Documentaries Quotes - Page 22

• ...I don't see myself as a documentary photographer. I am more drawn to the image itself, rather than to the description of a scene. And, anyway, every image only halfway represents reality, whereas the other half is rather, more or less, fulfilling our imagination.

  Beat Streuli

  Reality, Imagination, Half

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• Making the documentary was an extraordinary experience and it really hit home to me the quasi-religious nature of this anthropogenic global warming cause. These people really have found religion.

  Nick Minchin

  Religious, Home, People

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• The photographic frame is no longer used as a documentary window into undisturbed private lives, but as a stage on which the subjects consciously direct themselves to bring forward hidden information that is not normally displayed on the surface.

  Arthur Tress

  Information, Window, Stage

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• My staged work looks so real that people actually take it for documentary. But, in fact, that is my intention, to disguise the manufacturedness of it. Half of my work, or probably more than that, is staged.

  Wolfgang Tillmans

  Real, People, Looks

  Interview with Peter Halley and Bob Nickas, www.indexmagazine.com. 1997.

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• It's rare in a documentary film that you have a repetitive act. So when you do, you can shoot it in different ways so that you have more choices when you're sitting down to edit that sequence six months later.

  Frederick Wiseman

  Choices, Sitting Down, Different

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I'm kind of a twisted social documentary photographer.

  Catherine Opie

  Photographer, Kind, Twisted

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• For years my only purpose was to do documentary photos for magazines, without any idea that they were part of a larger project. It was as if I were carried along by a stream - even though I believed that the current was taking me in the right direction.

  Hiroshi Hamaya

  Years, Ideas, Purpose

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• A lot of people just go to movies that feed into their preexisting and not so noble needs and desires: They just go to action pictures, and things like that. But if you go to foreign films, if you go to documentaries, if you go to independent films, if you go to good films, you will become a better person because you will understand human nature better. Movies record human nature in a better way than any other art form, that's for sure.

  Roger Ebert

  Art, Independent, People

  Source: progressive.org

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• Photography is the typical means of expression of a society founded on a civilization of technicians, conscious of the aims it has set for itself... Its power of exactly reproducing external reality, a power inherent in its technique, lends it a documentary character and makes it appear as the most faithful and impartial process for the reproduction of social life.

  Gisele Freund

  Photography, Character, Mean

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• I need there to be documentary photographers, because my work is meta-documentary; it is a commentary about the documentary use of photography.

  Joan Fontcuberta

  Photography, Needs, Use

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• In a way my work is documentary. But I am also a photographer who has a distinct style. My photographs are a companion to the reality of the situation.

  Graciela Iturbide

  Reality, Style, Way

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• The exposé, the compassion and outrage, of documentary fueled by the dedication to reform has shaded over into combinations of exoticism, tourism, voyeurism, psychologism and metaphysics, trophy hunting - and careerism.

  Martha Rosler

  Compassion, Dedication, Hunting

  Martha Rosler (2004). “Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001”, p.178, MIT Press

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• A picture that is ghostly and silent can be more eloquent and less clichéd than a noisier photo-journalistic approach and I have attempted to make pictures that whilst they are not documentary in the traditional sense, they are still documents, like forensic traces.

  Simon Norfolk

  Silent, Forensics, Approach

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• Watching a documentary with people hacking their way through some polar wasteland is merely a visual. Actually trying to deal with cold that can literally kill you is quite a different thing.

  Henry Rollins

  People, Trying, Different

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• Reportage is interesting only when placed in a fictional context, but fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context.

  Jean-Luc Godard

  Interesting, Fiction, Ifs

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• When you say documentary, you have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. It should be documentary style, because documentary is police photography of a scene and a murder ... that's a real document. You see, art is really useless, and a document has use. And therefore, art is never a document, but it can adopt that style. I do it. I'm called a documentary photographer. But that presupposes a quite subtle knowledge of this distinction.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Art, Real

  Jeff Rosenheim, Walker Evans, Jane Ninas, Historic New Orleans Collection (1991). “Walker Evans and Jane Ninas in New Orleans, 1935-1936”, Historic New Orleans

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• [Documentary photography] is unwittingly literary, because it is nothing other than an observation of contemporary life apprehended at the right moment by an artist capable of seizing it. (1928)

  Pierre Mac Orlan

  Photography, Artist, Moments

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• I think being really open to this new world of online and what it means to be online. Also, understanding that maybe it's time to let go of the 90-minute experience and realize that all of the content that comes on top of the 90-minute film experience, [that] there's a lot of that, especially with documentaries.

  Alex Stapleton

  Letting Go, Mean, Thinking

  Source: collider.com

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• I think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose.

  W. Eugene Smith

  Photography, Thinking, Purpose

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• I've always been interested in how to present something that relates to our reality - which is not really... I don't even know if documentary itself does as good a job. It has its own problems in trying to get at the reality of the situation.

  Gus Van Sant

  Jobs, Reality, Trying

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• No one likes documentaries.

  Alex Gibney

  Likes

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• I think everything can be painted because painting can change reality; but everything cannot be photographed and the photographer often comes home empty-handed, with images which (often) have a documentary interest, but which rarely go further than that. One has to be completely available, very tenacious and admit that many subjects won't give any results... and a miracle sometimes happens, without warning.

  Martine Franck

  Home, Reality, Thinking

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• I personally chose to go vegan because I educated myself on factory farming and cruelty to animals, and I suddenly realized that what was on my plate were living things, with feelings. And I just couldn't disconnect myself from it any longer. I read books like 'Diet for a New America' and saw documentaries like 'Earthlings' and 'Meet your Meat,' and it became an easy choice for me.

  Ellen DeGeneres

  Book, Animal, America

  "Why Ellen Went Vegan". www.peta.org. November 09, 2009.

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• For me, documentary photography has always come with great responsibility. Not just to tell the story honestly and with empathy, but also to make sure the right people hear it. When you photograph somebody who is in pain or discomfort, they trust you to make sure the images will act as their advocate.

  Giles Duley

  Photography, Pain, Responsibility

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• I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything.

  Gus Van Sant

  Drama, Animal, Ideas

  Interview with Steve Head, www.ign.com. October 22, 2003.

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