A Photograph Quotes

My point is that meaning is always personal, changeable and subjective. There is no 'correct' interpretation of a photograph. ~ Bill Jay

The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons, particularly to people who have been in warfare, who have been bombed and shelled for at the back of a bombing run is invariably a photograph. In the back of ruined towns, and cities, and factories, there is aerial mapping, or spy mapping, usually with a camera. Therefore the camera is a feared instrument, and a man with a camera is suspected and watched wherever he goes ... In the minds of most people today the camera is the forerunner of destruction, and it is suspected, and rightly so. ~ John Steinbeck

When you take a photograph of someone, you take a portrait of their soul ~ Winna Efendi

A work of art is itself an object, first of all, and so manipulation is unavoidable: it's a prerequisite. But I needed the greater objectivity of the photograph in order to correct my own way of seeing: for instance, if I draw an object from nature, I start to stylize and to change it in accordance with my personal vision and my training. But if I paint from a photograph, I can forget all the criteria that I get from these sources. I can paint against my will, as it were. And that, to me, felt like an enrichment. ~ Gerhard Richter

But one needs to bear in mind that things are not always what they seem and, contrary to the dead stillness of a photograph, reality is in a state of perpetual flux. ~ Audur Ava Olafsdottir

To the vast majority of people a photograph is an image of something within their direct experience: a more-or-less factual reality. It is difficult for them to realize that the photograph can be the source of experience, as well as the reflection of spiritual awareness of the world and of self. ~ Ansel Adams

The person who looks at a photograph as a complete picture, unable to say anything about anything except the facts which existed at the moment of exposure, does not see very far. ~ Francis Meadow Sutcliffe

On every door the management had placed a photograph of the person so they could find their room. As he went by he saw face after face of someone who used to be young. ~ Fannie Flagg

You can carry a photograph with you on a thumb drive, and you can make it bigger or smaller - it's a very malleable form of mass production. ~ Mary Mattingly

Insulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on the solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots, the drowsy well-fed girls lounging in the shade were no more a part of their environment than figures in a photograph album, arbitrarily posed against a backcloth of cork rocks and cardboard trees. ~ Joan Lindsay

In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything. ~ Tom Clancy

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt. ~ Susan Sontag

This is a photograph of me as I wish I looked all the time. Then I might have a chance of getting in Hollywood. ~ Anne Frank

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. ~ Errol Morris

A photograph is the pause button on life. ~ Various

In 1979 Susan Sontag wrote, "Today, everything exists to end in a photograph." Today, does everything exist to end online? ~ Sherry Turkle

I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it. ~ Don DeLillo

A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever. ~ Mark Twain

A photograph is a mirror; mostly it reflects the prejudices of the viewer. ~ Bill Jay

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. ~ Richard Avedon

Do you know that I can't remember her face? Try as I may, it will not be conjured. I can tell you what she looked like; I can recite a description of her features, part by part, but I cannot evoke the whole face.'
'Don't you have a photograph?'
'Photographs!' He spat out the word. 'I'm talking about true recollection - seeing the face. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Some photographers take reality ... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation. ~ Ansel Adams

Everybody feels like they need a photograph because we're in a generation where, if you don't document it, it didn't occur. So you've got to stop and take a picture with everybody. ~ Jesse Eisenberg

Time it was And what a time it was, it was A time of innocence A time of confidences Long ago it must be I have a photograph Preserve your memories They're all that's left you ~ Paul Simon

The greatest enthusiasts for Civil War history and memory often displace complicated consequences by endlessly focusing on the contest itself. We sometimes lift ourselves out of historical time, above the details, and render the war safe in a kind of national Passover offering as we view a photograph of the Blue and Gray veterans shaking hands across the stone walls at Gettysburg. Deeply embedded in an American mythology of mission, and serving as a mother lode of nostalgia for antimodernists and military history buffs, the Civil War remains very difficult to shuck from its shell of sentimentalism. ~ David W. Blight

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. ~ John Sexton

A photograph to me is always a reminder of how the person was on a certain day in that certain light fixed. When I look at a watercolor of that same person, it seems to me alive, more open than a photograph. ~ Francesco Clemente

