Quotes About A Photograph

“You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”

— Ansel Adams

“That picture changed everything. I was not the same after I saw it and I couldn't go back to the man I'd been before seeing it either. Not after we met that night on the street. My whole world altered because of a photograph. A photograph of my beautiful American girl.”

— Raine Miller

“[W]hile our souls are meager, nature has surplus. Yet something of the mechanism's subject was indeed dissolved in that silver chloride, flattened then minted as those promiscuous postcards we saw now, which we could not now unsee, for we had accepted unawares a bit of the Canyon each time we saw a photograph of it, and those pieces, filtered and diluted, had accumulated in us, so that we never saw anything for the first time. Perhaps the ugliest of our impulses, to shove the sublime through a pinhole.”

— Claire Vaye Watkins

“One thing that struck me early is that you don't put into a photograph what's going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.”

— Diane Arbus

“As he watches her in the flickering light, it strikes Bailey suddenly that she is a fair deal older than she appears, and that the same is likely true of Marco. It is like realizing someone in a photograph is no longer the same age as they were when it was taken, and they seem farther away because of it.”

— Erin Morgenstern

“Patriotism is too deep a feeling to depict in the posing for a photograph.”

— Charlie Chaplin

“The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.”

— Richard Avedon

“I will never have a photograph of her to carry around in my pocket. I will never have a letter in her handwriting, or a scrap-book of everything we've done. I will never share an apartment with her in the city. I will never know if we are listening to the same song at the same time. We will not grow old together. I will not be the person she calls when she's in trouble. She will not be the person I call when I have stories to tell. I will never be able to keep anything she's given to me.”

— David Levithan

“Exile is a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own.”

— Salman Rushdie

“I glanced out of the window, and it was like turning the page of a photograph album. Those roof-tops and that sea were mine no more. They belonged to yesterday, to the past.”

— Daphne Du Maurier

“Fantasy isn't something I put into the pictures; I don't try and inject them with a sense of play. But it's about being an honest photographer; a photograph is as much of a mirror of the photographer as it is the subject.”

— Tim Walker

“It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing-and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite - that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.”

— Mark Twain

“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.”

— Stephen Chbosky

“What a photograph shows us is how a particular thing could be seen, or could be made to look - at a specific moment, in a specific context, by a specific photographer employing specific tools.”

— A. D. Coleman

“If [a photograph is] unbelievably real it becomes superreal or another kind of super real, better than real ... [it] also can be, I think, so heartfelt that you almost can get a pang of compassion for the thing.”

— Ralph Eugene Meatyard

“Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem.”

— Jeanette Winterson

“Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is always about time.”

— Richard Misrach

“Any photographed human being is always a photograph.”

— Luigi Ghirri

“I have never taken a photograph without one thought in my head to amuse myself.”

— Jacques-Henri Lartigue

“All alone - shorn of context, without captions - a photograph is neither true nor false ... For truth, properly considered, is about the relationship between language and the world, not about photographs and the world.”

— Errol Morris

“The person who looks at a photograph as a complete picture, unable to say anything about anything except the facts which existed at the moment of exposure, does not see very far.”

— Francis Meadow Sutcliffe

“Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes known, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.”

— Fred Hoyle

“You look at it [a photograph] and all around the real world is humming, buzzing and moving, and yet in this little frame there is stillness that looks like the world. That connection, that collision, that interfacing, is one of the most astonishing things we can experience.”

— Joel Meyerowitz

“I never take a picture of a face because a face is somebody, an arm is not recognizable as somebody. When you take a photograph of someone's face, it identifies it as somebody, but if you take just a fragment, it's everybody. It's not one person.”

— Annette Messager

“I was out there with the White House press squad, and after his helicopter took off, and the carpet rolled up ... This wasn't a photograph that others were taking, but I continued to take pictures.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“You can carry a photograph with you on a thumb drive, and you can make it bigger or smaller - it's a very malleable form of mass production.”

— Mary Mattingly

“A photograph is a biography of a moment.”

— Art Shay

“A photograph is a mirror; mostly it reflects the prejudices of the viewer.”

