Photograph Quotes

Life is a movie; death is a photograph. (Susan Sontag)
The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality. View quote
Henri Cartier-Bresson
When I make a photograph, I make love. View quote
Alfred Stieglitz
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. View quote
Diane Arbus
To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy. View quote
Henri Cartier-Bresson
A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you. View quote
Brigitte Bardot
The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard. View quote
Penelope Lively
Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness. View quote
Yousuf Karsh
I don't have a photograph. I'd give you my footprints, but they're upstairs in my socks. View quote
Groucho Marx
While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see. View quote
Dorothea Lange
I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term -- meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching -- there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster. (Ansel Adams)
I began to realise that film sees the world differently than the human eye, and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed. View quote
Galen Rowell
To photograph is to confer importance. View quote
Susan Sontag
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones. View quote
Susan Sontag
Composition is a side issue. Its role in my selection of photographs is a negative one at best. By which I mean that the fascination of a photograph is not in its eccentric composition but in what it has to say: its information content. And, on the other hand, composition always also has its own fortuitous rightness. View quote
Gerhard Richter
As far as the surface is concerned – oil on canvas, conventionally applied – my pictures have little to do with the original photograph. They are totally painting (whatever that may mean). On the other hand, they are so like the photograph that the thing that distinguished the photograph from all other pictures remains intact. View quote
Gerhard Richter
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see. View quote
Roland Barthes
The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
...even more ominous ... is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. ... he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals ... A visual is more interested in style than in content ... A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph. View quote
John Fowles
If you look at any great fashion photograph out of context, it will tell you just as much about what's going on in the world as a headline in The New York Times. View quote
Anna Wintour
Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem. (Jeanette Winterson)
There are plenty of beautiful girls who don't photograph well. View quote
Lauren Hutton
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. View quote
Kenneth Clark
The modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world – in other words – expressing the energy, the motion and the other inner forces.... the modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating. View quote
Jackson Pollock
Kodachrome, They give us those nice bright colours, Give us the greens of summers, Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, Oh, yeah, I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph, So Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away. View quote
Paul Simon