Photographic Essay Quotes

What I'm exploring right now is the subject of my own mortality. It's an area that I'm curious about, and I'm researching it to see if there's a photographic essay in it for me. If images don't start to come, I'll go to something else. ~ Leonard Nimoy

When we are reading, a voice comes to us as in the dark and whispers, "Imagine!" Samuel Beckett
as told by Bill Moyer in the Foreword he wrote for, The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by Robert Dawson. Afterword by Ann Patchett ~ Samuel Beckett

The essay form has superceded the novel as the vehicle that best suggests the prevailing apocalyptic gestalt, and as the talisman that is most able to repel the onset of paralysing dread. ~ Adam Parfrey

A few more days, and this essay will follow the Defensio Populi to the dust and silence of the upper shelf ... For a month or two it will occupy a few minutes of chat in every drawing-room, and a few columns in every magazine; and it will then be withdrawn, to make room for the forthcoming novelties. ~ Thomas B. Macaulay

Tom Paine generally took a critical stance when dealing with religion and the church, but in 1775, in an essay entitled, "Thoughts on Defensive War" he wrote as follows: "In the barbarous ages of the world, men in genernal had no liberty. the strong governed the weak a will; till the coming of Christ there was no sucht thing as political freedom in any part of the world... The Romans held the world in slavery and were themselves slaves of their emperors... Wherefore political as well as spiritual freedom is the gift of God through Christ ~ Edmund A. Opitz

In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials. ~ Stanley Kubrick

What I've learned from my travels is that people are more alike than they are different. Yes, I may have a different home or lifestyle than a mom living in Shanghai, but deep down we are still mothers who hope for the best in our children. I always find so much in common with those I meet on my travels – and that provides a genuine connection that cultural differences can't erase. ~ Janna Graber

For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him. ~ Virginia Woolf

I was extravagant in the matter of cameras - anything photographic - I had to have the best. But that was to further my work. In most things I have gone along with the plainest - or without. ~ Edward Weston

everyday life - a series of incidents, some of which make an impression, while most are forgotten. Your consciousness is trained to repress. You crave a holiday, two weeks on a Greek island in the summer or, slighter shorter-term, a long weekend on a ferry to Denmark. Drinking, shouting, laughing, homing in on a woman with just the right kind of husky laugh, who has warm eyes and who thinks pointed shoes are absolutely great. But until that happens: days like photographic slides - images which flicker for a few seconds before disappearing, some easier to remember than others, but then those disappear, too. ~ K.O. Dahl

A lazy man works twice as hard. My mother told that to me, and now I say it to my kids. If you're writing an essay, keep it in the lines and in the margins so you don't have to do it over. ~ Gary Oldman

When setting out on a photographic holiday, always provide yourself with two cameras, one to leave in the train going and the other to leave in the cab coming back. ~ W.C. Sellar

After all, this was the place where I'd had my first meaningful conversation with a female, it was the site of a football's first encounter with my groin, and above all, it was the location where I was first punched in the face by a bully. Somewhere out there, a tooth of mine lay deep within the soil. ~ Wes Locher

Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance. ~ Tennessee Williams

Does the world really need another long essay on environmental archaeology and freshwater mollusks? Well, it's going to get one, whether it likes it or not. ~ Elly Griffiths

Maybe every essay automatically is in some way experimental - less an outline traveling toward a foregone conclusion than an unmapped quest that has sprung from the word 'question'. ~ John D'Agata

Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us. A photograph of an art object is not the art object. An essay about an artist's work is not the artist's work. ~ Carl Andre

I was just sorta wondering…have you ever noticed the way Jason looks at me?"
She looked in her rearview mirror, looked in her side view mirror.
"Bird?"
"I'm thinking."
"It's not an essay question. It's a yes or no."
"Yes."
"And?"
"Thought you said no essay."
"Come on, Bird, how does he look at me?"
She sighed. "He looks at you like you're something he wants and can't have."
I gazed out the window at the houses passing by. "When have you seen him looking at me like that?"
"When have I not seen him looking at you like that? ~ Rachel Hawthorne

While I was in junior high, I wrote an entire essay in rhyme about manufacturing in New York State. In high school, I won a Scholastic poetry contest. ~ Jane Yolen

I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book. ~ William Styron

the best of luck in improving their English writing skills. However, in saying that, it's not up to luck so much as dedication, hard work, and a personal interest in improving your English academic writing skills. APPLY your newly learned knowledge with practical essay writing skills, and you can write you way to a BA. ~ Stephen E. Dew

A spinning stash is much more complex than a knitting stash. It is like the first mother goddess. Everything comes from it, and nothing happens without it. You can't have yarn without the fiber.

