A Quote by Olga Tokarczuk

The first photograph I ever experienced consciously is a picture of my mother from before she gave birth to me. Unfortunately, it's a black-and-white photograph, which means that many of the details have been lost, turning into nothing but gray shapes.
I believe that the black-and-white photograph, or rather the gray zones in the black-and-white photograph, stand for this territory that is located between life and death.
When you photograph people in color you photograph their clothes. When you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their soul!
Black and white means photography to me. It's much easier to take a good color photograph, but you can get more drama into a black and white one.
I have never seen a picture of my mother. My mother's family never owned a photograph of her, which tells you everything you need to know about where I'm from and what the world was like for the people who gave me life.
How foolish of me to believe that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearance of trees and automobiles, and people with a reality itself, and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.
Perhaps the first photograph ever taken, Niépce's view of the rooftops over Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, was a truly pure photograph. The second one he took, he was already comparing nature to the first photograph he had taken.
I have just one black and white photograph left of my mother when she was younger. She was 17 when it was taken and beautiful with wispy curls and eyes that shone like dark marbles.
I did photograph Angelina Jolie up in Vancouver when she was making 'Life Or Something Like It', and they gave me the drawings they wanted me to photograph of her up there, but she didn't really care for them that much, and ultimately they weren't even used.
When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and, along with them, the public sighed: 'Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert .... Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!'
A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of mother or father taken many years ago. You see them as you remember them. But as people live on, they change completely. That is why I think a photograph can be kind.
You can talk about a caption underneath a photograph being true or false, because there is a linguistic element. You can claim that a photograph is a picture of a horse or a cow, but it is the sentence that expresses the claim, which is true or false, not the photograph.
A photograph records both the thing in front of the camera and the conditions of its making... A photograph is also a document of the state of mind of the photographer. And if you were to extend the idea of the set-up photograph beyond just physically setting up the picture, I would argue that the photographer wills the picture into being.
Today a lot of things are so celebrity-oriented; it's only because it's celebrity and the photograph is lost. To me it's important to have an image that is a photograph first, not about necessarily who that person is.
In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
I walk in the park every day, and when people come and ask for a photograph, I say, "Oh, my God!" It means they recognize that I have been doing something right and they want to have a photograph taken with me.
A photograph is a photograph. When I am making a picture I am just interested in making a very interesting photograph. I don't care where it's going to go.
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