A Quote by Beaumont Newhall

The fundamental belief in the authenticity of photographs explains why photographs of people no longer living and of vanished architecture are so melancholy.

Beaumont Newhall

Quote Topics

Architecture Authenticity Belief Explains Fundamental Living Longer Melancholy People Photographs Why

Quote Author

Beaumont Newhall
June 22, 1908 - February 26, 1993

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs-especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past-are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.

Susan Sontag

I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models... I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know.

Francis Bacon

I don't consider [my] photographs fashion photographs. The photographs were for fashion, but at the same time they had an ulterior motive, something more to do with the world in general.

Deborah Turbeville

All photographs are about light. The great majority of photographs record light as a way of describing objects in space. A few photographs are less about objects and more about the space that contains them. Still fewer photographs are about light itself.

John Paul Caponigro

Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant. once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs.

Nicole Krauss

I believe in the resonance and staying power of quiet photographs. These photographs required a certain seeing, but few special techniques, and no tricks. Something though was hard. It was hard being between photographs and not knowing when or how another image would reveal itself.

William Albert Allard

I am not much interested in discovering new territories to photograph. Instead, what I wish my pictures could do is lessen the distance one often feels when looking at landscape photographs... The longer I work, the more important it is to me to make photographs that tell my story as a participant, and not just an observer of the land.

Mark Klett

Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.

Eddie Adams

When I am preparing my 'lookalike' photographs, I think about the character of the real people, because, if the photographs are going to be plausible, you have to convince the viewer that they could have happened.

Alison Jackson

If my people are wiped out you must destroy all photographs of us, because future generations will look at our photographs and be too ashamed at such a crime against humanity.

Davi Kopenawa Yanomami

Photography is linked with death in many different ways. The most immediate and explicit is the social practice of keeping photographs in memory of loved beings who are no longer alive. But there is another real death which each of us undergoes every day, as each day we draw nearer to our own death. Even when the person photographed is still living, that moment when she or he was has forever vanished.

Christian Metz

Though infested with many bewildering anomalies, photographs are considered our best arbiters between our visual perceptions and the memory of them. It is not only their apparent 'objectivity' that grants photographs their high status in this regard, but our belief that in them, fugitive sensation has been laid to rest.

Max Kozloff

We know that photographs inform people. We also know that photographs move people. The photograph that does both is the one we want to see and make.

Sam Abell

Photographs are diary entries That's all they can be. Photographs are just documentations of a day's event. At the same time, they drag the past into the present and also continue into the future. A day's occurrence evokes both the past and the future. That's why I want to clearly date my pictures. It's actually frustrating, that's why I now photograph the future