Top 1200 Documentary Photography Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

Contemporary art photography, or, more specifically, what I would term mainstream art photography, represents for the most part the mining of an exhausted lode.

Photography is more than a window for me. Photography is more like a space that tries to capture situations.

I think what I love about the documentary process is that you bring yourself to the documentary. And hopefully that makes you ask good questions, and hopefully that makes you reveal a little bit about yourself as well.

I think when you look at architectural photography it doesn't help to have piles of old clothes lying on the floor. Architectural photography sets up an artifice.

I wanted to be a scientist. I did a thesis on lions. But I realised photography can show things writing can't. Lions were my professor of photography.

It's entirely ridiculous and hopeless to try to compete with somebody who made such a huge contribution to photography... I knew when I went into photography that I would be compared to my mother. I thought to myself, what can I do about that?

The traditional difficulty of balancing the mechanical with the imaginative schools of photography still operates. In schools of photography meaningful art education is often lacking and on the strength of their technical ability alone students, deprived of a richer artistic training, are sent forth inculcated with the belief that they are creative photographers and artists. It is yet a fact that today, as in the past, the most inspiring and provocative works in photography come as much (and probably more) from those who are in the first place artists.

Photography has always been associated with death. Reality is colorful, yet early photography always took the color out of reality and made it black-and-white. Color is life; black-and-white is death. There was a ghost hidden in the invention of 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.

Now documentary evidence is acceptable. What does that mean? If you have documentary evidence that a person served as a guard in one of the death camps and the documents have been authenticated, that is grounds to charge the person with crimes against humanity. And that's why you see the spate of trials previously, for example, in the '70s and the '80s, even in the low '90s. That was not the case until the change in the law.

In a world and a life that moves so fast, photography just makes the sound go out and it makes you stop and take a pause. Photography calms me.

I think photography has a huge potential to expand a circle of knowledge. There's a reality that we are all the more linked globally and we have to know about each other. Photography gives us that opportunity.

If I didn't have a conviction that a serious painter can portray Nature more profoundly than the best colour photography, I'd probably give it all up or go abstract or take up photography.

In a one-hour documentary, you can tell maybe ten stories. That's how the documentary is structured. I wrote to forty of the greatest historians of both African and African-American history, and hired them as consultants. I had them submit what they thought were the indispensable stories, the ones they felt this series absolutely had to include.

My hat's off to documentary filmmakers. I don't know if I'm ever going back to it. You're treated like a second-class citizen at most film festivals. You take the bus while everybody else is flown first-class. If you're a feature film director, you're put in a five-star hotel, and if you're a documentary director, you stay in a Motel 6.

I never liked photography. Not for the sake of photography. I like the object. I like the photographs when you hold them in your hand.

I'm a huge fan of the Ken Burns documentary style, big time. I love documentaries full stop. I'm a big documentary fan. That's my reality. I don't like reality TV. I like it like that.

I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism - real life - the now.

Perhaps 'photography' has become so all-pervasive that it no longer makes sense to think about it as a discreet practice or field of inquiry. In other words, perhaps 'photography,' as a meaningful cultural trope, is over.

My paintings have an ongoing dialogue with photography. There are many painters who would say the same, I'm sure. The difference is that I'm thinking more about the temporal aspect of photography, rather than the visual.

I find it some of the hardest photography and the most challenging photography I've ever done. It's a real challenge to work with the natural features and the natural light.

Photography is a mechanical device; photomontage is a piece of work done with the products of photography. This entire process forms one whole... If I assemble documents and juxtapose them with intelligence and skill, the effect of agitation and propaganda on the masses will be enormous.

The fundamental issue is one of emphasis: you are not a photographer because you are interested in photography...The reason is that photography is only a tool, a vehicle, for expressing or transmitting a passion in something else. It is not the end result.

There's a real difference between a documentary that was all about facts and history and information. People just don't get as engaged in that kind of documentary - they don't fall in love, they don't cry, they don't forget who they are, they don't ride with you. As we realized we had richer, vérité kind of people, what we wanted to do is focus in on the vérité story.

In most of my photographic pieces I have manipulated the quality of the evidence that people assign to photography, in order to subvert it, or to show that photography lies - that what it conveys is not reality but a set of cultural codes.

Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools !), then photography and art are the same thing.

Painting from life is a completely different monster, which I like. But because I've been painting from photography for so long, I've learned my best moves from photography.

The photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what's going on and what's happening outside.

To me, photography is 90% a retrospective experience. There's the part of pursuing the image, and exposing the film, but once you make the exposure, you're always looking backwards in time. I like that aspect of photography.

You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. (In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz)

Without my photography life would be boring. Photography adds an extra dimension to my life. Somehow it confirms my place in the world

There's this idea that photography is a kind of testimony and therefore we're forbidden to tell lies with it. I think that's nonsense. Photography isn't testimony.

