A Quote by Tina Modotti

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.
I collect art on a very modest scale. Most of what I have is photography because I just love it and it makes me happy and it looks good in my home. I also have a pretty big collection of art books mainly, again, on photography. A lot of photography monographs, which is great because with photography, the art itself can be reproduced quite well in book form.
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.
What to me is anathema - a corpse-like, outmoded hangover - is for photography to be a bad excuse for another medium. ... Is not photography good enough in itself, that it must be made to look like something else, supposedly superior?
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.
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.
What's happened is that the digital age has made photography more accessible to people. Everyone is a photographer. But to do it [photography] at a certain level, well, there's a skill to it. Still, it's a good time for photography now.
Has it led you to the conclusion that photography is an art ? Or it is simply a means of recording ? "I'm glad you asked that. I've been wanting to say this for years. Is cooking an art ? Is talking an art ? Is even painting an art ? It is artfulness that makes art, not the medium itself. Of course photography is an art - when it is in the hands of artists."
Tactility was rejected in conceptual photography. I embrace the possibilities of my medium. Surface, texture, and tactility is something analog photography can do well, or it is something I can do well in analog photography. It can be hard to know what or who is in control.
Computer photography won't be photography as we know it. I think photography will always be chemical.
As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used - as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts - to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera.
First you study photography, then you practice photography, then you serve photography, and finally one becomes photography.
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.
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.
I don't know that there were any rules for documentary photography. As a matter of fact, I don't think the term was even very precise. So as far as I'm concerned, the kind of photography I did in the FSA was the kind of photography I still do today, because it is based on passionate concern for the human condition. That is the basis of all the work that I do.
There is a lot of social photography being done now to point to the untruth of photography. It's getting very dull now. So, okay photography doesn't tell the truth. So what? Everyone has known this forever.
Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!