A Quote by Roy DeCarava
A photograph is a photograph, a picture, an image, an illusion complete within itself, depending neither on words, reproductive processes or anything else for its life, its reason for being.
Related Quotes
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.
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.
I do not photograph for ulterior purposes. I photograph for the thing itself - for the photograph - without consideration of how it may be used.
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.
To the vast majority of people a photograph is an image of something within their direct experience: a more-or-less factual reality. It is difficult for them to realize that the photograph can be the source of experience, as well as the reflection of spiritual awareness of the world and of self.
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.
What if I said that every photograph I made was set up? From the photograph, you can't prove otherwise. You don't know anything from the photograph about how it was made, really.
Someone said to me, early on in film school... if you can photograph the human face you can photograph anything, because that is the most difficult and most interesting thing to photograph.
The person who looks at a photograph as a complete picture, unable to say anything about anything except the facts which existed at the moment of exposure, does not see very far.
If you finish like a photograph, on the other hand, the picture has as much personality as a photograph.
Perishability in a photograph is important in a picture. If a photograph looks perishable we say, "Gee, I'm glad I have that moment."
You've got a number of things that take place that are peculiar to still photography. One: how a picture looks - what you photograph is responsible for how a photograph looks. In other words, it's responsible for the form.
...the logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph.
When a person looks at a photograph you've taken, they will always think of themselves, their own life experience. They will relate your photograph to their memories. That interplay is where a picture comes alive and grows into something. They function like invitations.
There are a lot of ways to talk about the life of a photograph. You can talk about the afterlife of a photograph, and in the end I talk about that, with the Richard Prince picture. But mainly, what I dedicated the book to being about was how photographs begin their life, and where they begin it. And they begin it with the photographer's imagination and instinct and experience.
The photograph, after all, is just a photograph. Words will determine its meaning and status.
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