Top 1200 Documentary Photography Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

We exaggerate the difference between documentary and fiction. I think that on some level a fiction film is also a documentary on the actors. You can't wash away your life's history, which is written on your face, unless you get a facelift.

Since high school, I've always been super into photography. I event went to Valley College for photography.

Photography's relationship with pornography is as old as photography. That kind of unholy relationship is formed from the very beginning, and there's a reason why: it's thoroughly enjoyable to be that voyeuristic. Voyeurism is a very old modality, and most of the history of photography is in some way related voyeurism.

I've been encouraging documentary filmmakers to use more and more humor, and they're loath to do that because they think if it's a documentary it has to be deadly serious - it has to be like medicine that you're supposed to take. And I think it's what keeps the mass audience from going to documentaries.

I chose makeup over photography because there was something very sensual about makeup that I loved. But photography was always in the back of my mind. That was always something that I was very connected with: looking at magazines, enjoying photography, and then taking pictures myself when I was a kid.

Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.

Photography was a blessing because it filled my time. If I had to start over, I'd pursue photography - probably to the exclusion of acting.

I didn't do well in high school, but I took photography, and I loved being able to capture moments. It led to more and more photography, and fashion was the angle into photography for me. It was incredible to see photographs by Irving Penn or Helmut Newton. I was really intrigued by that, and that's what led me to New York City.

You kind of form a bond with your subjects, in a way. You're in it together. To a degree that people don't realize, documentary films - or at least the kind of documentary films I'm interested in - are a collaborative undertaking with the subjects.

Real photography is a wonderfully inclusive, democratic medium, whereas art photography is more often a private pursuit by conmen.

[Photography] remains servile to a thoughtless vision of the world... As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it.

I've never seen myself as a documentary filmmaker. I see myself as a filmmaker, period, and I am interested in drama as well as in documentary.

If it doesn’t have ambiguity, don’t bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography - the mendacity of photography. It’s got to have some kind of peculiarity in it, or it’s not interesting to me.

The French have a different take on photography than Americans do. They consider photography to be absolutely parallel to literature. That often makes for a deeper perception of the work.

It's good to be around people who see [photography] as a reasonable enterprise when everyone in the neighborhood may think it's ridiculous. (On the benefit of teaching photography)

Photography promises an enhanced mastery of nature, but photography also threatens conflagration and anarchy.

Photography has always been a passion of mine, but I began to study light field photography when I was in the Ph.D. program at Stanford University.

Photography is Photography; And in it's purity and innocence is far too uniquely, valuable and beautiful to be spoilt by making it imitate something else.

When I hear the word 'documentary,' I don't think certain things should be left out. You've got to keep it 100 percent as much as you can, unless your group has a meeting beforehand and says, 'Yo - don't say this, 'cause boom, boom, boom.' Other than that, it's a documentary so let's document, you know what I mean?

The enemy of photography is the convention, the fixed rules of 'how to do'. The salvation of photography comes from the experiment.

Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I'm looking for. Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it.

This whole business of documentary being a second-class citizen is bullshit. A documentary can be as interesting, as dramatic, as sad, as funny, blah, blah, blah, as a fiction movie. Or it can be as awful as a fiction movie!

The key fact missed most often by social scientists utilizing documentary films for data, is this: documentary films are not found or reported things; they're made things.

Since I come from documentary background and my father is a documentary filmmaker, for me the core essence of cinema is it's social statement. It is somewhat similar to the work of a journalist, just on a different level. This is the kind of cinema I enjoy.

To us, the difference between the #? photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as separating photography as art from #? photography as document. But both are logical extensions of what photography means: note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world, from every possible angle.

I was attracted to photography because it was technical, full of gadgets, and I was obsessed with science. But at some point around fifteen or sixteen, I had a sense that photography could provide a bridge from the world of science to the world of art, or image. Photography was a means of crossing into a new place I didn't know.

I saw this documentary he did years ago called 'Fade to Black.' I was always a Jay Z fan - I liked Jay Z - but after I saw that documentary, I loved Jay Z. I realized how intelligent he was.

It has been important to me, as an historian of photography, to understand photography by photographing.

I am a former economist. I never went to photography school to learn photography.

When I hear the word "documentary," I don't think certain things should be left out. You've got to keep it 100 percent as much as you can, unless your group has a meeting beforehand and says, "Yo -- don't say this, 'cause boom, boom, boom." Other than that, it's a documentary so let's document, you know what I mean?

Of course I will continue photography. I love photography. But when you become old, it's too much.

To me, traditional approaches to doing photography and thinking about photography feel increasingly anachronistic.

I came up in photography, and Dust Bowl-era photography is a lot of the reason that I got behind the camera in the first place.

I love photography... I'd like to write a show about photography.

For me photography was the means to the end, but they made it the most important thing. (On the discovery of X-ray photography.)

The first half of the 20th century belongs to Picasso, and the second half is about photography. They said digital would kill photography because everyone can do it, but they said that about the box brownie in 1885 when it came out. It makes photography interesting because everyone thinks they can take a picture.

I seem to be always returning to photography in my poetry. I guess you could say that I'm documenting the personal history and relationship I have with photography.

Color was the palette of commercial photography and snapshot photography.

I've been the head of the photography program at Bard College for over 30 years, and I take that as seriously as I do my photography. My time is devoted to that too.

Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.

I never intended to be a documentary filmmaker. I think I became a documentary filmmaker because I had trouble writing, and I had trouble finishing things.

We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more. Even Vagabond - it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true.

I didn't choose photography. Photography chose me.

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.

Photography should be redefined. It's largely technical... Photography is just unbelievably limiting. I always think of David Bailey and all the fashion photographers - they overlap, you can't always tell who did it. I don't really even like photography all that much. I just think it's so overdone.

Maybe every two films you need to do documentary to tell what you really want to tell and not be limited by the medium. With documentary you don't create the reality you have to hunt the reality.

When I graduated from Brown after majoring in women's studies, I made my first PBS documentary, 'Women of Substance.' My first feature documentary was called 'American Hollow,' which I did for HBO and was at the Sundance Film Festival.

Photography was inspired by painting, cinema by theatre and photography, I don't believe that any new art form was ever created from scratch.

I assumed from the outset that photography was already art, and that I and other people working in photography were artists. I understand now that this was a minority point of view.

Photography, if there is photography, is already snapped, already shot, in the very interior of things and for all points of space.

Photography is usually viewed as a solitary activity, but the truth of the matter is that people love to shoot together, compare notes, and just have fun with photography.

I’m more interested in a photography that is ‘unfinished’ - a photography that is suggestive and can trigger a conversation or dialogue. There are pictures that are closed, finished, to which there is no way in.

Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I'm looking for. Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it...

I look at the camera as sort of a missing link between motion picture photography and still photography.

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.

My photography is very European. In America, I always get the sense that people are comforted by understanding what they're looking at. Photography's quite clear here [in the U.S.], it's very well-explained. My photography's perhaps not as well-explained.

I don't even like photography at all. I'm just doing photography until I can do something better.

Photography and writing are marvelous distractions from painting. I might even have found movies more interesting than photography. I tried it a bit, but not enough.

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.

As an avid photographer, I also took advantage of the latest technology in photography - digital photography - to post photos on my website on a daily basis.