A Quote by Don McCullin

Many people misunderstand me - I'm quite happy to be called a photographer. All of a sudden, the art world has caught up with photography, and they are trying to hijack us.

Don McCullin

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Art Art World Caught Caught Up Happy Many Me Misunderstand People Photographer Photography Quite Sudden Trying Understand Me Up Us World

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Don McCullin
British - Photographer
Born: October 9, 1935

To us, the difference between the #? photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as separating photography as art from #? photography as document. But both are logical extensions of what photography means: note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world, from every possible angle.

Susan Sontag

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

Photography for me has been tremendously good, because I'm not a very sociable person. I'm happy reading or sitting in the library or going for walks. So photography has brought me in contact with people and made me understand people in a way that I probably wouldn't have done if I hadn't been a photographer. And so I'm grateful for that, really.

Stuart Franklin

When you say documentary, you have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. It should be documentary style, because documentary is police photography of a scene and a murder ... that's a real document. You see, art is really useless, and a document has use. And therefore, art is never a document, but it can adopt that style. I do it. I'm called a documentary photographer. But that presupposes a quite subtle knowledge of this distinction.

Walker Evans

Photography has always reminded me of the second child.. trying to prove itself. The fact that it wasn't really considered an art.. that it was considered a craft.. has trapped almost every serious photographer.

Richard Avedon

Photography has an amazing ability to capture the fine detail of surface textures. But far too often these intricate patterns are loved by the photographer for their own sake. The richness of texture fascinates the eye and the photographer falls easy prey to such quickly-caught complexities. The designs mean nothing in themselves and are merely pictorially attractive abstractions. A central problem in contemporary photography is to bring about a wider significance in purely textural imagery.

Arthur Tress

I think when people struggle with the problem of trying to understand the art world as an idea, they misunderstand it. They think it's a world of visionaries or opportunists. But it also includes people who want to take part in this cultural exercise but don't have the required stuff, they don't have the ideas or the production.

Liam Gillick

It's quite difficult to write about photography as a photographer. A lot of better photographers than me have declined to do it.

Stuart Franklin

Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me.

William Eggleston

What's happened is that the digital age has made photography more accessible to people. Everyone is a photographer. But to do it [photography] at a certain level, well, there's a skill to it. Still, it's a good time for photography now.

Bryan Adams

The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.

Susan Sontag

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

[Photography] can be tiny, on your phone, or it can be a billboard, or a film-sized projection, or printed in a magazine. I don't think we've been in a time before when so much photography is available in so many formats, when everybody is a photographer.

Christian Marclay

I was brought up on art. My father thought I had a great hand at art and sent me to art school. But he did not want me to become a photographer.

Imogen Cunningham

Black people don't hijack planes, alright? Now I'll be the first to admit, we steal a lot of stuff, but we do not hijack planes. In fact, in the history of aviation, a black person has never even attempted to hijack a plane. Do you want to know why? Because you can't sell an airplane.

Alonzo Bodden

There is more in art, with an apology to that much abused word, as applied to photography, than startling display lines, on mounts and signs announcing artist Photographer, Artistic Photography Studio, etc., and the lower the standard the more frantic the claim.

Gertrude Kasebier

A Quote by Don McCullin

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