A Quote by Andre Bazin

Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.

Andre Bazin

Quote Topics

Arts Freed Likeness Obsession Photography Plastic

Quote Author

Andre Bazin
French - Critic
April 18, 1918 - November 11, 1958

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.

Vik Muniz

Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.

Ralph Gibson

I'll tell you what me scares me is plastic. Plastic bags and plastic bottles and these things. Why does my water have to be in a bloody plastic bottle? The landfill and the ocean. And I don't know, I'm just terrified with the proliferation of plastic.

Helen Mirren

The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.

Alfred Stieglitz

Back in the day, I actually studied photography in Florence for a few months, and my photography teacher took away my digital camera and said, 'No, use this - it's analog and it's square.' It was a Holga camera, a very cheap $3 or $4 plastic camera. And that's what inspired 'Instagram'.

Kevin Systrom

Originally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts it is the most democratic, in so far as it's instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth.

Gregory Crewdson

Moses freed the Jews. Lincoln freed the slaves. I freed the neurotics.

Larry Flynt

Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Photography my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.

Alfred Stieglitz

When I first became interested in photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don't give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself.

Edward Steichen

All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.

Andre Bazin

I was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth my obsession.

Alfred Stieglitz

Geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer.