A Quote by William J. Mitchell

Photography is and is not a language; language also is and is not a photography.

William J. Mitchell

Quote Topics

Also Language Photography

Quote Author

William J. Mitchell
Australian - Architect
December 15, 1944 - June 11, 2010

The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.

Walker Evans

I like to think of Photography 1.0 as the invention of photography. Photography 2.0 is digital technology and the move from film and paper to everything on a chip. Photography 3.0 is the use of the camera, space, and color and to capture an object in the third dimension.

Edward Burtynsky

We believe we can also show that words do not have exactly the same psychic "weight" depending on whether they belong to the language of reverie or to the language of daylight life-to rested language or language under surveillance-to the language of natural poetry or to the language hammered out by authoritarian prosodies.

Gaston Bachelard

Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

Susan Sontag

The language that photography has is a formal language. Any photographer is doing something formal. If it's formal, then it must be an aesthetic way to communicate.

Sebastiao Salgado

I collect art on a very modest scale. Most of what I have is photography because I just love it and it makes me happy and it looks good in my home. I also have a pretty big collection of art books mainly, again, on photography. A lot of photography monographs, which is great because with photography, the art itself can be reproduced quite well in book form.

Chris Parnell

First you study photography, then you practice photography, then you serve photography, and finally one becomes photography.

Ralph Gibson

When I was in the 12th standard itself, I decided to join the Adyar Film Institute and study photography. I specifically chose photography because I see photography as an applied science. There is an artistic element also in it. If you perfect your scientific element, you can attain certain quality.

Rajiv Menon

Photography is my only language.

Andre Kertesz

I don't hate language. I have my own language, but I also enjoy the English language. Obviously, you don't read a lot of literature and not care about language.

Twyla Tharp

Now that photography is a digital medium, the ghost of painting is coming to haunt it: photography no longer retains a sense of truth. I think that's great, because it frees photography from factuality, the same way photography freed painting from factuality in the mid-nineteenth century.