A Quote by Martha Rosler

Any familiarity with photographic history shows that manipulation is integral to photography.

Martha Rosler

Quote Topics

Any Familiarity History Integral Manipulation Photographic Photography Shows

Quote Author

Martha Rosler
American - Artist
Born: July 29, 1943

I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography—that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms.

Joel Meyerowitz

I wish to state emphatically that I do not believe in any sort of handwork or manipulation on a photographic negative or print.

Alvin Langdon Coburn

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

In most of my photographic pieces I have manipulated the quality of the evidence that people assign to photography, in order to subvert it, or to show that photography lies - that what it conveys is not reality but a set of cultural codes.

Christian Boltanski

French photography was basically poetic, and mine was vulgar and brash and violent, except that there's never any violence in the photographs: it's only in the photographic style.

William Klein

And one has to remember that no photography can pretend to show the truth. A picture only shows a given situation under a very specific perspective, consciously or not, openly or not, relevantly or not. Photographers have to accept they can just convey fragments of illusory realities and relate their own intimate experience of the world. In this process of fictionalising an unreachable truth, it's up to them to impose their doubts about any photographic truth, or accept being impotent pawns in the mediatic game.

Antoine D'Agata

I'm almost violent about that stuff - electronic manipulation of pictures. I think it's an abomination. I reject it all. I mean, it's OK for selling corn flakes or automobiles or for taking pimples out of Elizabeth Taylor's face, but it undermines the thing that photography is about, which is about observation and not about manipulation of images.

Elliott Erwitt

As the possibilities for straightforward photography seem to have become exhausted it has been the photographers who know about the history of art, not simply the history of photography, who have shaped important directions for the future.

Van Deren Coke

If it were possible for any one person or group of persons to go through a photographic finishing plant's work at the end of a day, you could probably pull out the most extraordinary photographic exhibition we've ever seen. On almost any subject. The trouble is to find the things.

Edward Steichen

The photographer must bear the responsibility for his work and its effect …[for] photographic journalism, because of its tremendous audience reached by publications using it, has more influence on public thinking than any other branch of photography.

W. Eugene Smith

Photography has always been capable of manipulation.

Joel Sternfeld

The history of photography needs clearing out. It needs something else now. Because photography always acknowledged there were cameras before photography.