A Quote by Lee Friedlander

Photography is a generous medium.

Lee Friedlander

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Generous Medium Photography

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Lee Friedlander
American - Photographer
Born: July 14, 1934

He was a very generous soul and was exceptionally dedicated to the medium of photography.

John Sexton

No individual photo explains anything. That's what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium. It is the photographer's job to get this medium to say what you need it to say. Because photography has a certain verisimilitude, it has gained a currency as truthful - but photographs have always been convincing lies.

Joel Sternfeld

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

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

It occurs to me that at the beginning one works passionately to learn photography. This takes years, and the craft is usually formed during this period. Then as time passes one finds oneself more in the role of serving the medium... Then, as in the example of several masters that I have been privileged to know personally, it appears that by having devoted oneself totally to the medium, one becomes photography.

Ralph Gibson

Real photography is a wonderfully inclusive, democratic medium, whereas art photography is more often a private pursuit by conmen.

Philip Jones Griffiths

I believe that the medium of photography prevails entirely as an act of faith in the souls of those who love and practice it. And so every photograph becomes another subtle variation on the theme of the medium itself.

Ralph Gibson

... photography is just a medium. It's like a typewriter. Photography as an art doesn't interest me an awful lot; as a participant, though I like to look at it.

Ezra Stoller

Whenever the medium of photography is useful for a particular task, I use it. If another medium is more suitable I use that.

Hans Haacke

Tactility was rejected in conceptual photography. I embrace the possibilities of my medium. Surface, texture, and tactility is something analog photography can do well, or it is something I can do well in analog photography. It can be hard to know what or who is in control.

Torbjørn Rødland

I do note that photography, a despised medium to work in, is full of empty phonies and worthless commercial people. That presents quite a challenge to the man who can take delight in being in a very difficult, disdained medium.

Walker Evans

I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism - real life - the now.

Berenice Abbott

I only wanted Uncle Vernon standing by his own car (a Hudson) on a clear day, I got him and the car. Ialso got a bit of Aunt Mary’s laundry and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on the fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and 78 trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It’s a generous medium, photography.

Lee Friedlander

What to me is anathema - a corpse-like, outmoded hangover - is for photography to be a bad excuse for another medium. ... Is not photography good enough in itself, that it must be made to look like something else, supposedly superior?

Berenice Abbott

Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art.

Berenice Abbott

Photography is the easiest medium with which to be merely competent. Almost anybody can be competent. It's the hardest medium in which to have some sort of personal vision and to have a signature style.

Chuck Close

A Quote by Lee Friedlander

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