A Quote by Thomas Ruff

In photography, you always have both the medium and the depicted subject at the same time.

Thomas Ruff

Quote Topics

Always Both Medium Photography Same Same Time Subject Time

Quote Author

Thomas Ruff
German - Photographer
Born: February 10, 1958

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

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

In this, photography is the same thing as love. When my gaze, diving into the sea as my subject, converges with the act of photography, hot sparks fly at the point of intersection.

Shomei Tomatsu

The decisive moment, the popular Henri Cartier-Bresson approach to photography in which a scene is stopped and depicted at a certain point of high visual drama, is now possible to achieve at any time. One's photographs, years later, may be retroactively rephotographed by repositioning the photographer or the subject of the photograph, or by adding elements that were never there before but now are made to exist concurrently in a newly elastic sense of space and time.

Fred Ritchin

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

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

This is the same problem I have with digital photography. The potential is always remarkable. But the medium never settles. Each year there is a better camera to buy and new software to download. The user never has time to become comfortable with the tool. Consequently too much of the work is merely about the technology. The HDR and QTVR fads are good examples. Instead of focusing on the subject, users obsess over RAW conversion, Photoshop plug-ins, and on and on. For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter.

Alec Soth

Subjects who reciprocally recognize each other as such, must consider each other as identical, insofar as they both take up the position of subject; they must at all times subsume themselves and the other under the same category. At the same time, the relation of reciprocity of recognition demands the non-identity of one and the other, both must also maintain their absolute difference, for to be a subject implies the claim of individuation.

Jurgen Habermas

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

Photography is like a found object. A photographer never makes an actual subject; they just steal the image from the world... Photography is a system of saving memories. It's a time machine, in a way, to preserve the memory, to preserve time.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Photography, of course, is the perfect medium for the investigation. It can reveal the truth of present day specifics and particularities, while at the same time, by conscious choice of lighting and pictorial structure, suggest the aesthetic legacy of the past.

John Pfahl

The purpose of photography is the transmission of a visualized sector of life through the medium of the camera into a mental process that starts with the photographer's thinking about the subject he photographs and is continued in the mind of the spectator.

Roman Vishniac

Photography has arrived at the point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject. In any case, a certain aspect of the subject now belongs to the domain of photography. So shouldn't painters profit from their newly acquired liberty, and make use of it to do other things?

Pablo Picasso

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

I always believed that photography was subjective, interpretive and certainly did not represent the truth, but I did think that its status as a societal and historical referent needed to be both safeguarded and illuminated....now photojournalism is devolving into yet another medium perceived as intending to shock, titillate, sell, distort.

Fred Ritchin

In a world in which everything is subject to the passing of time, art alone is both subject to time and yet victorious over it.