John Szarkowski Famous Quotes
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It isn't what a picture is of, it is what it is about.
Photography was not invented to serve a clearly understood function. There was in fact widespread uncertainty, even among its inventors, as to what it might be good for.
The very best pictures adapt themselves to many changes in meaning.
In practice a photographer does not concern himself with philosophical issues while working; he makes photographs, working with subject matter that he thinks will make the pictures.
The world now contains more photographs than bricks, and they are, astonishingly, all different.
Speaking of photography Baudelaire said: "This industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy." And in his own terms of reference Baudelaire was half right; certainly the new medium could not satisfy old standards. The photographer must find new ways to make his meaning clear.
A photographer's best work is, alas, generally done for himself.
A camera has interesting ideas of its own.
To quote out of context is the essence of the photographer's craft.
Pure photography is a system of picture-making that describes more or less faithfully what might be seen through a rectangular frame from a particular vantage point at a given moment.
Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere ...
The photographer's vision convinces us to the degree that the photographer hides his hand.
Photography's central sense of purpose and aesthetic: the precise and lucid description of significant fact.
What's happening is that people are making a billion photographs a year of their cats, frequently with the cats wearing costumes. Do you think I should be doing shows of cat photography?
One of the leading uses of photography by the mass media came to be called photojournalism. From the late 'twenties' to the early 'fifties' what might have been the golden age of this speciality - photographers worked largely as the possessors of special and arcane skills, like the ancient priests who practiced and monopolized the skills of pictography or carving or manuscript illumination. In those halcyon days the photographer enjoyed a privileged status.
Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.
Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.
Because we see reality in different ways, we must understand that we are looking at different truths rather than the truth and that, therefore, all photographs lie in one way or another.
The simplicity of photography lies in the fact that it is very easy to make a picture. The staggering complexity of it lies in the fact that a thousand other pictures of the same subject would have been equally easy.
Most of Tina Modotti's work that is known to the photography world was done in Mexico in the years 1923 through 1926, when she lived and worked with Edward Weston.
Luck is the attentive photographer's best teacher.
The goal is not to make something factually impeccable, but seamlessly persuasive.
