A Quote by Abelardo Morell

...the very basics of photography [can] be potent and strange. So why not make pictures about the medium itself and see where they would take me? — © Abelardo Morell
...the very basics of photography [can] be potent and strange. So why not make pictures about the medium itself and see where they would take me?
Photography is a very forgiving medium. Anybody that can afford film and a camera can make pictures.
Digital photography and Photoshop have made it very easy for people to take pictures. It's a medium that allows a lot of mediocre stuff to get through.
I do note that photography, a despised medium to work in, is full of empty phonies and worthless commercial people. That presents quite a challenge to the man who can take delight in being in a very difficult, disdained medium.
What to me is anathema - a corpse-like, outmoded hangover - is for photography to be a bad excuse for another medium. ... Is not photography good enough in itself, that it must be made to look like something else, supposedly superior?
I chose makeup over photography because there was something very sensual about makeup that I loved. But photography was always in the back of my mind. That was always something that I was very connected with: looking at magazines, enjoying photography, and then taking pictures myself when I was a kid.
I can appreciate the idea that with e-books more people would publish, the work would be easier to disseminate, and that it could even be interactive. Being a lover of photography, I especially like the idea that you could include lots of pictures - full-color pictures - with your writing. That to me is exciting! We'll all have to stay tuned to see what develops.
Some of my pictures are poem-like in the sense that they are very condensed, haiku-lik. There are others that, if they were poetry, would be more like Ezra Pound. There is a lot of information in most of my pictures, but not the kind of information you see in documentary photography. There is emotional information in my photographs.
The thing that interests me about photography, and why it's different from all other media, is that it's the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece.
Photography really is all about lines, and so is clothing. I worked for Oberto Gili for a couple of years after I was at ICP; we worked in fashion, travel, interior design, everything. I was inspired by his styling choices within fashion photography, and I think those experiences helped steer me towards fashion design. I love photography as a medium, so I think I will always take inspiration from it.
To know whether photography is or is not an art matters little. What is important is to distinguish between good and bad photography. By good is meant that photography which accepts all the limitations inherent in photographic technique and takes advantage of the possibilities and characteristics the medium offers. By bad photography is mean that which is done, one may say, with a kind of inferiority complex, with no appreciation of what photography itself offers: but on the contrary, recurring to all sorts of imitations.
Photography is a very lonely medium. There’s a kind of beautiful loneliness in voyeurism. And that’s why I’m a photographer.
We think of photography as pictures. And it is. But I think of photography as ideas. And do the pictures sustain your ideas or are they just good pictures? I want to have an experience in the world that is a deepening experience, that makes me feel alive and awake and conscious.
I believe that the medium of photography prevails entirely as an act of faith in the souls of those who love and practice it. And so every photograph becomes another subtle variation on the theme of the medium itself.
This idea of imposing an order is very interesting to me. Photography is in essence an analytic medium. … In photography, you start with the whole world and every decision you make imposes an order on it. The question is to what extent it’s an idealized order I’m imposing or is it an order that grows out of what the world looks like.
It's possible to think of photography as an act of editing, a matter of where you put your rectangle pull it out or take it away. Sometimes people ask me about films, cameras and development times in order to find out how to do landscape photography. The first thing I do in landscape photography is go out there and talk to the land - form a relationship, ask permission, it's not about going out there like some paparazzi with a Leica and snapping a few pictures, before running off to print them.
It would be so easy to lose the plot now. It's not about achieving something for its own sake, and taking pictures for their own sake. But to make conscious decisions and choices, and it includes this constant questioning - Why am I taking pictures? Because really, the world is... it has pictures enough. I mean, there are enough pictures out there.
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