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What is YOUR favorite quote about photography? Send it to us! If we include on our PHOTOQUOTES page, we will credit you as the source.
- "If you want to understand America, start by looking out the window."
- Lee Friedlander
- "What is the point of just recording?"
- Georgia O'Keeffe
- "Seeing is a neglected enterprise."
- Saul Leiter, in an August 10, 2006 interview by Lisa Hostetler, author of Street Scene, published by Milwaukee Art Museum.
- "I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse."
- Diane Arbus
- "A portrait is worth a dozen biographies."
- Thomas Carlyle, Historian (1795-1891)
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"Today - when the speculators and status-seekers are disappearing - it is more important than ever for serious collectors to continue buying from the best galleries. Why? Because it directly supports the artists, so they can continue developing their practices. And because for several hundred years, gallerists have been the ones who have most frequently taken the first and largest risks in promoting new artists, movements and mediums.
Granted, galleries are commercial entities. But in the good times, serious galleries don't simply cash out; rather, they reinvest much of the profit from their successful artists in sustaining their entire programs. Even the largest galleries are small by most business standards. Most have the owner's name on the door and bear the stamp of their founder's personality. These galleries are not purveyors of luxury goods or brokerages peddling an "alternative asset class." No, serious galleries are a critical component in the art world ecosystem, providing resources to artists for both their short-term projects and their long-term legacies."
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Art + Auction, OPINION - All in the Timing, Marc Spiegler
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"Six months into production, I did the first on-camera interview with Herb and Dorothy (Vogel) and asked them, "Why did you like this artist or that work?" They just replied, "because it's beautiful" or "because we like them." I thought - how can I make a filme about art collectors who can't articulate anything about their collection? Then I met Lucio Pozzi, the first artist we interviewed for the film (http://www.herbanddorothy.com), and told him about the difficulties I was having; his response was, "That's why Herb and Dorothy are so unique and special. Why do you have to verbalize and explain visual art? Why can't you simply say I like it or don't like it?" Art is not something you have to explain, but feel. That's the great lesson I learned from Herb and Dorothy."
- Director Megumi Sasaki, from Modern Painters, April 2009
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"Art is the lie that shows us the truth."
- Pablo Picasso
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"Fine photography is literate."
- Walker Evans
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"One knows one's past through pictures."
- David Deitcher, Camerawork, A Journal of Photographic Arts, Fall/Winter 2008
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"In 1957, I was on a panel discussing magazine photography. Someone in the audience asked what quality was most important in a photograph. The expected answer was composition or texture or some other photographic quality much discussed at the time. I said perception. I still would."
- John Loengard - As I See It
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"The best advice I can give a collector is: develop your eye, and then buy with your heart—always, always with the heart."
- André Emmerich, art dealer/NYC (deceased 2007)
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"Nearly right is child's play."
- Alfred Stieglitz, 1919
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"When [Stieglitz] began to photograph in the early 1880's, few people believed that the medium could be used for creative expression. When he died more than sixty years later, few doubted it."
- Earl A. Powell III, Director, National Gallery of Art, Washington
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"When the book [New York] came out, I was invited to photo clubs to address the members, and I found there would be no dialogue. They would have their photographs of old women and so on, and then I would show my photographs and they would be mostly interested in how come with such terrible photographs you can become famous and have a book published?"
- William Klein
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"The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all."
- Louis Faurer
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"There was something approaching a sharp edge of bitterness in the look of the pictures. And of course what was eventually learned from that was that it was not necessarily the sensibility that gave the pictures their bitter taste, but rather the knowledge that the medium itself was much more plastic, and was open to a wider range of invention than we ever realized."
- John Szarkowski - about The Americans, by Robert Frank
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"The photographer must lie in wait, watching out for his prey, and
have a presentiment of what is about to happen."
- Henri Cartier-Bresson
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"Who in their right mind would want to lock themselves away and play with chemicals, when today an inkjet printer can render a print of quality equal to that or a traditional analogue print (and of superior archival durability)?"
- Martin Parr
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"In 1851, the daguerrotypists and callotypists started the argument that still rages today: one process vs. the next, one definition of reality vs. another. Digital darkroom vs. chemical darkroom...the same noisy argument just sporting a different vocabulary."
- Brenton Hamilton, Professor/Photographer, Maine Media Workshops
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"A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks."
- Richard Avedon
- "A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me..."
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
- "And so, hundreds of millions of photographs, fragile images, often carried next to the heart or placed by the side of the bed, are used to refer to that which historical time has no right to destroy."
- John Berger, Critic
- "The function of the photographer is to go to the place as a mature creative personality and a man who knows his medium and knows how to use his medium to penetrate this situation, this object, and to come back with the revelation of new and important facts."
- Sid Grossman
- "A photograph always and by its nature refers to what is not seen."
- John Berger, Critic
- "This is one of the several things that sets photography apart from the other arts. Most people, after all, can't paint a wonderful painting or compose a wonderful poem or write a wonderful play. But lots of ordinary people - with no training, no experience, no education, no knowledge - have taken wonderful photos: better, sometimes, than those of the great artists."
- Susie Linfield, Boston Review, September/October, 2006.
- "The camera has hopelessly beaten the pencil and paint-brush as an instrument of artistic representation...As to the painters and their fanciers, I snort defiance at them; their day of daubs is over."
- George Bernard Shaw, 1901
- "It's logical to say that what I do is an act of faith. Other people might call it conceit, but I have faith and conviction. It came to me. And I worked it out."
- Walker Evans, Art in America, March-April 1971
- "Fine photography is literate."
- Walker Evans, Art in America, March-April 1971
- "What I am looking for is best found by looking at the photographs."
- Chauncey Hare, Interior America
- "This wider perspective [the use of a wide-angle lens] is the only way I could get the photographs to carry the message of rage."
- Chauncey Hare, Interior America
- "Believing in one's own art becomes harder and harder when the public response grows fonder."
- Cindy Sherman, Documenta 7 exhibition catalog, 1982
- "The problem is to get the viewer to release the commonly but falsely held belief in the photograph as a window; to get the viewer to go through the window in a state of openness to a new experience, not a representation of one that has already occurred."
- Carl Chiarenza, in an e-mail to Robert Hirsch (Seizing the Light)
- "The key to artistic photography is to work out your own thoughts, by yourselves. Imitation leads to certain disaster. New ideas are always antagonized. Do not mind that. If a thing is good it will survive."
- Gertrude Käsebier, 1898
- "Peppers are reproduced in seed catalogs, but they have no relation to my peppers."
- Edward Weston, Daybooks, July 16, 1931
What is YOUR favorite quote about photography? Send it to us! If we include on our PHOTOQUOTES page, we will credit you as the source.
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