A Quote by Trevor Paglen

To go and photograph an airbase is not only to photograph something but it is to insist on one’s right to photograph. You’re flexing that right. — © Trevor Paglen
To go and photograph an airbase is not only to photograph something but it is to insist on one’s right to photograph. You’re flexing that right.
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.
One of the magical things about photography is the transformation that takes place when you photograph something. Something that inherently has very little going for it in terms of the interest you take in it, can become infinitely more interesting when rendered as a photograph. It's no longer a building. It's a photograph.
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.
When you photograph people in color you photograph their clothes. When you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their soul!
I do not photograph for ulterior purposes. I photograph for the thing itself - for the photograph - without consideration of how it may be used.
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.
If you look at a photograph, and you think, 'My isn't that a beautiful photograph,' and you go on to the next one, or 'Isn't that nice light?' so what? I mean what does it do to you or what's the real value in the long run? What do you walk away from it with? I mean, I'd much rather show you a photograph that makes demands on you, that you might become involved in on your own terms or be perplexed by.
I always wanted to make an abstract photograph. I would photograph walls, sports interiors, marks on the walls people made. Even looking back it makes so much sense. It's like it was a fight against the photograph.
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.
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.
What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
When you finish a record, I look at it like a photograph. It's already taken. You got it the way you wanted it to be. You edit it, make sure the light and contrast are right, then you just put it away, and that's your photograph. Then you don't really think about it anymore.
Our editors, I'm afraid, have come to believe that the photograph is an end in itself. They've forgotten that the photograph is only the subsidiary, the little brother, of the word.
As far as the surface is concerned - oil on canvas, conventionally applied - my pictures have little to do with the original photograph. They are totally painting (whatever that may mean). On the other hand, they are so like the photograph that the thing that distinguished the photograph from all other pictures remains intact.
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