A Quote by Bill Jay

Why do photographers photograph? To make unreality visible.

Bill Jay

Quote Topics

Make Photograph Photographers Unreality Visible Why

Quote Author

Bill Jay
Writer
August 12, 1940 - 2009

Grey. It makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations: it is really neither visible nor invisible. Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible, in a positively illusionistic way, like a photograph. It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make 'nothing' visible.

Gerhard Richter

Most photographers go and photograph something that they see, that exists, and that somebody else has created - they document it. But fashion photographers have to create what they're going to photograph. We have to go into the thought and build it up, get a girl, get a guy, get a situation, get the house, get the decor. It's the meaning of the word photography: "writing with light."

Mario Testino

In making portraits, I refuse to photograph myself as do so many photographers. My style is the style of the people I photograph.

Lotte Jacobi

Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph. It is inevitable. A photograph without structure is like a sentence without grammar-it is incomprehensible, even inconceivable.

Stephen Shore

The way in which the photograph records experience is also different from the way of language. Language makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a word or sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or listener is deprived of what was said before, and after. But there is no such thing as a photograph taken out of context, for a photograph does not require one. In fact, the point of photography is to isolate images from context, so as to make them visible in a different way.

Neil Postman

Photographers usually want to photograph facts and things. But I'm interested in the nature of the thing itself. A photograph of someone sleeping tells me nothing about their dream state; a photograph of a corpse tells me nothing about the nature of death. My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient.

Duane Michals

We don't understand what photography is doing. We don't understand the power of its rhetoric. We don't understand why the Provoke photographers showed Tokyo city as a ghastly and alien city when it was really going through this period of mega-capitalist growth. It's a very, very, very powerful force, the photograph. People ask me why it has such an ability to captivate us. And I just don't know.

Stuart Franklin

There are many aspects about what and why we photograph: visual pleasure, personal empathy, intellectual stimulation, technical excellence, etc. Serious photographers and artists will try to create works that are original. Over a career period they may develop a singular identity in their images.

Michael Kenna

As an amateur you have an advantage over photographers - you can do as you wish... This should make amateurs the happiest of photographers.

Andreas Feininger

There are photographers whose shows I try to make it my business to see, if I'm in the city. There are photographers I have no interest in at all.

Garry Winogrand

A shudder runs through the viewer of old photographs. For they make visible not the knowledge of the original but the spatial configuration of a moment; what appears in the photograph is not the person but the sum of what can be subtracted from him or her.

Siegfried Kracauer

Sometimes photographers mistake emotion for what makes a great street photograph.

Garry Winogrand

Photographers have to make the clothes look fantastic; that's why we get paid.

Patrick Demarchelier

Visible things can be invisible. However, our powers of thought grasp both the visible and the invisible – and I make use of painting to render thoughts visible.

Rene Magritte

I have always done the opposite of what I was trained to do... Having little technical background, I became a photographer. Adopting a machine, I do my utmost to make it malfunction. For me, to make a photograph is to make an anti-photograph.