Duplay Photography Quotes

In the history of photography, we have many masterpieces in terms of black and white books. You have Bresson's 'Decisive Moment,' Frank's 'The Americans' ... many masterpieces. But there is nothing to this caliber in color. Well, I think I'll waltz with my muse and hope that I might be able to produce something on this order in color. ~ Ralph Gibson

To me photography must suggest, not insist or explain. ~ Brassai

I was twenty when I discovered war and photography. I can't say that I wanted to bear witness and change the world. I had no good moral reasons: I just loved adventure, I loved the poetry of war, the poetry of chaos, and I found that there was a kind of grace in weaving between the bullets. ~ Luc Delahaye

Everyone is a photographer now, remember. That's the great thing about photography. ~ Martin Parr

I love feeling that I am opening new worlds for people who don't have time to investigate these things themselves. ~ Joyce Tenneson

That frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject, you cannot do it by not being lost yourself. ~ Dorothea Lange

In the absence of a subject with which you are passionately involved, and without the excitement that drives you to grasp it and exhaust it, you may take some beautiful pictures, but not a photographic oeuvre. ~ Brassai

Ever since the 1860s when photographers travelled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment. ~ Galen Rowell

The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances. ~ Andre Breton

For me, photography must be visual, rather than intellectual and ideological. ~ Roy DeCarava

There was a time when one looked over one's shoulder with an ironical smile at the photographer and when photography as a profession seemed almost invariably a target for ridicule. That time is now over. ~ Albert Renger-Patzsch

In photography we possess an extraordinary instrument for reproduction. But photography is much more than that. Today it is [a method for bringing optically] some thing entirely new into the world. ~ Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Ultimately success or failure in photographing people depends on the photographer's ability to understand his fellow man. ~ Edward Weston

I think it's very dangerous for a free society to have all the information distilled and packaged by our government and given to us. Do we know to this day who we killed in Iraq? I don't think so. If bringing war into the living room means that we as a people will say we don't want to do it that way anymore we want to figure out other ways to solve these conflicts, then I would say that photography and television have done us a great service. ~ Michael Deaver

Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way. ~ William Gibson

For me, photography is not a means by which to create beautiful art, but a unique way of encountering genuine reality ~ Daido Moriyama

A reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment. Everything in a novel is explicitly chosen, whereas some of what a film captures feels incidental, according to the vagaries of photography and sound recording. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I've never taken a script to the stage or to principal photography and said, "This is perfect. This is as good as it can possibly be." It's not Shakespeare, you know; you know it can probably be better. ~ Harold Ramis

Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is always about time. ~ Richard Misrach

Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it. ~ Kenneth Clark

I started photography more or less by accident when I was already 27. I was taken on as an assistant by a photographer who was a friend of a friend and I very quickly understood the potential of expression in photography. ~ Peter Lindbergh

One question that especially intrigues me is exactly when humpbacks started coming to Hawaii and why. In artwork and oral histories of ancient Hawaiians there is no record of humpback whales being there, and there is no evidence that humpbacks were there in large numbers in the mid-1800's during the heyday of whaling. The whalers who provisioned in Hawaii in the winter couldn't have overlooked the numbers of whales that are in Hawaii now. We really don't know what happened, but everything points to a recent colonization of humpbacks. (p.162). ~ Charles "Flip" Nicklin

This is the way photography can be cruel ... in the sense that it describes everything, even the things we are not necessarily aware we're revealing. ~ Katy Grannan

Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took. ~ Rebecca McNutt

There is a terrible truthfulness about photography that sometimes makes a thing look ridiculous. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Photography is not a sport. It has no rules. Everything must be dared and tried! ~ Bill Brandt

There are many reasons why photography does not attract the social and cultural attention it deserves. I would add one more which has received scant attention: it does not make a lot of noise ... Perhaps photography would be more appreciated if camera shutters fired with the sound of a .357 Magnum. ~ Bill Jay

I never liked photography. Not for the sake of photography. I like the object. I like the photographs when you hold them in your hand. ~ Robert Mapplethorpe

It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us. ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

I want pictures like these. The kind that can capture a moment, make it real, make it last. I need pictures that do more than reflect. I need pictures that are truth. ~ Lisa Mangum

It's important to let your subjects be themselves. ~ Herb Ritts

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible. ~ Susan Sontag

Photography was the first available demonstration that light could indeed exert an action sufficient to cause changes in material bodies. ~ Henry Fox Talbot

The greatest moments are right in front of you. ~ Matthew Knisely

With the work that I do as a director, I've got dialogue, camera movement, and character blocking to help create a tone to the piece. In photography, those elements are somewhat void so that tone becomes a bit more subtle but still equally important. ~ Aaron Ruell

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz. ~ Sigmar Polke

"Do not call yourself an "artist-photographer" and make "artist-painters" and "artist-sculptors" laugh; call yourself a photographer and wait for artists to call you brother." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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. ~ Taryn Simon

The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates. ~ Susan Sontag

I don't want to knock photography, and I don't feel that film is up there but photography isn't. I think they're next to each other really, you know. There's an incredible strength to a still picture. Or there can be an incredible strength to a still picture that can outlive you. That can outlive a film. ~ Anton Corbijn

I've enjoyed photography, ever since I was a teenager, and I'm still at it. I've had shows in various cities, around the country, and I have a number of pieces in permanent collections in museums that I'm very proud of. ~ Leonard Nimoy

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. ~ John Szarkowski