Toubia Photography Quotes

In photography we must learn to seek, not the 'picture,' not the aesthetic of tradition, but the ideal instrument of expression, the self-sufficient vehicle for education. ~ Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

do not take pictures to please the public, the photo should be spontaneous and free ~ Betty Poluk

My love of photography is melded with the ability to capture what I want to remember in the moment I want to never forget. ~ Devin Dygert

To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize. ~ Susan Sontag

Do not forget that when the heart petrifies there is no progress. All science must be like a fruit, so ordered that it may hang from a tree of the flesh & ripen in the sunlight of passion. Histology, photography, electric bells, telescopes, birds, amperes, smoothing irons, etc. -this is only good for bouncing off the arse of humanity. ~ Blaise Cendrars

If anyone gets in my way when I'm making a picture, I become irrational. I'm never sure what I am going to do, or sometimes even aware of what I do-only that I want that picture. ~ Margaret Bourke-White

I don't photograph any two people who are remotely the same. ~ Jock Sturges

Pictures you have taken have an influence on those that you are going to make. That's life! ~ John Sexton

Art accepts what it finds. ~ Frederick Sommer

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

I have a way to photograph. You work with space, you have a camera, you have a frame, and then a fraction of a second. It's very instinctive. What you do is a fraction of a second, it's there and it's not there. But in this fraction of a second comes your past, comes your future, comes your relation with people, comes your ideology, comes your hate, comes your love - all together in this fraction of a second, it materializes there. ~ Sebastiao Salgado

Contemporary art photography, or, more specifically, what I would term mainstream art photography, represents for the most part the mining of an exhausted lode. ~ Abigail Solomon-Godeau

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

Photography as a subject is a good one. Its history is only about 150 years ... You only have to know about twenty-five or thirty names and that's it. All you need. In painting there are more than 1,000. ~ William Wegman

It's the first time that I've ever had an art show based on a film, but it's a photography collage. ~ Val Kilmer

I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.' ~ Jerry Saltz

Photography is the power of observation, not the application of technology. ~ Ken Rockwell

I almost never set out to photograph a landscape, nor do I think of my camera as a means of recording a mountain or an animal unless I absolutely need a 'record shot'. My first thought is always of light. ~ Galen Rowell

The persistent problem in photography is how to look at it. ~ Ben Maddow

I'm a huge, huge fan of photography. I have a small photography collection. As soon as I started to make some money, I bought my very first photograph: an Henri Cartier-Bresson. Then I bought a Robert Frank. ~ Annie Leibovitz

Over the past two decades, the boundary between photography and other media like painting, sculpture, or performance has become increasingly porous. It would seem that each medium has absorbed the other, leaving the photographic residing everywhere, but nowhere in particular. ~ Geoffrey Batchen

There's nothing worse than a brilliant beginning. ~ Pablo Picasso

Something catches your eye, or your interest. You attack it in some way or observe it in some way, and try to put it in some kind of form and take a picture. It's as simple as that. ~ Elliott Erwitt

Look for the extraordinary in the ordinary. ~ Matthew Knisely

I drift like a cloud,
Across these venerable eastern lands,
A journey of unfathomable distances,
An endless scroll of experiences...
Lady Zhejiang here we must part,
For the next province awaits my embrace.
Sad wanderer, once you conquer the East,
Where do you go? ~ Tom Carter

Photography has the capacity to provide images of man and his environment that are both works of art and moments in history. ~ Cornell Capa

You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. (In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz) ~ Marcel Duchamp

'Ornithologists concluded that migratory birds take hundreds of naps as they fly; they also practice unilateral eye closure, in which one eye closes, thereby permitting half the brain to sleep.' Is this what happens when photographers close one eye to look through a viewfinder? If so, they might be operating with only half a brain. Perhaps that explains ... ~ Bill Jay

Contrast is what makes photography interesting. ~ Conrad Hall

In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all. ~ Susan Sontag