Originally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts it is the most democratic, in so far as it's instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth.

... photography is just a medium. It's like a typewriter. Photography as an art doesn't interest me an awful lot; as a participant, though I like to look at it.

Photography brought a lot to painting because it forced artists to think about what painting could do that photography couldn't.

The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.

Photography today is accomplishing a lofty mission in which every German should collaborate by buying a camera. The German people is ahead of every other in the technical domain and, thanks to its exceptional qualities, the small camera has conquered the whole world... Much is at stake here from the point of view of popular consumer goods and, furthermore, photography has a particularly important political role to play. (Addressing the Berlin Photography Fair, 1933)

I realized that one of the differences between news photography and dance photography was that the former has to tell a specific story, whereas all a dance photograph had to be was visually interesting.

Humans have changed the landscape so much, but images of the sea could be shared with primordial people. I just project my imagination on to the viewer, even the first human being. I think first and then imagine some scenes. Then I go out and look for them. Or I re-create these images with my camera. I love photography because photography is the most believable medium. Painting can lie, but photography never lies: that is what people used to believe.

I started photography more or less by accident when I was already 27. I was taken on as an assistant by a photographer who was a friend of a friend and I very quickly understood the potential of expression in photography.

When assignments were over, photography continued. One of the primary reasons it did was that I wanted and needed to have fresh work. Also, it's very stimulating to be around non-professional photographers. They're the ones with the purest flame burning about their photography. I appreciate that.

Photography is a holding together of opposites: Light and dark, beautiful and ugly, sublime and banal, concious and unconcious. I am still struck by the power of photography to strip away the bark of the mind and reveal the visceral workings underneath.

There's a reductiveness to photography, of course - in the framing of reality and the exclusion of chunks of it (the rest of the world, in fact). It's almost as if the act of photography bears some relationship to how we consciously manage the uncontrollable set of possibilities that exist in life.

In photography we possess an extraordinary instrument for reproduction. But photography is much more than that. Today it is [a method for bringing optically] some thing entirely new into the world.

I never felt in competition with anybody in war photography. You're lucky to get your ass in and out again. It's as simple as that. It's the easiest photography in the world to shoot somebody who's been shot up. It doesn't take a genius. That's easy. The only thing you need to know is your photography. Get in and if you're lucky get out. And get as close as you can get.

Photography has been a passion of mine since I was 15. After my kids were born I found myself incorporating my photography into different art endeavors and from there it just blossomed.

We could teach photography as a way to make a living, and best of all, somehow to get students to experience for themselves photography as a way of life.

I was extremely irritated being photographed for a long time, then I gave up caring. Photography is a nauseating cliche, but there is a lot to it. You can tell so much about a person from it. You are exaggerating the consciousness. It's life-thickening, photography.

I became interested in photography during my first visit to the United States. I was a student at a university in Holland. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the American West. That was when I learned about the tradition of nature in American photography.

[Photography is ] likewise even French impressionists. So the Sculls bought pop. It was politics, and they moved with it. And I think that could be happening, to some degree, with photography, too. It doesn't cost as much to do it, either.

[I]n general, my work is less about expanding the possibilities of photography than about re-investing it with a truer perception of things by returning to a simple method, one that photography had from the beginning of its existence.

If I photograph you I don't have you, I have a photograph of you. It's got its own thing. That's really what photography, still photography, is about.

[Photography] can be tiny, on your phone, or it can be a billboard, or a film-sized projection, or printed in a magazine. I don't think we've been in a time before when so much photography is available in so many formats, when everybody is a photographer.

Photography really is all about lines, and so is clothing. I worked for Oberto Gili for a couple of years after I was at ICP; we worked in fashion, travel, interior design, everything. I was inspired by his styling choices within fashion photography, and I think those experiences helped steer me towards fashion design. I love photography as a medium, so I think I will always take inspiration from it.

In fact, I probably learned more about photography from studying black-and-white photography in those magazines [Look Magazine and LIFE Magazine] than I did from watching movies here. That's the truth.

A lot of the distinctions that we make between drama and documentary are spurious. We're deeply confused about these issues. About the difference between the two, about where documentary ends and drama begins.

What makes [photography] obscene is its terrible cruelty. Happiness may be fleeting, but it's the reason we go on living. Photography is the joy that precedes pain, the moment of life just before death.

Photography's ability to blur truth and fiction is one of its most compelling qualities. But when misused... this ambiguity can have severe, even lethal consequences.... Photography's ambiguity, beautiful in one context, can be devastating in another.

Landscapes, heads and naked women are called artistic photography, while photographs of current events are called press photography.

Here is a paradox. It would seem that there cannot be surrealism and photography, but only photography or surrealism.