Those very same metadata are contained in millions of photographs posted to sale and auction sites such as Craigslist and eBay. For example, a photograph of a diamond ring or an iPad posted on Craigslist might have embedded with it the precise location of your home where the photograph was taken. ~ Marc Goodman

Exile is a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own. ~ Salman Rushdie

He stretches his legs out underneath the table and checks Facebook on his phone. It tells him things he doesn't need to know about people he hasn't seen in years. He absorbs their aggressively worded opinions and quasi-political hate-speak. He sees a photograph of his ex-girlfriend with her new boyfriend smiling at a picnic and he realises, with a strange cascade of emptiness, that she is pregnant and wearing an engagement ring. The comments are jubilant. He reads every word before he forces himself to put his phone down. A loneliness descends. He feels its familiar talons grabbing him violently out of his chair and hanging him, swinging, up by the ceiling. Pete ~ Kate Tempest

For me a photograph is most successful when it doesn't answer all the questions and it leaves something to be desired. ~ Greg Gorman

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

Looking through a photograph I found inside a drawer
I was taken by a photograph of you. ~ Jackson Browne

A photograph is not necessarily a lie, but it isn't the truth either. It's more like a fleeting, subjective impression. ~ John Berger

Have you ever wondered what it feels like to have a love for the lost? This is a term we use as part of our Christian jargon. Many believers search their hearts in condemnation, looking for the arrival of some feeling of benevolence that will propel them into bold evangelism. It will never happen. It is impossible to love "the lost". You can't feel deeply for an abstraction or a concept. You would find it impossible to love deeply an unfamiliar individual portrayed in a photograph, let alone a nation or a race or something as vague as "all lost people".
Don't wait for a feeling or love in order to share Christ with a stranger. You already love your heavenly Father, and you know that this stranger is created by Him, but separated from Him, so take those first steps in evangelism because you love God. It is not primarily out of compassion for humanity that we share our faith or pray for the lost; it is first of all, love for God. ~ John Piper

You'll reach into your wallet to brandish a photograph of a new puppy, and a friend will say, 'Oh, no - not pictures.' ~ Caroline Knapp

I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I'm more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph. ~ Robert Bringhurst

Real people move, they bear with them the element of time. It is this fourth dimension of people that I try to capture in a photograph. ~ Richard Avedon

I really feel lovely when I get up with my sweetheart. When I depart a photograph shoot, as a result of someway miracles have been labored. ~ Jennifer Aniston

A photograph is just a tiny slice of a subject. A piece of them in a moment. It seems presumptuous to think you can get more than that. ~ Annie Leibovitz

One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon's youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: 'I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.' Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it. ~ Roland Barthes

This was not Newt's fault; in his younger days he would go every couple of months to the barber's shop on the corner, clutching a photograph he's carefully torn from a magazine which showed someone with an impressively cool haircut grinning at the camera and he would show the picture to the barber, and ask to be made to look like that, please. And the barber, who knew his job, would take one look and then give Newt the basic, all-purpose, short-back-and-sides. After a year of this, Newt realized that he obviously didn't have the face for haircuts. The best Newton Pulsifer could hope for after a haircut was shorter hair. ~ Neil Gaiman

A man goes into Boots and says: "Have you got any Viagra?" "Do you have a prescription?" asks the chemist. "No," he replies, "But 'I've got a photograph of the wife." ~ Frank Carson

Am i a photograph
you gaze at in
moments of weakness?
You ordered me
off my knees
into your arms
Wasn't to beg
that I knelt; only
to see you once
from below. ~ Viggo Mortensen

If you were to ask me to define a photograph in a few words, I would say it is a fossil of light and time. ~ Daido Moriyama

I have a photograph of myself when I was 2 years of age, and I don't recognize the person in the photograph. She doesn't look anything like me, and I can't find any trace of her in me physically. And yet I remember her very, very well - even her anxiety. ~ Jamaica Kincaid

Photography allows you to be a part of the action and document stories. It is a perfect extension of my body. I can take it pretty much anywhere and tell a story with a photograph. ~ Chris Burkard

