Quotes on Photograph

Photographs don’t lie, but liars may photograph

The photograph should be more interesting or more beautiful than what was photographed

The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.

We do not make photographs with our cameras. We make them with our minds, with our hearts, with our ideas.

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.

Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

Art is not in the ...eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist.

Photographers usually want to photograph facts and things. But I'm interested in the nature of the thing itself. A photograph of someone sleeping tells me nothing about their dream state; a photograph of a corpse tells me nothing about the nature of death. My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient.

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.

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.

The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.

I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.

It's easy to photograph light reflecting from a surface, the truly hard part is capturing the light in the air.

A photograph doesn't gain weight or lose weight, or change from being happy to being sad. It's frozen. You can use it, then recycle it.

I know that everyone who listens to radio creates you in a visual image that they need you to have. Whatever that is, I thought, let them have it. Let me be who the listener needs me to be and let me not contradict that with the reality of my photograph and risk disappointing them.

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.

The two dozen commonplace childhood photographs - snowsuit, pony, tennis racket, looming fender of a Dodge - were an inexhaustible source of wonder for him, at her having existed before he met her, and of sadness for his possessing nothing of the ten million minutes of that black-and-white scallop-edged existence save these few proofs.

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

Above all, it's hard learning to live with vivid mental images of scenes I cared for and failed to photograph. It is the edgy existence within me of these unmade images that is the only assurance that the best photographs are yet to be made.

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.