A Quote by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Photography, when used as a representational art, is not a mere copy of nature. This is proved by the rarity of the 'good' photograph.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Quote Topics

Art Copy Good Mere Nature Photograph Photography Proved Rarity Used

Quote Author

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
Hungarian - Painter
June 20, 1895 - November 24, 1946

The invention of photography destroyed the canons of representational, imitative art.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

No one can really explain in a rational way what makes a good photograph or a bad photograph... This is why the art world will not throw billions of dollars at photography the way it has at painting; and that is what makes it an exciting medium.

David Wojnarowicz

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

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

A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.

Paul Gauguin

The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art.

Clement Greenberg

I have a hunch that our obsession with photography arises from an unspoken pessimism; it is our nature to believe the good things will not last. . . But photos provide a false sense of security> like our flawed memory, they are guaranteed to fade. . . . We take photographs in order to remember, but it is in the nature of a photograph to forget (pg 157)

Michelle Richmond

There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough - there has to be vision, and the two together can make a good photograph.

Robert Frank

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.

Tina Modotti

Has it led you to the conclusion that photography is an art ? Or it is simply a means of recording ? "I'm glad you asked that. I've been wanting to say this for years. Is cooking an art ? Is talking an art ? Is even painting an art ? It is artfulness that makes art, not the medium itself. Of course photography is an art - when it is in the hands of artists."

Aaron Scharf

Photography is the most transparent of the art mediums devised or discovered by man. It is probably for this reason that it proves so difficult to make the photograph transcend its almost inevitable function as document and act as a work of art as well.

Clement Greenberg

If art is the poetic interpretation of nature, photography is the exact translation; it is exactitude in art or the complement of art. (1854)

Charles Negre

By exposing the multiplicity, the facticity, the repetition and stereotype at the heart of every aesthetic gesture, photography deconstructs the possibility of differentiating between the original and the copy. [Photography calls] into question the whole concept of the uniqueness of the art object, the originality of the author, the coherence of the oeuvre within which it was made, and the individuality of so-called self-expression.

Rosalind E. Krauss

It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.

Ansel Adams

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.