Sometimes you think you know more than you really do - people, events, things that are true and things that are not. Sometimes you think you know yourself. But then, surprise, it is someone else who shows you what is really there, like the truth a photograph shows. ~ Patricia MacLachlan

I find it strangely beautiful that the camera with its inherent clarity of object and detail can produce images that in spite of themselves offer possibilities to be more than they are a photograph of nothing very important at all, nothing but an intuition, a response, a twitch from the photographer's experience. ~ Joel Meyerowitz

They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn't name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered. ~ Graham Greene

I have a photograph of my grandfather driving a donkey cart barefoot. ~ Nelly Furtado

Alas, Measured Perfectly"

Saturday, August 25, 1888. 5:20 P.M.
is the name of a photograph of two
old women in a front yard, beside
a white house. One of the women is
sitting in a chair with a dog in her
lap. The other woman is looking at
some flowers. Perhaps the women are
happy, but then it is Saturday, August
25, 1888. 5:21 P.M., and all over. ~ Richard Brautigan

after Mother died I could look at a photograph of her till kingdom come, but it never game me back what it was to sit across the kitchen table from her flesh and bones, never gave me back the feeling, you know. The inside of the feeling. ~ Alayna Munce

I'm never more aware of the limitations of language than when I try to describe beauty. Language can create its own loveliness, of course, but it cannot deliver to us the radiance we apprehend in the world, any more than a photograph can capture the stunning swiftness of a hawk or the withering power of a supernova ... All that pictures or words can do is gesture beyond themselves toward the fleeting glory that stirs our hearts. So I keep gesturing. ~ Scott Sanders

It became his habit to creep out of bed even before his mother was awake, to slip into his clothes and to go quietly down to the barn to see Gabilan. In the grey quiet mornings when the land and the brush and the houses and the trees were silver-grey and black like a photograph negative, he stole toward the barn, past the sleeping stones and the sleeping cypress tree. The turkeys, roosting in the tree out of coyotes' reach, clicked drowsily. The fields glowed with a grey frost-like light and in the dew the tracks of rabbits and of field mice stood out sharply. The good dogs came stiffly out of their little houses, hackles up and deep growls in their throats. Then they caught Jody's scent, and their stiff tails rose up and waved a greeting Doubletree Mutt with the big thick tail, and Smasher, the incipient shepherd-then went lazily back to their warm beds. It was a strange time and a mysterious journey, to Jody -an extension of a dream. When he first had the pony he liked to torture himself during the trip by thinking Gabilan would not be in his stall, and worse, would never have been there. And he had other delicious little self-induced pains. ~ John Steinbeck

There's something essentially fictive about a photograph. That doesn't mean that if you understand that, and you understand how the world is transformed by the camera, that you can't use the limitations or the transformation to have an observation that is a very subtle perception of the world. ~ Stephen Shore

A photograph is a click away. A good photograph is a hundred clicks away and a better one, a thousand clicks away ~ Kowtham Kumar K

There is something particularly fascinating about seeing places you know in a piece of art - be that in a film, or a photograph, or a painting. ~ Sara Sheridan

I remember seeing a photograph of myself en pointe with my hand over my head and the other hand turned in under my breast curtseying. I took dance lessons at Miss Debbie's Dance Studio, and she put this picture of me in the storefront window. I was so unbelievably humiliated by the sight of myself. ~ Lisa Yuskavage

Use visual cues to prompt yourself to put away more. A photograph of the beach house where you and your husband can envision spending your retirement will remind you to bump up the contribution to your 401(k); a snapshot of your child in a college sweatshirt can encourage you to put more into a 529 college savings plan. ~ Jean Chatzky

There were days, rainy gray days, when the streets of Brooklyn were worthy of a photograph, every window the lens of a Leica, the view grainy and immoble. We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed. We lay in each other's arms, still awkward but happy, exchanging breathless kisses into sleep. ~ Patti Smith

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. ~ Robert Mapplethorpe

Even within the dark paint on a canvas, and the shadows in a photograph, there is light. ~ Melissa Bond

