Loupe Photography Quotes

It occurs to me that at the beginning one works passionately to learn photography. This takes years, and the craft is usually formed during this period. Then as time passes one finds oneself more in the role of serving the medium ... Then, as in the example of several masters that I have been privileged to know personally, it appears that by having devoted oneself totally to the medium, one becomes photography. ~ Ralph Gibson

Photography is without mercy
though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men. ~ Nick Harkaway

I think probably something big can be done with cameras, I'm not saying, er, I'm saying chemical photography's finished, that means you can't have a Cartier Bresson again, you need never believe pictures. ~ David Hockney

The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much. ~ Annie Leibovitz

I believe that photography loves banal objects, and I love the life of objects. ~ Josef Sudek

'Woman on the Plaza,' with its distinct horizon, snow-like surfaces, wintry wall, stunning sunlight, sharp shadows, and hurrying figure, would become the most biographical of my photographs - an abstract image of the landscape and life of northern Ohio where I grew up and first practiced photography. ~ Sam Abell

Life's the picture. But all good photographers know you gotta have the right lens. ~ Lamar Giles

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. ~ Roland Barthes

At this sunset hour, the canyon walls are indescribably beautiful and I fear the magic of photography can never record what I see now. The tall spires near the canyon's top and the walls of the canyon up there look as if God had reached out and swiped a brush of golden paint across them, gilding these rocks in the bright glow of the setting sun. ~ Barry Goldwater

The photos stirred feelings she couldn't quite frame in words, and this, she decided, must mean they were true works of art. ~ Celeste Ng

When painting portraits a lot of people say, 'Why not get a photograph of the person?' Photography is wonderful and it is an art form in itself, but ... my portrait is a culmination of elements ... a truer image of a person than just the 'click' of a snapshot. ~ Jamie Wyeth

I'm a New Yorker. I don't believe in air unless I can see it. ~ Jay Maisel

By exposing the multiplicity, the facticity, the repetition and stereotype at the heart of every aesthetic gesture, photography deconstructs the possibility of differentiating between the original and the copy. [Photography calls] into question the whole concept of the uniqueness of the art object, the originality of the author, the coherence of the oeuvre within which it was made, and the individuality of so-called self-expression. ~ Rosalind E. Krauss

There had to be something new, some fresh angle. As the rain pattered down around him, Kapenda thought. What was the weirdest thing he'd seen since this all started? He'd been in the tiny town of Chew Stoke a few weeks earlier, filming the remains of a vehicle that had been washed into a culvert and whose driver had died. In Grovehill, no one had died yet but there were abandoned cars strewn along the streets and surrounding tracks, hulking shapes that the water broke around and flowed over in fractured, churning flurries.

That was old. Every television station had those shots.

He'd been there the year before when the police had excavated a mud-filled railway tunnel and uncovered the remains of two people who had been crushed in a landslide. What they needed was something like that here, something that showed how weak man's civilized veneer was when set against nature's uncaring ferocity. He needed something that contrasted human frailty and natural strength, something that Dali might have painted - a boat on a roof, or a shark swimming up the main street. He needed that bloody house to collapse.

("Into The Water") ~ Simon Kurt Unsworth

Photography is Photography; And in it's purity and innocence is far too uniquely, valuable and beautiful to be spoilt by making it imitate something else. ~ Frederick H. Evans

I did photography, painting, and drawing, but I prefer sculpture. I like it because it's very physical. ~ P.J. Harvey

As you get older, you have different tools, and you learn to use photography differently. ~ Annie Leibovitz

One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud. ~ Diane Arbus

For me photography is just a way to collect material to realize the ideas in my mind. I get inspired by things around me in my daily life and all kinds of things I see. Every new project is a new challenge and my goal is to realize them as realistic as possible. ~ Erik Johansson

There is no question that photography has played a major role in the environmental movement. ~ Galen Rowell

A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography. ~ Roman Jakobson

I am a firm believer that digital imaging has already rivaled the chemical process in its ability to make fine prints. An exceptional digital print, on a fine quality paper, can take on all the delicacy of a masterful photogravure. Each is, after all, ink on paper. The unfortunate thing is that skillful digital fine art photography is being created by so few, and today's artworld is brimming with hastily made, conceptually oriented, digital bric-a-brac. ~ Waswo X. Waswo

Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness. The camera doesn't know how to lie. ~ Janet Malcolm

He took twelve pictures that day.
Within a few days he showed me the contact sheet. "This one has the magic," he said.
When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us. ~ Patti Smith

My father thought photography was done by lowlifes. ~ Saul Leiter

In a world of disturbing images, the general body of photography is bland, dealing complacently with nature and treating our preconceptions as insights. Strange, private worlds rarely slip past our guard ... ~ Henry Holmes Smith

Every photo tells a story but remember this, there was a story teller behind the lens. ~ Belinda Taylor

Producing a photographic document involves preparation in excess. There is first the examination of the idea of the project. Then the visits to the scene, the casual conversations, and more formal interviews - talking, and listening, and looking, looking ... And finally, the pictures themselves, each one planned, talked, taken and examined in terms of the whole. ~ Aaron Siskind

On deck, he encountered another young man, Thomas Sumner, of Atherton, England, who also had a camera. (Sumner bore no relation to Cunard's New York manager, Charles Sumner.) Both hoped to take photographs of the harbor. The day was cool and gray - "rather dull," as Sumner put it - and this caused the two to wonder what exposures to use. They fell to talking about photography. ~ Erik Larson

Photography was the only thing that mattered in my life and I gave it everything. ~ Anton Corbijn

Then I thought, Whoa. If there are no photographs, then there is no history. I'm going to get in there. I'm going to make these pictures. We need a record. ~ Joel Meyerowitz

Taco Hidde Bakker: (quoting a sentence from Schles' book "Oculus") Further on you write, decidedly, "Seeing is not knowing. Recognition is not knowledge". […] Muses are the origin of knowledge. Almost everything one knows and is able to know nowadays, comes from hearsay, isn't based on one's own experiences or witnessing of events. Most of us don't even directly witness historically decisive events (or what have come to be portrayed as such by the media) during our lifetimes. By means of the mechanisms of complex (visual) representation networks, we are second-order or even third-order witnesses. If we were to consider photography sui generis, then it is a Muse. It is virtually omnipresent, it sees everything, transmits visual evidence to people all over the globe, and enlargers their body of knowledge. ~ Taco Hidde Bakker

To remember is to rewrite. To photograph is to replace. The only reliable memories, I suppose, are the ones that have been forgotten. They are the dark rooms of the mind. Unopened, untouched, and uncorrupted. ~ Abby Geni

Photography is a love affair with life. ~ Burk Uzzle

That's one of the wonderful things about the whole process of photography - eye contact can be very revealing. ~ Derek Ridgers

You had to be aware that I saw that photography was a mere episode in the history of the optical projection and when the chemicals ended, meaning the picture was fixed by chemicals, we were in a new era. ~ David Hockney