Top 1200 Old Photographs Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

Explore popular Old Photographs quotes.
Last updated on April 15, 2025.
I love everything that's old, - old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine.
I am interested in making photographs which comment on the experience of a place as well as describe it. My position has not typically been one of advocacy for or against any political position. But I regard photographs as commentary, and that includes, at times, taking a specific political viewpoint on an issue.
I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs. Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he 'uncovers' it.
The inferiority of photographs to the best works of artists, so far as resemblance is concerned, lies in their catching no more than a single expression. If many photographs of a person were taken at different times, perhaps even years apart, their composite would possess that in which a single photograph is deficient.
I have a rule that I don't review shows from photographs or from video. I certainly might go back and look at photographs and look at video to remind myself of something or for personal information. But I never review from that.
In so many instances, there has been an attempt to rewrite history. And many times, on photographs, Martin and I were marching together, hand in hand; they cropped the photographs and left me out.
There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs. — © Ansel Adams
There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.
It pleases me to take amateur photographs of my garden, and it pleases my garden to make my photographs look professional.
The photographs of space taken by our astronauts have been published all over the place. But the eye is a much more dynamic mechanism than any camera or pictures. It's a more exciting view in person than looking at the photographs. Of course, I personally am sick and tired of hearing people talk like that: I want to see it myself!
Things changed a little when I started taking photographs for magazines. I was afraid in the beginning. I thought, "Oh I can't do it, because I have never taken a photographs commercially for a magazine." But I wanted to learn so I started. But when I took models from agencies, I took beginners. Sometimes they were really good, but you have to work with them. You have to be good with women and the boys.
It wasn't until I realised that I could actually take nice photographs that I started to become passionate about it. I then got a few jobs working for magazines in London, and I would get terribly excited and intense about doing a job and taking photographs and looking through the lens to capture something amazing.
The digital camera takes photographs in practically no light: it will dig out the least bit of light available. I was amazed to see the results of photographs that I wouldn't take ordinarily. That's the advantage of digital photography.
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.
... my father loved to take photographs of me. When I was nine I made my own costumes for a school play and I experienced becoming different characters. I loved to document myself as different images and I think my work evolved after this favorite activity. The photographs I exhibited in New York juxtaposed reality and fantasy. There was everyday life and fantasy was dismantling that reality.
To live in a world of photographs is to live in a world of substitutes... or so it seems, whose actual referent is always the other, the described, the reality of a world once removed. I prefer, on the other hand, to look at the photographs as something real and of my world, a strange and powerful thing... part of a language, a system of communication, an economy of signs.
People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.
My photographs are proof of what happened. When I go to Russia, sometimes I meet ex-soldiers... They say, 'We came to liberate you....' I say: 'Listen, I think it was quite different. I saw people being killed.' They say: 'No. We never... no shooting. No. No.' So I can show them my Prague 1968 photographs and say, 'Listen, these are my pictures. I was there.' And they have to believe me.
Always, when the words art and artistic are applied to my photographic work, I am disagreeably affected. This is due, surely, to the bad use and abuse made of those terms. I consider myself a photographer, nothing more. If my photographs differ from that which is usually done in this field, it is precisely because I try to produce not art but honest photographs, without distortions or manipulations.
During my performances, I don't like folks to take pictures because I feel that we live in a very photographic time. Photography was invented over 100 years ago, and now it's at its peak because everyone has a camera. The fact that they are taking experiences and filtering them through a mechanical lens I find amazing, but also disheartening. Amazing when you have photographs that start revolutions. Disheartening when you have people making photographs but not living.
A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
When I started working in fashion, I didn't have money to buy photographs, so I'd Xerox pictures from magazines and put them in notebooks. When I'd start a collection, I'd sit with my old notebooks and look through them for inspiration.
Some of the people who are now manipulating photos, such as Andreas Gursky, make the argument - rightly - that the 'straight' photographs of the 1940s and 50s were no such thing. Ansell Adams would slap a red filter on his lens, then spend three days burning and dodging in the dark room, making his prints. That's a manipulation. Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.
I hate those live action versions of animated cartoons. It ruins everything, the whole point of cartoons is to get away from photographs. I mean it would be stupid to say that cartoons are better than photographs but its true.
If you take a good look at the book [ Stock Photographs], it's largely a portrait gallery of faces - faces that I found dramatic. And some of those turned out to be reasonably dramatic photographs. But that's all it is, I think.
In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The 'anything whatever' then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.
How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs.
My photographs tried to find the politicians at their most wary, most vulnerable, and perhaps most truthful moments. I wanted the photographs to reveal the person through stance and stare, when he or she was most reflective or off guard, in order to measure the person and event unfolding.
Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.
One has the impression that something is stirring inside [photographs] - it is as if one can hear little cries of despair, gémissements de désespoir... as if the photographs themselves had a memory and were remembering us and how we, the surviving, and those who preceded us, once were.
The word "photography" can be interpreted as "writing with light" or "drawing with light." Some photographers are producing beautiful photographs by drawing with light.. Some other photographers are trying to tell something with their photographs. They are writing with light.
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.
But there are times when thinking is misplaced, like when taking photographs. You cannot think your way to making photographs; you can photograph your way to clearer thinking.
Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs ... But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real. ... 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.