The way in which the photograph records experience is also different from the way of language. Language makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a word or sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or listener is deprived of what was said before, and after. But there is no such thing as a photograph taken out of context, for a photograph does not require one. In fact, the point of photography is to isolate images from context, so as to make them visible in a different way. ~ Neil Postman

The only thing that prevented a father's love from faltering was the fact that there was in his possession a photograph of himself at the same early age, in which he, too, looked like a homicidal fried egg. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

However spontaneous I hope a photograph will look, I always put a lot of thought into how I can make it happen. The very best pictures are the most relaxed, so a lot of fussing around technically can completely break the spell, and everyone freezes up with nerves. ~ Mario Testino

Page 3 is a crazy concept whereby for no discernable reason, a national newspaper prints a photograph of a young woman showing her tits. I'd object but I'm too enamoured with the boobs ... ~ Russell Brand

Photography, like all camera-made images such as film and video, effaces the marks of its making (and maker) at the click of a shutter. A photograph appears to be self-generated - as though it had created itself. ~ Abigail Solomon-Godeau

It scares me how hard it is to remember life before you. I can't even make the comparisons anymore, because my memories of that time have all the depth of a photograph. It seems foolish to play games of better and worse. It's simply a matter of is and is no longer. ~ David Levithan

We walk around like a photograph that my dad's been cut out of. ~ Kendare Blake

It comes down to risk, again and again. If you risk coming out, if you risk making pictures that aren't good, you might discover something in a photograph that is the key. The very doorway to your own interest. ~ Joel Meyerowitz

I came across an account of a young man named Kim Malthe-Bruun, who was eventually captured and executed by the Nazis when he was only twenty-one years old. I read his story as I had read many others, turning the pages, skimming here and there: this sabotage, that tactic, this capture, that escape. After a while even courage becomes routine to the reader. Then, quite unprepared, I turned the page and faced a photograph of Kim Malthe-Bruun. He wore a turtleneck sweater, and his thick, light hair was windblown. His eyes looked out at me, unwavering on the page. Seeing him there, so terribly young, broke my heart. ~ Lois Lowry

The existence of a medium, after all, is its absolute justification, if as so many seem to think, it needs one and all comparison of potentialities is useless and irrelevant. Whether a water-color is inferior to an oil, or whether a drawing, an etching, or a photograph is not as important as either, is inconsequent. To have to despise something in order to respect something else is a sign of impotence. [emphasis added] Let us rather accept joyously and with gratitude everything through which the spirit of man seeks to an ever fuller and more intense self-realization. ~ Paul Strand

In a photograph a person's eyes tell much, sometimes they tell all. ~ Alfred Eisenstaedt

I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn't have a personal vision or doesn't communicate emotion fails. ~ Galen Rowell

It is hard to avoid the aspect of time when producing what ones sees as a photograph ... my images [are] something that is not a frozen moment, but an image made up of many moments and that is created over time rather than taken. ~ Idris Khan

A photograph is an opportunity to keep a moment forever. ~ Destin Sparks

On my last ride on the RR train I looked almost as lovingly at the faces and expressions of my fellow passengers as if I were staring a a photograph of times long past. They did not know that they made a photograph. They did not understand the vanishing background of their lives ... ~ Mark Helprin

I still dream of the day when I will take a photograph so beautiful that it can be called love. ~ Jan Saudek

'Lucky Us' ends with a description of a photograph of the novel's fictional family. I could never get enough of my own family photo albums. ~ Amy Bloom

If you ask people to remember a painting and a photograph, their description of the photograph is far more accurate than that of the painting. Strangely enough, there is a physical element intertwined with the painting. It shakes loose an emotional element within the viewer. ~ Luc Tuymans

Amber starts off as sap from a tree," Joseph said in the dark. "And sometimes insects get caught in it, and over millions of years the amber turns into a gemstone, but it traps the insect inside."
"Oh."
"A photograph is sort of like that, don't you think? ~ Brian Selznick

Now my inspiration but it won't last and we'll be just a photograph - i ~ William S. Burroughs

