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Photography Quotes

The more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.

[photography]... wanted to understand, to master for myself, all the processes involved, and to mani...

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Photographers along with dentists are the two professions never satisfied with what they do. Every...

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Truthfully, I don't really think of myself as a photographer. I don't have all the disciplines and k...

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He took twelve pictures that day.Within a few days he showed me the contact sheet. "This one has the...

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Kodachrome... it gives us those nice, bright colors,gives us the greens of summers,makes ya think al...

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Picture of Paul Simon
Paul SimonPaul Simon: There Goes Rhymin' Simon

Kodachrome... it gives us those nice, bright colors,gives us the greens of summers,makes ya think al...

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Paul SimonPaul Simon: There Goes Rhymin' Simon

This gesture is one of the motifs of modernity's turn against the principle of imitating nature, tha...

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When do I see a photograph, when a reflection?

This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens...

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Picture of Robert M. Pirsig
Robert M. PirsigZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

If I like a photograph, if it disturbs me, I linger over it. What am I doing, during the whole times...

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Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close y...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly intentional, and probably mu...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorou...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography correspond...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a ch...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not ...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

I imagine that the essential gesture of the Operator is to surprise something or someone (through th...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-rep...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

Another unary photograph is the pornographic photograph (I am not saying the erotic photograph: the ...

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The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vu...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

...The editors of (i)Life(i) rejected Kerész'a photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (apology of thi...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political te...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

The (i)studium(i) is ultimately always coded, the (i)punctum is not)...

Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.

Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first phot...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent tings, but because on each occasion (i)it fi...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster ...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated th...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: ...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it mus...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it repr...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a fam...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it rep...

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Picture of Roland Barthes
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

I know the best moments can never be captured on film, even as I spend nearly half my life trying to...

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

Picture of Salman Rushdie
Salman RushdieThe Ground Beneath Her Feet

When we are reading, a voice comes to us as in the dark and whispers, "Imagine!" Samuel Beckettas to...

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Art is what we call...the thing an artist does.It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whethe...

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Writing, of course, is writing, acting comes from the theater, and cinematography comes from photogr...

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The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thi...

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Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchange...

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Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing – which ...

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Instead of just recording reality photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us ...

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The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality and eventually in one's own.

Life is not about significant details illuminated in a flash fixed forever. Photographs are.

The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemu...

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Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.Photographs are.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having know...

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The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Al...

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To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which doe...

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The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorpho...

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If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an eco...

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A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photograp...

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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel...

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With the daguerreotype everyone will be able to have their portrait taken—formerly it was only the p...

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He's got a box with a demon in it that draws pictures," said Rincewind shortly. "Do what the madman ...

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Realism without naturalism... is a leading motif in Modern Art. There is a move away from the strugg...

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Photography, painting or poetry - those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things; they are m...

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Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers, however, have not understood 'information.' W...

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Picture of Vilem Flusser
Vilem FlusserTowards a Philosophy of Photography

Images are mediations between the world and human beings. Human beings 'ex-ist', i.e. the world is n...

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Vilem FlusserTowards a Philosophy of Photography

The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom - and thus it...

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Picture of Vilem Flusser
Vilem FlusserTowards a Philosophy of Photography

Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing somet...

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There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorpor...

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In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.

A photograph is usually looked at- seldom looked into.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is b...

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A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the de...

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The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!

Sometimes I arrive just when God's ready to have somone click the shutter.

Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment...

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When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be...

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There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures...

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

To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, There are always two people...

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There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

Stirton's work, he says, is now all about investigation. 'You literally are trying to find out what'...

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What's required of me in the field is to feel,' Stirton says with emphasis. 'And trying to take that...

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Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone it has to be it...

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Photography helps people to see.

Does not the very word 'creative' mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act - rather than to b...

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A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at y...

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Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

It’s not lost on me that I’m so busy recording life, I don’t have time to really live it.

Picture of David Sedaris
David SedarisLet's Explore Diabetes with Owls

It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and ...

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A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the e...

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We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White f...

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What was the barn like before it was photographed?' he said. 'What did it look like, how was it diff...

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