Photograph Quotes

If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.

If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.

To photograph is often compared to an act of redemption - to select from an infinite number of choices that which is to be remembered.

The photograph as an object has a relationship to that which it represents something like the relationship the snake skin has to the snake that sheds it.

The cartoon absolutely captures something that acres and acres of copy can't. And even photographs can't.

The formal artistic gesture is already expressed in the act of taking the photograph.

Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.

Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both.

Photography Cannot Record Abstract Ideas (Title of a 16x20 inch photograph depicting an index card on which that phrase is handwritten.)

I try not to make conscious decisions about what I am looking for. I don't make elaborate preparations before I go to a location. Essentially I walk, explore, discover and photograph.

The one thing that is always clear in my mind is that the people, and their stories, and the themes of life that I photograph are always more important to me than the process of photography itself.

I have always tried to keep truth in my photographs. My work, whether realistic or abstract, has always dealt with a form of religion or imagination.

I can see the character in a photograph, in the way a guy stands or holds his hands, the way he buckles his belt. I fantasize a lot looking at photographs. I'm sure that doesn't work for many people.

I never look for a photograph. The photograph finds me and says, I'm here! and I say, Yes, I see you. I hear you.

I took individual photographs of Annie Liebovitz, I kept taking her picture.

The photograph, the clothes, the sets - this was about 1974, and I started hanging out with my friend Richard Sold, who was playing in a band with Patti Smith.

The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.

A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.

Photographs are still always depictions, it's just that for my generation the model for the photograph is probably not reality any more, but images we have of that reality.

To go and photograph an airbase is not only to photograph something but it is to insist on one’s right to photograph. You’re flexing that right.

You can't photograph if you're not in love.

I have a special relationship with God. And when I take the right photograph, God gives me a little bing! in the camera. And then I know I'm on the right track.

The simple fact is this: There are no neutral photographs.

A photograph is a photograph. When I am making a picture I am just interested in making a very interesting photograph. I don't care where it's going to go.

It's important to me to have what I photograph undergo a certain transformation - to become a thing different from what we are used to, to be another version of itself.

A photograph is just a little, teeny-weeny, small piece of life. I feel like I see so much more than what I can actually get.

Mr. President, Mrs. Obama. There is a photograph of you [hugging] that went viral, became the most shared photograph in the history of Twitter. How do you keep the fire going?

If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.

We do not see everything in the environment in the complete, totally resolved, explicit character of the photograph. We, in fact, prioritize our seeing.

I always give a print to everybody I photograph, and some of my subjects have told me they have a hard time hanging them up at home.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

The modern pantheist not only sees the god in everything, he takes photographs of it.

The destination of the photograph is to reveal what something or somebody looked like, under a particular set of conditions, at a particular moment in time, and to transmit the results to others.

My wealth is measured not in money but in photographs, not in quantity but creativity.

I write in order to express what the photo itself cannot say. A photograph of my father doesn't tell me what I thought of him, which for me is much more important than what the man looked like.

I never photograph sunsets and I never photograph moonrises. I'm not interested in what things look like.

In some way, a photo is like a stolen kiss. In fact a kiss is always stolen, even if the woman is consenting. With a photograph it's the same: always stolen, and still slightly consenting.

The person who looks at a photograph as a complete picture, unable to say anything about anything except the facts which existed at the moment of exposure, does not see very far.

It's very easy to make successful photographs - it's very easy.

There are no photographs while I'm reloading .

I didn't choose photography. Photography chose me.

In a still photograph you basically have two variables, where you stand and when you press the shutter. That's all you have.

The notion that Playboy exploited women, because we showed them in beautiful photographs, sexually oriented, strikes me as rather bizarre.

It's not that I don't care about content, but content is not the only way a photograph has meaning.

I still dream of the day when I will take a photograph so beautiful that it can be called love.

Northern Ireland is part of Ireland, not Britain, as can clearly be seen from aerial photographs.

No new photographs until all the old ones have been used up.

If there is pain in my photographs, it relates to the pain in my own existence.

I don't look for things to see how they function as metaphors.... You can't photograph the sublime. You can only traffic in the specific and its relationship to the symbolic.

In all my work there's this notion of the melancholic. You can make a photograph about the sublime, but you can't make the sublime itself.