Photography Quotes - Page 14

• It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.

  David Bailey

  Art, Learning, Imagination

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• In my photography, color and composition are inseparable. I see in color.

  William Albert Allard

  Color, Inseparable, Composition

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• The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Cameras, Photographer, Moments

  Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lincoln Kirstein, Beaumont Newhall (1963). “Photographs”

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• This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition - an organic coordination of visual elements.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Real, Essence, Elements

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• As far as I am concerned, taking photographs is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from other means of visual expression. It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It is a way of life.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Mean, Expression, Understanding

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• I guess I've shot about 40,000 negatives and of these I have about 800 pictures I like.

  Harry Callahan

  Photographer, Shots

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• I just think it's important to be direct and honest with people about why you're photographing them and what you're doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul.

  Mary Ellen Mark

  Thinking, People, Soul

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• There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Eye, Expression, Creative

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• I didn't want to tell the tree or weed what it was. I wanted it to tell me something and through me express its meaning in nature.

  Wynn Bullock

  Weed, Marijuana, Tree

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• Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts.

  Minor White

  Travel, Heart, Cameras

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• I don't really remember the day when I stood behind my camera with Henry Kissinger on the other side. I am sure he doesn't remember it either. But this photograph is here now to prove that no amount of kindness on my part could make this photograph mean exactly what he.. or even I.. wanted it to mean. It's a reminder of the wonder and terror that is a photograph.

  Richard Avedon

  Kindness, Mean, Sides

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• At the root of creativity is an impulse to understand, to make sense of random and often unrelated details. For me, photography provides an intersection of time, space, light, and emotional stance. One needs to be still enough, observant enough, and aware enough to recognize the life of the materials, to be able to 'hear through the eyes'.

  Paul Caponigro

  Art, Creativity, Eye

  Paul Caponigro (2002). “New England Days”, p.38, David R. Godine Publisher

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• My quest, through the magic of light and shadow, is to isolate, to simplify and to give emphasis to form with the greatest clarity. To indicate the ideal proportion, to reveal sculptural mass and the dominating spirit is my goal.

  Ruth Bernhard

  Light, Giving, Goal

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• Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth?

  Paul Gauguin

  Knows, Do You Know, Ultimate

  Paul Gauguin (1978). “The writings of a savage”, Viking Adult

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• But I would like to reach the point where I could cut up an illustrated magazine at random and see to it that the parts would each become a painting. I cannot properly explain it right now. Already now I am searching for the most boring and irrelevant photo material that I can find. And I would like to get to the point soon where this determined irrelevance could be retained, in favor of something that would be covered up otherwise by artifice.

  Gerhard Richter

  Cutting, Irrelevance, Covered Up

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• The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source.

  Gerhard Richter

  Perfect, Style, Doe

  FaceBook post by Gerhard Richter from Feb 27, 2014

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• Suddenly, I saw it in a new way, as a picture that offered me a new view, free of all the conventional criteria I had always associated with art. It had no style, no composition, no judgment. It freed me from personal experience. For the first time, there was nothing to it: it was pure picture. That's why I wanted to have it, to show it - not use it as a means to painting but use painting as a means to photography.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Mean, Views

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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• A work of art is itself an object, first of all, and so manipulation is unavoidable: it's a prerequisite. But I needed the greater objectivity of the photograph in order to correct my own way of seeing: for instance, if I draw an object from nature, I start to stylize and to change it in accordance with my personal vision and my training. But if I paint from a photograph, I can forget all the criteria that I get from these sources. I can paint against my will, as it were. And that, to me, felt like an enrichment.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Objectivity, Order

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007”

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• Photography has almost no reality; it is almost a hundred per cent picture. And painting always has reality: you can touch the paint; it has presence; but it always yields a picture - no matter whether good or bad. That's all the theory. It's no good. I once took some small photographs and then smeared them with paint. That partly resolved the problem, and it's really good - better than anything I could ever say on the subject.

  Gerhard Richter

  Reality, Yield, Matter

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• Photography has been a passion of mine since I was 15.

  Angela Cartwright

  Passion, Mines, Has Beens

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Reality, Age, Way

  "Photography, or the Writing of Light" by Jean Baudrillard, 2000.

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• Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth? - photography, once it begins to reproduce colors, and that won't be long in coming. And yet you want an intelligent man to sweat for months so as to give the illusion he can do something as well as an ingenious little machine can!

  Paul Gauguin

  Intelligent, Men, Color

  Paul Gauguin (1978). “The writings of a savage”, Viking Adult

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• The video camera dominates art. It's a bore, it makes everything look a bit the same. If you look at things with a pencil and paper in your hand, you are going to see far more.

  David Hockney

  Art, Hands, Video

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• The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects. So that no one would say, how did you do it, where did you find it, but they would say that such things could be.

  Dorothea Lange

  Photograph, Objects, Consequence

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• But I always liked the fact that you get these totally unacceptable images, but they're taken by a really expensive photographer, with great light, and in terms of the quality of the photograph it's a great photograph, but in terms of imagery it's unacceptable, and I like that contradiction.

  Damien Hirst

  Taken, Light, Quality

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