A Quote by Susan Sontag

Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.

Susan Sontag

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First First Of All Photography Seeing Way

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Susan Sontag
American - Author
January 16, 1933 - December 28, 2004

Photography has become so fundamental to the way we see that 'photography' and 'seeing' are becoming more and more synonymous. The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge to curators, practitioners, and critics.

Trevor Paglen

"You know you are seeing such a photograph if you say to yourself, "I could have taken that picture. I've seen such a scene before, but never like that." It is the kind of photography that relies for its strengths not on special equipment or effects but on the intensity of the photographer's seeing. It is the kind of photography in which the raw materials-light, space, and shape-are arranged in a meaningful and even universal way that gives grace to ordinary objects."

Sam Abell

First you study photography, then you practice photography, then you serve photography, and finally one becomes photography.

Ralph Gibson

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

Photography is solitary and there are lags between seeing with your eyes and seeing through the lens, and then seeing the image on your computer... I often see things after the fact. So there’s a revelatory quality. And this definitely includes a sense of playfulness, because you’re not sure what the consequences are going to be.

Christian Marclay

We could teach photography as a way to make a living, and best of all, somehow to get students to experience for themselves photography as a way of life.

Minor White

I'm shooting a gangbanger, but as a dignified man. That's pretty much what war photography did: seeing images of soldiers in a dignified way. They might have been killers in Vietnam, but I'm seeing another side of them, and looking at images of the the American soldiers, also the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong - I never saw an enemy.

Jamel Shabazz

...There are too many people studying it [photography] now who are never going to make it. You can't give them a formula for making it. You have to have it in you first, you don't learn it. The seeing eye is the important thing.

Imogen Cunningham

Actually, I didn't study photography at first. I went to school for painting my first year, poetry my second year, graphic design my third and fourth year, and photography my fifth.

Ryan McGinley

Humans have changed the landscape so much, but images of the sea could be shared with primordial people. I just project my imagination on to the viewer, even the first human being. I think first and then imagine some scenes. Then I go out and look for them. Or I re-create these images with my camera. I love photography because photography is the most believable medium. Painting can lie, but photography never lies: that is what people used to believe.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

I like to think of Photography 1.0 as the invention of photography. Photography 2.0 is digital technology and the move from film and paper to everything on a chip. Photography 3.0 is the use of the camera, space, and color and to capture an object in the third dimension.

Edward Burtynsky

I came up in photography, and Dust Bowl-era photography is a lot of the reason that I got behind the camera in the first place.

Rachel Morrison

Good photography is not about Zone Printing or any other Ansel Adams nonsense. It's just about seeing. You either see or you don't see. The rest is academic. Photography is simply a function of noticing things. Nothing more.

Elliott Erwitt

It was only after a while, after photographing mines and clear-cutting of forests in Maine, that I realized I was looking at the components of photography itself. Photography uses paper made from trees, water, metals, and chemistry. In a way, I was looking at all these things that feed into photography.

David Maisel

Human experience comes suspended in the sickly-sweet amniotic fluid of commercial photography. And a world normally animated by abrasive differences is blithely reduced to a single, homogeneous National Geographic way of seeing.

Geoffrey Batchen

I had a teacher when I was in college, and he was the first person who liked my photos and said, 'The way you look at girls is your own way of seeing.' He was the first person who really gave me the confidence to try something.

Sofia Coppola

A Quote by Susan Sontag

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