Top 1200 Photograph Quotes & Sayings

The photograph is always more interesting than what the photograph is of.

What you photograph is responsible for how a photograph looks - the form, the design, whatever word you want to use.

As far as the surface is concerned - oil on canvas, conventionally applied - my pictures have little to do with the original photograph. They are totally painting (whatever that may mean). On the other hand, they are so like the photograph that the thing that distinguished the photograph from all other pictures remains intact.

A photograph can look anyway. It just depends basically on what you photograph.

The photograph, after all, is just a photograph. Words will determine its meaning and status.

I do not photograph for ulterior purposes. I photograph for the thing itself - for the photograph - without consideration of how it may be used.

I never paint a portrait from a photograph, because a photograph doesn't give enough information about what the person feels.

A photograph is a photograph. When I am making a picture I am just interested in making a very interesting photograph. I don't care where it's going to go.

For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ("this-has-been"), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.

Mr. President, Mrs. Obama. There is a photograph of you [hugging] that went viral, became the most shared photograph in the history of Twitter. How do you keep the fire going?

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.

Perhaps the first photograph ever taken, Niépce's view of the rooftops over Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, was a truly pure photograph. The second one he took, he was already comparing nature to the first photograph he had taken.

...the logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph.

When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.

A photograph is a photograph, a picture, an image, an illusion complete within itself, depending neither on words, reproductive processes or anything else for its life, its reason for being.

If you finish like a photograph, on the other hand, the picture has as much personality as a photograph.

You have to bring to the photograph a prejudice about something, and I'm prejudiced against farmers who tie dead animals on fences. Therefore, I can make a meaningful photograph.

I guess my choice of medium depends on how I want to interpret the idea. Sometimes the interpretation works best in a photograph, and then sometimes it works best in a drawing. But most often times, with the work, everything starts with the diorama with the photograph. Then I'm just filtering out ideas and images from the photograph and reinterpreting them in other mediums.

No amount of toying with shades of print or with printing papers will transform a commonplace photograph into anything other than a commonplace photograph.

You can talk about a caption underneath a photograph being true or false, because there is a linguistic element. You can claim that a photograph is a picture of a horse or a cow, but it is the sentence that expresses the claim, which is true or false, not the photograph.

What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.

In making portraits, I refuse to photograph myself as do so many photographers. My style is the style of the people I photograph.

One of the magical things about photography is the transformation that takes place when you photograph something. Something that inherently has very little going for it in terms of the interest you take in it, can become infinitely more interesting when rendered as a photograph. It's no longer a building. It's a photograph.

To go and photograph an airbase is not only to photograph something but it is to insist on one’s right to photograph. You’re flexing that right.

A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of mother or father taken many years ago. You see them as you remember them. But as people live on, they change completely. That is why I think a photograph can be kind.

When you photograph people in color you photograph their clothes. When you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their soul!

One day the photograph is going to become even more important than it is now.... But I am not particularly an advocate of the photograph.

A photograph records both the thing in front of the camera and the conditions of its making... A photograph is also a document of the state of mind of the photographer. And if you were to extend the idea of the set-up photograph beyond just physically setting up the picture, I would argue that the photographer wills the picture into being.

This is a photograph, so it is as you see: there are no lies and no deceptions. One can detect here, elevated to an incomparably higher level, the same pathetic emotional appeal that lies concealed in every fake spiritualist photograph, every pornographic photograph; one comes to suspect that the strange, disturbing emotional appeal of the photographic art consists solely in that same repeated refrain: this is a true ghost... this is a photograph, so it is as you see: there are no lies, no deceptions.

I walk in the park every day, and when people come and ask for a photograph, I say, "Oh, my God!" It means they recognize that I have been doing something right and they want to have a photograph taken with me.

A photograph has no value unless it looks exactly like a photograph and nothing else.

I was invited to photograph Hollywood. They asked me what I would like to photograph. I said, Ugly men.

You can give some kind of spark of life to a comic that a photograph doesn't really have. A photograph, even if it's connecting with you, it seems very dead on the page sometimes.

He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.

I never look for a photograph. The photograph finds me and says, I'm here! and I say, Yes, I see you. I hear you.

The typical nature photograph shows a butterfly on a pretty flower. The conservation photograph shows the same thing, but with a bulldozer coming at it in the background.

There have to be at least two copies of a photograph, otherwise it’s not a photograph.

I love having the photograph in my hand. I love looking at the photograph. I love looking at a box of photographs. I just love the still photograph.

Photographers usually want to photograph facts and things. But I'm interested in the nature of the thing itself. A photograph of someone sleeping tells me nothing about their dream state; a photograph of a corpse tells me nothing about the nature of death. My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient.

Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.

I don't think that there's anything that we shouldn't be allowed to photograph, really, unless there's something that's really deeply harmful to the subject in the photograph.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

I find the surface of a photograph a thing of beauty in and of itself, and it is this surface that makes a photograph unique relative to other two-dimensional media.

What if I said that every photograph I made was set up? From the photograph, you can't prove otherwise. You don't know anything from the photograph about how it was made, really.

Someone said to me, early on in film school... if you can photograph the human face you can photograph anything, because that is the most difficult and most interesting thing to photograph.

I always wanted to make an abstract photograph. I would photograph walls, sports interiors, marks on the walls people made. Even looking back it makes so much sense. It's like it was a fight against the photograph.

There is a great difference between shooting a photograph and making a photograph.

When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it.

Many cherish the idea that a photograph is an exact presentment of nature, and accept without question the paradox that a photograph cannot lie. Actually there never was a more unmitigated liar.

I don't really remember the day when I stood behind my camera with Henry Kissinger on the other side. I am sure he doesn't remember it either. But this photograph is here now to prove that no amount of kindness on my part could make this photograph mean exactly what he.. or even I.. wanted it to mean. It's a reminder of the wonder and terror that is a photograph.

What matters is not what you photograph, but why and how you photograph it. Even the most controversial subject, if depicted by a sensitive photographer with honesty, sympathy, and understanding, can be transformed into an emotionally rewarding experience.

Our editors, I'm afraid, have come to believe that the photograph is an end in itself. They've forgotten that the photograph is only the subsidiary, the little brother, of the word.

I don't think that there's that much difference between a photograph of a fist up someone's ass and a photograph of carnations in a bowl.

Perishability in a photograph is important in a picture. If a photograph looks perishable we say, "Gee, I'm glad I have that moment."

A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.

How foolish of me to believe that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearance of trees and automobiles, and people with a reality itself, and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

If you look at a photograph, and you think, 'My isn't that a beautiful photograph,' and you go on to the next one, or 'Isn't that nice light?' so what? I mean what does it do to you or what's the real value in the long run? What do you walk away from it with? I mean, I'd much rather show you a photograph that makes demands on you, that you might become involved in on your own terms or be perplexed by.

The photograph is a tool used to take you back to a certain point in one's life, to remember a face or a place you once stood. I feel there is always something quite melancholic about a photograph.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

At the end of the day, it's only a photograph and if someone is going to get really upset about a photograph, then they have a lot of issues. I just roll with it and see what happens.