Quotes on Photography

Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumes as such, publicly.

The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.