— Bill Jay

“A photograph is a picture and no more true or false than any other depiction; why is that so hard to comprehend?”

— Bill Jay

“I have a photograph of my grandfather driving a donkey cart barefoot.”

— Nelly Furtado

“A photograph must come from imagination and not be a reflection of what is.”

— Thierry Mugler

“A photograph can, by the addition of an unimportant spot of color, become a photomontage, a work of art of a special kind.”

— John Heartfield

“I have never been interested in making a photograph that describes what the world I live in looks like, but I am interested in what pictures (of the world) look like.”

— Uta Barth

“Usually I think if there is something imperfect in a photograph it makes the picture more real. Photographs that are slick, smooth, and imperfect seem less honest to me.”

— John Loengard

“The photograph, after all, is just a photograph. Words will determine its meaning and status.”

— Wright Morris

“When people look at a photograph, they believe it ... My photographs crawl along that edge. I document the world, but from my own biased point of view.”

— Zoe Leonard

“The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid than a photograph.”

— Kenneth Clark

“A [spatial, temporal] work had only to be exhibited in a gallery and then written about and reproduced as a photograph in an art magazine. Then this record of the no longer extant installation, along with accretions of information after the fact, became the basis for its fame, and to a large extent its economic value.”

— Dan Graham

“Each time I make a photograph I celebrate the life I love and the beauty I know and the happiness I have experienced. All my photographs are made like that responding to my intuition ... After all these years, I am still motivated by the radiance that light creates when it transforms an object into something magical. What the eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black-and-white image is yet another transformation. What exactly exists, we may never know.”

— Ruth Bernhard

“If you look at a photograph, and you think, 'My isn't that a beautiful photograph,' and you go on to the next one, or 'Isn't that nice light?' so what? I mean what does it do to you or what's the real value in the long run? What do you walk away from it with? I mean, I'd much rather show you a photograph that makes demands on you, that you might become involved in on your own terms or be perplexed by.”

— Duane Michals

“This is a photo as I would wish myself to look all the time. Then I would maybe have a chance to come to Hollywood. (10, October, 1942; Handwritten inscription on a photograph)”

— Anne Frank

“A photograph is not an accident - it is a concept.”

— Ansel Adams

“Why can't a photograph be all four things at once? -be an art object; be a document, what ever that means exactly, but deal with content; be a formalist exploration; and operate on some, metaphor is not the right word but, resonant level..”

— Stephen Shore

“Everybody feels like they need a photograph because we're in a generation where, if you don't document it, it didn't occur. So you've got to stop and take a picture with everybody.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

“I knew Pluto was popular among elementary schoolkids, but I had no idea they would mobilize into a 'Save Pluto' campaign. I now have a drawer full of hate letters from hundreds of elementary schoolchildren (with supportive cover letters from their science teachers) pleading with me to reverse my stance on Pluto. The file includes a photograph of the entire third grade of a school posing on their front steps and holding up a banner proclaiming, 'Dr. Tyson - Pluto is a Planet!'”

— Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.”

— Susan Sontag

“My point is that meaning is always personal, changeable and subjective. There is no 'correct' interpretation of a photograph.”

— Bill Jay

“The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons, particularly to people who have been in warfare, who have been bombed and shelled for at the back of a bombing run is invariably a photograph. In the back of ruined towns, and cities, and factories, there is aerial mapping, or spy mapping, usually with a camera. Therefore the camera is a feared instrument, and a man with a camera is suspected and watched wherever he goes ... In the minds of most people today the camera is the forerunner of destruction, and it is suspected, and rightly so.”

— John Steinbeck

“A work of art is itself an object, first of all, and so manipulation is unavoidable: it's a prerequisite. But I needed the greater objectivity of the photograph in order to correct my own way of seeing: for instance, if I draw an object from nature, I start to stylize and to change it in accordance with my personal vision and my training. But if I paint from a photograph, I can forget all the criteria that I get from these sources. I can paint against my will, as it were. And that, to me, felt like an enrichment.”

— Gerhard Richter

“Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow.”

— Man Ray