it conceit, but I have faith and conviction. It came to me. And I worked it out. I used to suffer from a lack of it, and now that I've got it I suppose it seems self-centered. I have to have faith or I can't act. I think that what I am doing is valid and worth doing, and I use the word transcendent. That's very pretentious, but if I'm satisfied that something transcendent shows in a photograph I've done, that's it. It's there, I've done it. Without being able to explain, I know it absolutely, that it happens sometimes, and I know by the way I feel in the action that it goes like magic -- this is it. It's as though there's a wonderful secret in a certain place and I can capture it. Only I can do it at this moment, only this moment and only me. That's a hell of a thing to believe, but I believe it or I couldn't act. It's a very exciting, heady thing. It happens more when you're younger, but it still happens, or I wouldn't continue. I think there is a period of esthetic discovery that happens to a man and he can do all sorts of things at white heat.
-- Walker Evans (1903-1975), U.S. photographer and picture editor.
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.
-- Walker Evans (1903-1975), U.S. photographer and picture editor.
Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.
-- Walker Evans (1903-1975), U.S. photographer and picture editor.
If you want to make good photographs, a camera has to be second nature to you. Devoting too much attention to technical decisions can interfere with your creative processes.
-- Robert Farber (20th century), U.S. photographer.
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.
-- Edmund Burke Feldman (b. 1924), U.S. art critic, educator. Varieties of Visual Experience, 2nd edition, ch. 14, Abrams (1981).
They had their photos taken, eight poses, in a quick-development store. Kerry insisted on grouping them as a "varsity" football team, and then as a tough gang from the East Side, with their coats inside out, and himself sitting in the middle on a cardboard moon. The photographer probably has them yet -- at least, they never called for them.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), U.S. author,ÊThis Side of Paradise, 1920.
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.
-- Jill Freedman (b. 1939), U.S. photographer. As quoted in Working, book 3, by Studs Terkel (1973).
Here are faces that I have found memorable. If they are not all as happy as kings, it is because in this imperfect world and these hazardous times, the camera's eye, like the eye of a child, often sees true.
-- Toni Frissell (1907-1988), U.S. photographer.
The furthest bodies
To which man sends his
Speculation,
Beyond which God is;
The cosmic motes
Of yawning lenses. . . .
-- Robert Frost (1874-1963), U.S. poet. "I Will Sing You One-O . . . "
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