Photograph Quotes

Nobody takes photographs, photographs take you.

Everything is a subject. Every subject has a rhythm. To feel it is the raison detre. The photograph is a fixed moment of such a raison detre, which lives on in itself.

A person shows himself for an instant as in a photograph but clearer and in the background something which is bigger than his shadow.

Things just enter reality through photographs.

When I photograph, I am always relating things to one another. Photography shows the connection between things, how they relate.

In a Cafe" I watched a man in a cafe fold a slice of bread as if he were folding a birth certificate or looking at the photograph of a dead lover.

Friendship based solely upon gratitude is like a photograph; with time it fades.

My work never directly addresses the literal subject matter of the photograph, but attempts to ask questions about vision itself.

She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.

A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels...

All photographs are far more important than any painting.

[A photograph] should do something to the beholder; either give a more complete appreciation of beauty, or, if nothing else, even a good mental kick in the pants.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.

You've got to deal with how photographs look, what's there, not how they're made.

There is a big difference between The Merchant of Venice and a photograph of two males of different races in an erotic pose on a marble table top.

Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.

A photograph offers us a glimpse into the abyss of time.

I never photograph reality.

I do not photograph for ulterior purposes. I photograph for the thing itself - for the photograph - without consideration of how it may be used.

At the end of the day, it's only a photograph and if someone is going to get really upset about a photograph, then they have a lot of issues. I just roll with it and see what happens.

A photograph can, by the addition of an unimportant spot of color, become a photomontage, a work of art of a special kind.

My true program is summed up in one word: life. I expect to photograph anything suggested by that word which appeals to me.

I'm very interested in making the photographs look real, but a lot of them are highly synthetic. They're hybrids, located somewhere between the found and the constructed.

Everyone has seen photographs of Mexicans wearing those big sombreros. When you come to Mexico, the astonishing thing is, nobody wears these hats at all.

Many cherish the idea that a photograph is an exact presentment of nature, and accept without question the paradox that a photograph cannot lie. Actually there never was a more unmitigated liar.

I always loved the idea that a photograph was a memory frozen in time.

I want my photographs to say: "Look-there's this thing you haven't seen that you should see."

It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.

I never knew [Alfred Stieglitz] to make a trip anywhere to photograph. His eye was in him, and he used it on anything that was nearby. Maybe that way he was always photographing himself.

A photograph is a moment when you press the button. It will never come back.

Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.

I like to photograph people who have strength and dignity in their faces. Whatever life has done to them, it hasn’t destroyed them.

The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid than a photograph.

A photograph is not necessarily a lie, but it isn't the truth either. It's more like a fleeting, subjective impression.

They kept me in short pants as long as they could, until they were shaving the hair on my legs because it was beginning to photograph.

It's not enough that [the photograph] is beautiful. If it doesn't move my heart, it won't move anyone else's heart.

The point at which the photograph ceases to function as a metaphor is the point at which it is free to propose an experiential model.

The only objective truth that photographs offer is the assertion that somebody or something... was somewhere and took a picture.

Watching my daughter sort of live in this world where a photograph is not something to keep a memory. It's something to just speak with. It's language.

To photograph is to confer importance.

The photograph is to a great degree evidence of the conversation I had with the person. It's a part of my visual diary.

Real people move, they bear with them the element of time. It is this fourth dimension of people that I try to capture in a photograph.

It's too presumptuous and naïve to think you can change society by a photograph or anything else... I equate that with propaganda; I think that's a lower rank of purpose.

I find still photographs make me quite self-conscious.

When I photograph, I try to use my instincts as much as possible. It is when pictures are unconsidered and irrational that they come to life; that they evolve from showing to being.

The main thing about directing is: photograph the people's eyes.

There is a word we haven't used yet: virginity... To make a photograph, the plate must be virgin, but your eye as well.

Practice the mechanics of making photographs until it becomes second nature.

My favourite things are just wandering from place to place, going to cafés, taking photographs. My favourite day is a happy accident.

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.