Quotes about Photography

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

“Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.”

“The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.”

“I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term -- meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching -- there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.”

“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”

“The photographic image... is a message without a code.”

“Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject.”

“Photographers never have much incentive to show the world as it is.”

“No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.”

“The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.”

“I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.”

“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”

“If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.”

“At least the box is full of something useful. [On his photo gracing a box of Raisin Bran]”

“Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.”

“The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.”

“In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.”

“Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.”

“It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph -- only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.”

“Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.”

“The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.”

“The magic of photography is metaphysical. What you see in the photograph isn't what you saw at the time. The real skill of photography is organized visual lying.”

“The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.”

“A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there -- even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.”

“The camera is a killing chamber, which speeds up the time it claims to be conserving. Like coffins exhumed and priced open, the photographs put on show what we were and what we will be again.”

“I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive. I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.”

“It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.”

“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.”

“The camera has an interest in turning history into spectacle, but none in reversing the process. At best, the picture leaves a vague blur in the observer's mind; strong enough to send him into battle perhaps, but not to have him understand why he is going.”

“Photography suits the temper of this age -- of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately.”