(From the essay 'Spinning Stash') ~ Jillian Moreno

If I go out with no make-up and a tracksuit on, nobody comes up to me. And if they do, I won't do a photo because I wouldn't want any photographic evidence. ~ Paloma Faith

Now it makes sense, for example, if the children are taking a vocabulary test of 100 words, and one of the kids misses thirteen of them, to give him an 87 percent. But we go far beyond this. A student writes an essay on a sunset, let us say, and the teacher writes 87 percent at the top of that paper. What he is saying, in effect, is that there is a mathematical metaphor operative here. The figure of 87 is to 100 what this submitted essay is ... to what? What on earth is this supposed to mean? ~ Douglas Wilson

The Great White Male is rap's Grand Inquisitor, its idiot questioner, its Alien Other no less than Reds were for McCarthy. ~ David Foster Wallace

Personal essays are often nostalgia-fused narratives written by authors with authenticity fetishes. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

This one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood" "Normal Time" in New California Writing ~ Michael Chabon

She understood that for her to excel at Oxford she had to improve her English. Her brain was in need of words to express itself fully, the way a sapling was in need of raindrops to grow to its potential. She purchased stacks of coloured Post-it notes. On them she wrote the words she chanced upon, fell in love with and intended to use at the earliest opportunity -- just as every foreigner did, one way or another:
- Autotomy: The casting off of a body part by an animal in danger
- Cleft Stick (from Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings): To be in a difficult situation
- Rantipole (from the Legend of Sleepy Hollow): Wild, reckless, sometimes quarrelsome person.
In her first Political Philosophy essay, she wrote 'In Turkey, where daily politics is rantipole, each time the system is in a cleft stick, democracy is the first thing to be severed and sacrificed in an act of autotomy. ~ Elif Shafak

President Grover Cleveland issued an executive order in 1895 regarding entrance to the Foreign Service. Potential candidates were required to pass two examinations, one written and the other oral, to measure an applicant's knowledge and understanding on a range of subjects deemed necessary for the position. The written examination included essay questions about international law, arithmetic, modern history, resources and commerce of the United States, political and commercial geography, political economy, and American history and institutions. ~ Judith L. Pearson

Most writers want to share their essay or book much too quickly. Those who accept the pain of hard work and revising are those who get published. ~ Lee Gutkind

The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists re-create the past, reconstruct dialogue. They summon meaning from events that have long been dormant. They braid the clays of memory and essay and fact and perception together, smash them into a ball, roll them flat. They manipulate time; resuscitate the dead. They put themselves, and others, into necessary context. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind. ~ John D'Agata

It is essential to consider as a constant point of reference in this essay the regular hiatus between what we fancy we know and what we really know, practical assent and simulated ignorance which allows us to live with ideas which, if we truly put them to the test, ought to upset our whole life. ~ Albert Camus

(In response to a picture critic.)

I'm actually a very joyful person. But being a genius with a photographic memory mixed with a strong case of OCD makes for a difficult picture sometimes. ~ Calvin W. Allison

I'm never going to go to Mars, but I've helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars. ~ Ray Bradbury

Purple light passed over the paper, but nothing happened.
"Next!" Amy said. She was sure the man in black was going to burst in on them any second.
"Whoa!" Dan said.
Amy gripped his arm. "You found it?"
"No, but look! This whole essay - 'To the Royal Academy.' He wrote a whole essay on farts!" Dan grinned with delight. "He's proposing a scientific study on different fart smells. You're right, Amy. This guy was a genius! ~ Rick Riordan

The particular features of the photographic method of detecting atomic particles enabled us to establish the existence of transient forms of matter which had escaped recognition by other methods. ~ Cecil Frank Powell

When it comes to the college essay, feel free to break some rules. Many still apply, of course: you need to watch your grammar and spell everything correctly. Sentence structure still matters. But the formula that got you A's in English can be a straitjacket when you're writing your college essay. ~ Cassie Nichols

Photographic data ... is still and ESSENTIALLY THE SAFEST POETIC MEDIUM and the most agile process for catching the most delicate osmoses which exist between reality and surreality. The mere fact of photographic transposition means a total invention: the capture of a secret reality. ~ Salvador Dali