What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values. ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

[W]hile our souls are meager, nature has surplus. Yet something of the mechanism's subject was indeed dissolved in that silver chloride, flattened then minted as those promiscuous postcards we saw now, which we could not now unsee, for we had accepted unawares a bit of the Canyon each time we saw a photograph of it, and those pieces, filtered and diluted, had accumulated in us, so that we never saw anything for the first time. Perhaps the ugliest of our impulses, to shove the sublime through a pinhole. ~ Claire Vaye Watkins

I think most serious photographers understand that there's this large gap between the world and how the world looks through a photograph. ~ Stephen Shore

Finding a photograph is often like picking up a piece from a jigsaw-puzzle box with the cover missing. There's no sense of the whole. Each image is a mysterious part of something not yet revealed. ~ Susan Meiselas

Dad says that the world is always changing, every second of every day, and so is everything in it, which means that the you you are right now is different from the you you were when you started reading this sentence. Crazy, right? And your memories change, too. (For instance, I swear the teddy bear I had growing up was green, but according to my parents it was orange.) But when you take a photograph, things stay still. The way that they were, is the way that they are, is the way that they will always be. ~ Victoria Schwab

It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium. ~ Ansel Adams

I was never in a school situation where someone said, This is the way a photograph is supposed to look. I was completely open to cut them up, or do anything like that. I think if I had been in touch with people earlier, then I wouldn't have felt comfortable doing that. It would have been too bizarre. ~ Robert Heinecken

The wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene [in a photograph] is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imagined plenitude. ~ Victor Burgin

It is the single image, as used in a photograph or a painting - or the frame of a film - to which words have been added to enlarge the context. The method is not the same as that by which most paintings are named. It is closer in its performance to what dialogue does to a movie, to what the caption does to a good poster. ~ Muriel Rukeyser

[L]ess than at any time does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or GEC yields almost nothing about those institutions. Reality proper has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relationships, the factory, let's say, no longer reveals these relationships. Therefore something has to be constructed, something artificial, something set up. ~ Walter Benjamin

I've always thought that the most extraordinary special effect you could do is to buy a child at the moment of its birth, sit it on a little chair and say, "You'll have three score years and ten," and take a photograph every minute. "And we'll watch you and photograph you for ten years after you die, then we'll run the film." Wouldn't that be extraordinary? We'd watch this thing get bigger and bigger, and flower to become extraordinary and beautiful, then watch it crumble, decay, and rot. ~ Clive Barker

I never take a picture of a face because a face is somebody, an arm is not recognizable as somebody. When you take a photograph of someone's face, it identifies it as somebody, but if you take just a fragment, it's everybody. It's not one person. ~ Annette Messager

What I'm feeling, I think, is joy. And it's been some time since I've felt that blinkered rush of happiness, This might be one of those rare events that lasts, one that'll be remembered and recalled as months and years wind and ravel. One of those sweet, significant moments that leaves a footprint in your mind. A photograph couldn't ever tell its story. It's like something you have to live to understand. One of those freak collisions of fizzing meteors and looming celestial bodies and floating debris and one single beautiful red ball that bursts into your life and through your body like an enormous firework. Where things shift into focus for a moment, and everything makes sense. And it becomes one of those things inside you, a pearl among sludge, one of those big exaggerated memories you can invoke at any moment to peel away a little layer of how you felt, like a lick of ice cream. The flavor of grace. ~ Craig Silvey

Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert Einstein, and what will come to your mind is an image, a picture of face, (in Einstein's case, a photograph of a face). Of words, nothing will come to mind. This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture. ~ Neil Postman

A photograph of poverty is not a photograph but it is a knife that sticks into the hearts of everyman who looks at it! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

This is how people behave when their dailiness is destroyed, when for a few moments they see, plain and unadorned, one of the great shaping forces of life. Calamity fixes them with her mesmeric eye, and they begin to scoop and paw at the rubble of their days, trying to pluck the memory of the quotidian - a toy, a book, a garment, even a photograph - from the garbage heaps of the irretrievable, of their overwhelming loss. ~ Salman Rushdie

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