I would that my photographs might be, not the coverage of a news event, but an indictment of war - the brutal corrupting viciousness of its doing to the minds and bodies of men; and, that my photographs might be a powerful emotional catalyst to the reasoning which would help this vile and criminal stupidity from beginning again.
As I was walking up the stairs to dad's old room, and I was looking at the photographs, I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories. That someone actually took the photograph, and the people in the photograph had just eaten lunch or something.
I knew that was coming. That's another stupidity. The people who use the term don't even know the meaning. They use it to refer to photographs they believe are loosely organized, or casually made, whatever you want to call it. Whatever terms you like. The fact is, when they're talking about snapshots they're talking about the family album picture, which is one of the most precisely made photographs.
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.
I love looking at old photographs. I don't know if it's something that gets more appealing as one gets older and you're trying to get a sense of your place in the world and the little area that your life has taken up.
There are more pretty photographs of women than there are photographs of pretty women.
My camera, my intentions stopped no man from falling. Nor did they aid him after he had fallen. It could be said that photographs be damned for they bind no wounds. Yet, I reasoned, if my photographs could cause compassionate horror within the viewer, they might also prod the conscience of that viewer into taking action.
I was out in California over the holidays and I was working with some photographs I took out there just now, actually, which were all different photographs of the sunset. They're really interesting because El Niño has changed the cloud configuration, not only the sea, but also the whole makeup of the clouds, the sunset, and the different gradations of color and tonality. So it'll be interesting to work with that.
Inside the house, I turned on the kitchen light, revealing the photographs stuck every which way all over the cabinets, and then switched on the hall light. In my head, I heard Beck say to my small nine-year-old self, 'Why do we need every light in the house on? Are you signaling to aliens?
Each time I arrived in a new city, I'd get lost in the streets and photograph everything that looked interesting, taking nearly a thousand photographs every day. After each day of shooting, I'd select 30 or 40 of my favorite photographs and post them on Facebook. I named the albums after my first impression of each city.
How can my old photographs fail to create in me a feeling of emptiness and sorrow? They make me acutely aware that this second deprivation will be final this time. — © Claude Levi-Strauss
How can my old photographs fail to create in me a feeling of emptiness and sorrow? They make me acutely aware that this second deprivation will be final this time.
Photographs have always been the tar baby of censors and obscenity laws. Literature can certainly (if it's any good) conjure up the most pornographic imagination. But photographs dare to be real. No matter how contrived or constructed they are, there's that damn body staring you in the face.
Photographs need to demand the viewer's attention, often implicitly, posing questions as to the nature of what is being depicted. Photographs are not there to show us the world, but to show us a version of what may be happening.
Is not old wine wholesomest, old pippins toothsomest, old wood burn brightest, old linen wash whitest? Old soldiers, sweethearts, are surest, and old lovers are soundest.
I have a big box of autographs. I took photographs of me and Marlene Dietrich, me and Ida Lupino. I took pictures of Myrna Loy and Joel McCrea in front of the studios. I loved Hollywood. I have 500 autographs and 500 photographs I took.
I never thought I was particularly good looking. But when I see old photographs, I realise that I was. I do wish I had known that at the time because beauty is power. I didn't realise how lucky I was to be young, beautiful and in Hollywood. It didn't hit me. Every day I woke up, went to the film studio and just got on with it.
The ostensible subject of my photographs may be motion, but the subtext is time. A dancer's movements illustrate the passage of time, giving it a substance, materiality, and space. In my photographs, time is stopped, a split second becomes an eternity, and an ephemeral moment is solid as sculpture.
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
The reason I do photographs is to help people understand my music, so it's very important that I am the same, emotionally, in the photographs as in the music. Most people's eyes are much better developed than their ears. If they see a certain emotion in the photograph, then they'll understand the music.
In a world where the 2 billionth photograph has been uploaded to Flickr, which looks like an Eggleston picture! How do you deal with making photographs with the tens of thousands of photographs being uploaded to Facebook every second, how do you manage that? How do you contribute to that? What's the point?
I often find myself worrying about celebrities. It's an entirely caring thing; it's not like the people who commission those photographs with cruel arrows to go on the covers of the celebrity magazines. The photographs show botched plastic surgery, raging eczema, weight gain and horrible clothes for maximum schadenfreude.
I love being photographed, or I should say I love the art of photography. It's about people taking photographs of you, stealing them, and then presuming or assuming or captioning. Words can never be taken back, photographs can never be taken back, nothing can ever be taken back.
I believe that photography can only reproduce the surface of things. The same applies to a portrait. I take photographs of people the same way I would take photographs of a plaster bust.
The photographs that excite me are photographs that say something in a new manner; not for the sake of being different but ones that are different because the individual is different and the individual expresses himself.
I'm known for fashion photographs, but fashion photographs were mostly a joke for me. In 'Vogue,' girls were playing at being duchesses, but they were actually from Flatbush, Brooklyn. They would play duchesses, and I would play Cecil Beaton.
My father Bill had a problem with Christmas. Although he appears in old photographs to possess a whippy, muscular frame, he was actually a frail man and usually managed to cause some kind of drama just before the festivities began.
We as women are trained to see ourselves as cheap imitations of fashion photographs, rather than seeing fashion photographs as cheap imitations of women
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