Of his views on education, he says, 'My natural aversion to academic education was further strengthened when I came across an essay by Rabindranath Tagore on education. It confirmed my own precocious conclusions on the subject. I liked to be free to read what I please and not be examined at all.' After ~ R.K. Narayan

When I was in school, I wanted to be W. Eugene Smith. He was a legendary staffer at Life, a consummate photojournalist, and an architect of the photo essay. He was also kinda crazy.
That was obvious when he came to lecture at Syracuse University and put a glass of milk and a glass of vodka on the lectern. Both were gone at the end of the talk. He was taking questions and I was in the front row, hanging on every word.
Mr. Smith, is the only good light available light?" came the question.
He leaned into the microphone. "Yes," he baritoned, and paused.
A shudder ran through all of us. That was it! No more flash! God's light or nothing!
But then he leaned back into the mic, "By that, I mean, any &*%%@$ light that's available."
Point taken. ~ Joe McNally

Life isn't like coursework, baby. It's one damn essay crisis after another. ~ Boris Johnson

Lewis was a scholar and deeply spiritual man, so it is no surprise that all his characters have to face the complex nature of of the human condition. As a young boy, Lewis suffered from terrible nightmares...Reading fantasy helped Lewis deal with the fears that plagued him in real life. He believed that fantasy makes it easier for children to cope with their fears. In an essay in support of fantasy literature for children, he wrote, "Since it is so likely they will meet cruel enemies{in real life], let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker." By writing about serious themes like distrust, pride, temptation, and greed in a fantastical environment , Lewis helps readers recognize these emotions and forces in their own lives. ~ E.J. Kirk

In my classes, we read great fiction obsessively, and then attempt to see how a writer managed to affect us. We try to understand which elements - diction, syntax, point of view and so forth - made us feel that way. After we spend several weeks reading this way, wondering how the author made us shiver like that, we try our own hand. I ask students to begin with 'green lines,' to isolate writing so good it makes one writer envious of another. Which parts do they wish they had written themselves? Students start to understand how their own writing works, where it ripples with energy… What they really want is to have some kind of firsthand, visceral relationship with a book - to see what it's like to take a work apart and put it back together - using great stories as structural models, just the way the kids I grew up with in Detroit fell in love with cars by spending weekends trying to make derelict Ford Mustangs run again. When the engine finally starts, when you figure out how to make it fire, it's an incredibly powerful learning experience. ~ Dean Bakopoulos

Norman Cousins, endeavoring in his essay Modern Man Is Obsolete to express the deepest feelings of intelligent people at that staggering historical moment, wrote not about how to protect one's self from atomic radiation, or how to meet political problems, or the tragedy of man's self-destruction. Instead his editorial was a meditation on loneliness. "All man's history," he proclaimed, "is an endeavor to shatter his loneliness. ~ Rollo May

I make them up,' I tell them. 'Out of my head. ~ Neil Gaiman

All previous crimes of the Russian empire had been committed under the cover of a discreet shadow. The deportation of a million Lithuanians, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles, the liquidation of the Crimean Tatars remain in our memory, but no photographic documentation exists; sooner or later they will therefore be proclaimed as fabrications. ~ Milan Kundera

In any case, Klossowski, mentioned again during Acéphale's sessional meeting of 25 July 1938, would later return to his opposition between Nietzsche and Bataille in a lecture given in 1941 at the end of a retreat in a Dominican monastery, 'Le Corps du néant', later printed in the first edition of his book Sade my Neighbour (1947) and which Bataille later told him he 'does not like'. Here Klossowski recapitulated the two stages in the evolution of Nietzsche's thought outlined in Löwith's essay 'Nietzsche and the doctrine of the Eternal Return', which he had reviewed in Acéphale 2:
1. Liberation from the Christian YOU MUST to achieve the I WANT of supra-nihilism;
2. Liberation from the I WANT to attain the I AM of superhumanity in the eternal return.
It is precisely in this 'cyclical movement', according to Klossowski, that man 'takes on the immeasurable responsibility of the death of God'. Furthermore, he associates Bataille's negation of God with the negation of utility upon which the notion of expenditure was founded, and hence the source of his 'absolute political nihilism'. His conclusion, however, was a little more ambiguous: 'In his desire to relive the Nietzschean experience of the death of God [...] he did not have the privilege [...] of suffering Nietzsche's punishment: the delirium that transfigures the executioner into a victim [...] To be guilty or not to be, that is his dilemma. His acephality expresses only the unease of a guilt in which conscience ~ Georges Bataille

Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot - or will not - achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography. ~ Roland Barthes