Top 1200 Old Photographs Quotes & Sayings

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.

What I'm trying to do is make photographs that are universally understood... that cross cultural lines. I want my photographs to be about the basic emotions and feelings that we all experience.

No new photographs until all the old ones have been used up.

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.

The way we dress on 'Mad Men' is so associated with old photographs, with people's parents and grandparents.

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.

Saudi Arabia is so conservative. At first there were photographs of women I took that I couldn't publish - of women without their abayas. So I started writing out little anecdotes about things I couldn't photograph and wove it in with a more obscure picture and called it "moments that got away". I realised these worked as well as the photographs by themselves. There are a lot of photographers who feel the story is all in the photographs but I really believe in weaving in complementary words with the pictures.

When you're on a movie and the production department says, "We need old photographs of you - your character - when you were 20-years-old." I usually tell them it's in storage or I had a fire. I go back to these old photos and there's never a good photo or they're of times that I'm so glad I'm out of. They have nothing to do with the character that you're playing, so it feels false. That's one of the hardest things for me in terms of looking back.

I just hope I remember to tell my kids that they are as happy as I look in my old photographs. And I hope that they believe me.

He who writes must master the rules of grammar. He who shoots photographs needs only to follow the instructions as given by the camera.... This leads to the paradox that the more people shoot photographs, the less they are capable of deciphering them.

I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I've always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.

Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.

Sex is not a subject in my photographs, or would only be if it had to do with romance, sometimes vulnerability. The photographs are quite clearly about happiness, or search for happiness.

Since 1970, I've been using text and ephemera as well as photographs in order to tell stories of one kind or another. There's a thread that runs through all the work that is to do with bearing witness. The photographs are about asking questions, though, not answering them.

From taking photographs of George and Charlotte, I have been struck by the wonderful lack of self-consciousness that you see in photographs of children, without the self-awareness that adults generally feel.

Teaching is only interesting because you struggle with trying to talk about photographs, photographs that work, you see.

As a scientist Miss [Rosalind] Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook. Her photographs are among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken.

To me, photographs are like words and I generally will place many photographs together or print them one inside the other in order to construct a free-floating sentence that speaks about the world I witness.

There is no truth in photography. One can't reproduce an absolute truth. That said, I don't see [my photographs] as being any less truthful than any other photographs.

I don't use photographs because photographs don't give me the kind of information I need.

There are some old photographs from where if you take anything out, even a chicken or a little bird, the magic will disappear.

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.

All we ever see of stars are their old photographs.

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.

I don't really have a treasured possession, but I do love my family's proper old photo album. We all have hundreds of photos on our phones now, but you can't beat the old albums stuffed with black-and-white wedding photographs and 1970s Polaroids.

I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am - because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn't see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her her whole life in her. There's something so moving about someone's whole life.

Old pictures look very rugged and young, and the people in the photographs always seem a lot happier than you are.

It is the photographs that gives one the vivid realization of what actually took place. (On photographs from Abu Ghraib prison.)

A lot of my hair and makeup, and everything I pull for inspiration, is [drawn] from old photographs.

I found that while it was interesting to travel around and take the photographs, I would find that I was more interested in the stories behind the photographs. I was more interested in narrative.

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

I know these will become old stories someday and our pictures will become old photographs and we'll all become somebody's Mom or Dad, but right now, these moments are not stories. This is happening and I'm here.

It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they're related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again.

We are judged, not by the photographs we take, but by the photographs we show.

A good print is really essential. I want to take strong documentary photographs that are as good technically as any of the best technical photographs, and as creative as any of the best fine-art photographs. [...] I don't want to just be a photo essayist; I'm more interested in single images...ones that I feel are good enough to stand on their own.

Photographs are but one link in a potentially endless chain of reduplication; themselves duplicates (of both their objects and, in a sense, their negatives), they are also subject to further duplication, either through the procedures of printing or as objects of still other photographs.

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt

When I first started to take photographs in Czechoslovakia, I met this old gentleman, this old photographer, who told me a few practical things. One of the things he said was, "Josef, a photographer works on the subject, but the subject works on the photographer."

The notion of time bothers me. You look at thirty-year-old photographs and realize how the time has passed.

I make photographs and still make photographs of the natural environment. It's a love because that was part of my life before I was involved in photography.

My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs [rather than paintings, etchings, etc.] that unless one has eyes and sees, they won't be seen - and still everyone will never forget having once looked at them.

I love photographs. I love taking photographs. When I see something that's great, I want to capture that. You put it out there and on a place like Instagram you can put it there and review it later.

A shudder runs through the viewer of old photographs. For they make visible not the knowledge of the original but the spatial configuration of a moment; what appears in the photograph is not the person but the sum of what can be subtracted from him or her.

Research material can turn up anywhere - in a dusty old letter in an archive, a journal or some old photographs you find in a charity shop.

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.

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.

There is always something sad about the old photographs, it is because we know that people in the photos have gone forever.

Words alone are inadequate to express spiritual realities. This book expresses the Red Indian spirit because it combines the best photographs ever taken of the old-time chiefs with some of their best words. You can meet these old-timers and share their wisdom. People who read this book will better understand our sacred ways.

I began to realize that photographs, these still images, have a tremendous power to move your soul. They can change your life by what you choose to get out of them, and I started to collect photographs.

Photographers must learn not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs.

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film.

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

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.

Nobody takes photographs, photographs take you.

I have always loved the amateur side of photography, automatic photographs, accidental photographs with uncentered compositions, heads cut off, whatever. I incite people to make their self-portraits. I see myself as their walking photo booth.

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.

I look back at old photographs and videotapes, and I go, Who was I trying to be? Who was I doing this for?

I had already done a lot of research for Rough Riders, keeping notebooks and old photographs. Some of the books were antiques for that time period, with the covers falling off.

I became an adult in an extreme way. I was recently sorting some old photographs and I found another.

Whenever I am tired of making photographs of drawings, I make drawings of photographs.