Top 1189 Photographs Quotes & Sayings

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.

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 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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It pleases me to take amateur photographs of my garden, and it pleases my garden to make my photographs look professional.