[The photograph] is fabricated out of the unfabricated dross of passing life (while paradoxically still trading on the indexical heft of that dross).

- Tod Papageorge

I profoundly believe in - and teach - the proposition that photography is inherently a fiction-making process. Don't speak to me of the document; I d…

- Tod Papageorge

My argument against the set-up picture is that it leaves the matter of content to the imagination of the photographer, a faculty that, in my experien…

- Tod Papageorge

Cameras are like dogs, but dumb, and toward quarry, even more faithful. They point, they render, and defy the photographer who hopes.

- Tod Papageorge

By being fictions and, at the same moment, returning their subjects to us with a compelling fidelity, both photographs and poems work with the same s…

- Tod Papageorge

If you accept the idea that photographers, or some of them, are actually artists, then you have to look at their work less as a document of something…

- Tod Papageorge

It's unarguable to say that every one of us has been moved by the beauty of what I have called snapshots, but for photographers they are charms and p…

- Tod Papageorge

I believe that the (distorting) mirror which is photography holds an intrinsic, even elemental, relation to writing.

- Tod Papageorge