A Quote by John Szarkowski

Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is inevitably about photography, the container and vehicle of all its meanings.

John Szarkowski

Quote Topics

About Container Else Inevitably May Meanings Photograph Photography Vehicle Whatever

Quote Author

John Szarkowski
American - Photographer
December 18, 1925 - July 7, 2007

Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is always about time.

Richard Misrach

If I photograph you I don't have you, I have a photograph of you. It's got its own thing. That's really what photography, still photography, is about.

Garry Winogrand

Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?

Susan Sontag

By trying many different approaches, you may slowly reach the point where you say more about yourself than about the objects or the landscapes or the people you photograph - and this is where photography really interests me.

Frank Horvat

One of the magical things about photography is the transformation that takes place when you photograph something. Something that inherently has very little going for it in terms of the interest you take in it, can become infinitely more interesting when rendered as a photograph. It's no longer a building. It's a photograph.

Grant Mudford

The fundamental issue is one of emphasis: you are not a photographer because you are interested in photography...The reason is that photography is only a tool, a vehicle, for expressing or transmitting a passion in something else. It is not the end result.

David Hurn

Press information is serious information, but press information is also manipulated by people who want you to think that this and that happened. So it's the old thing that you still cannot trust photography at all or you have to know who is distributing the photograph. In terms of cell phone photography, I think nobody cares about a photograph anymore because they're taking so many pictures just for fun.

Thomas Ruff

Yet it seems so easy to take a photograph! One forgets that, apart from the technical aspects, photography can be a mental creation and the affirmation of a personality. What is marvelous about a photograph is that its possibilities are infinite; there aren't any subjects 'done to death'.

Gisele Freund

A photograph of a woman crying tells me nothing about grief. Or a photograph of a woman ecstatic tells me nothing about ecstasy. What is the nature of these emotions? The problem with photography is that it only deals with appearances.

Duane Michals

I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph.

Berenice Abbott

Your body is a vehicle of your emotions and a vehicle of feelings and a vehicle of whatever you need to get done in life. And you've got to take care of that vehicle.

Eva Longoria

The sophisticated concern about art sinks before a spontaneous love of reality, and I thank the photograph for being so transparent a vehicle for things.

George Santayana

All records are riddles, and whatever you may want people to think it's about, it may just be throwing them off. And you don't want it to get in the way of what someone else's understanding is. It's not really about anything. At the same time, it will find some meaning.

Tom Waits

As far as the surface is concerned - oil on canvas, conventionally applied - my pictures have little to do with the original photograph. They are totally painting (whatever that may mean). On the other hand, they are so like the photograph that the thing that distinguished the photograph from all other pictures remains intact.

Gerhard Richter

Most importantly, postmodernism comes down on the side of photography and power, not photography as power. As a consequence, photography continues to be conceived as an inconsequential vehicle or passage for real powers that always originate elsewhere.