Jul 10, 2009, 05:30
What means photography? I thought this so many times in my life. Of course there can be so many things to say about it,
but today, I think that photography is a kind of voyage of the world and life without luggage and passport. And no one can have the same voyage... Maybe my poetical spirit talks again here.
Anyway, I just wanted to share some of my favourite quotes about photography. If you wish you can add your thoughts and your favourite quotes too. Thank you, love, nia
*
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see. - Roland Barthes
Thinking is not unifying or making the appearance familiar under the guise of a great principal. Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing oneâs consciousness, making of every image a privileged place. - Albert Camus
You have to hurry up if you want to see something, everything disappears. - Paul Cezanne
Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision. - Salvador Dali
As far as I am concerned, I can only say how much I regret such an admirable discovery should have come so late ! The possibility of studying such images would have had an influence on me that I can only guess at from the usefulness which they have now, even in the little time left me for more intensive study. It is the tangible proof of natureâs own design, which we otherwise see only very feebly. - Eugene Delacroix - quoted in "French Primitive Photography", Philadelphia 1969
The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. Tears and not sight are the essence of the eye. - Jacques Derrida
A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of mother or father taken many years ago. You see them as you remember them. But as people live on, they change completely. That is why I think a photograph can be kind. - Albert Einstein
Imagination is more important than knowledge. - Albert Einstein
Photography concentrates oneâs eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One canât catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by feeling. - Franz Kafka - in 1921
Memory does not make films, it makes photographs. - Milan Kundera, Immortality by Milan Kundera, Peter Kussi (Translator)
There arenât twelve hundred people in the world who understand pictures. The others pretend and donât care. - Rudyard Kipling
The artists must see all things as if he were seeing them for the first time. All his life he must see as he did when he was a child. - Henri Matisse
If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear - but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented. - Edgar Allen Poe
Photography is an ambiguous challenge to chance. - Guy Le Querrec
Memory demands an image. - Bertrand Arthur William Russell, On Being a Photographer
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly,; what is essential is invisible to the eye. - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
You can't depend on your eyes if your imagination is out of focus. - Mark Twain
Art is stronger than Nature - Titian
I go back now, to Pennsylvania, and on one of the walls of the house in which my parents now live there hangs a photograph of myself as a boy. I am smiling and staring with clear eyes at something in the corner of the room. I stand before that photograph, and am disappointed to receive no flicker, not the shadow of a flicker, of approval, of gratitude. The boy continues to smile at the corner of the room, beyond me. That boy is not a ghost to me, he is real to me; it is I who am a ghost to him. - John Updike
To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees. - Paul Valery
We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
The hardest thing about being a photographer is, you have to take pictures.
Doug Bartlow
You canât make a great musician or a great photographer if the magic isnât there.
Eve Arnold
Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.
Ansel Adams
I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn. - Pablo Picasso
There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thank to their art and their intelligence transform the yellow spot into the sun. - Pablo Picasso
Two of the most frustrated trades are dentists and photographers- dentists because they want to be doctors, and photographers because they want to be painters. - Pablo Picasso
In every photographer there was a painter, a true artist, awaiting expression. - Pablo Picasso
A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
Orson Welles
All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this - as in other ways - they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it. -John Berger
What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful that the garment with which it is clothed?
Michelangelo
It was that glorious hour, with the daylight still glowing everywhere, but the moon already gleaming and the first bats dipping in the green, shimmering air. On the edge of the woods stood dissolving in the last light, bright chestnut trunks against black shadows. A yellow cottage softly radiated the daylight it had absorbed, glowing gently like a topaz. The small paths pink and violet, led through meadows, vineyards and woods. The western sky hung golden and green above the velvet blue mountains. Oh, to be able to work now, in the last enchanted quarter hour of ripe summerâs day which would never come again !
Hermann Hesse
I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.
Buddha
but today, I think that photography is a kind of voyage of the world and life without luggage and passport. And no one can have the same voyage... Maybe my poetical spirit talks again here.
Anyway, I just wanted to share some of my favourite quotes about photography. If you wish you can add your thoughts and your favourite quotes too. Thank you, love, nia
*
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see. - Roland Barthes
Thinking is not unifying or making the appearance familiar under the guise of a great principal. Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing oneâs consciousness, making of every image a privileged place. - Albert Camus
You have to hurry up if you want to see something, everything disappears. - Paul Cezanne
Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision. - Salvador Dali
As far as I am concerned, I can only say how much I regret such an admirable discovery should have come so late ! The possibility of studying such images would have had an influence on me that I can only guess at from the usefulness which they have now, even in the little time left me for more intensive study. It is the tangible proof of natureâs own design, which we otherwise see only very feebly. - Eugene Delacroix - quoted in "French Primitive Photography", Philadelphia 1969
The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. Tears and not sight are the essence of the eye. - Jacques Derrida
A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of mother or father taken many years ago. You see them as you remember them. But as people live on, they change completely. That is why I think a photograph can be kind. - Albert Einstein
Imagination is more important than knowledge. - Albert Einstein
Photography concentrates oneâs eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One canât catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by feeling. - Franz Kafka - in 1921
Memory does not make films, it makes photographs. - Milan Kundera, Immortality by Milan Kundera, Peter Kussi (Translator)
There arenât twelve hundred people in the world who understand pictures. The others pretend and donât care. - Rudyard Kipling
The artists must see all things as if he were seeing them for the first time. All his life he must see as he did when he was a child. - Henri Matisse
If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear - but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented. - Edgar Allen Poe
Photography is an ambiguous challenge to chance. - Guy Le Querrec
Memory demands an image. - Bertrand Arthur William Russell, On Being a Photographer
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly,; what is essential is invisible to the eye. - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
You can't depend on your eyes if your imagination is out of focus. - Mark Twain
Art is stronger than Nature - Titian
I go back now, to Pennsylvania, and on one of the walls of the house in which my parents now live there hangs a photograph of myself as a boy. I am smiling and staring with clear eyes at something in the corner of the room. I stand before that photograph, and am disappointed to receive no flicker, not the shadow of a flicker, of approval, of gratitude. The boy continues to smile at the corner of the room, beyond me. That boy is not a ghost to me, he is real to me; it is I who am a ghost to him. - John Updike
To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees. - Paul Valery
We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
The hardest thing about being a photographer is, you have to take pictures.
Doug Bartlow
You canât make a great musician or a great photographer if the magic isnât there.
Eve Arnold
Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.
Ansel Adams
I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn. - Pablo Picasso
There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thank to their art and their intelligence transform the yellow spot into the sun. - Pablo Picasso
Two of the most frustrated trades are dentists and photographers- dentists because they want to be doctors, and photographers because they want to be painters. - Pablo Picasso
In every photographer there was a painter, a true artist, awaiting expression. - Pablo Picasso
A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
Orson Welles
All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this - as in other ways - they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it. -John Berger
What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful that the garment with which it is clothed?
Michelangelo
It was that glorious hour, with the daylight still glowing everywhere, but the moon already gleaming and the first bats dipping in the green, shimmering air. On the edge of the woods stood dissolving in the last light, bright chestnut trunks against black shadows. A yellow cottage softly radiated the daylight it had absorbed, glowing gently like a topaz. The small paths pink and violet, led through meadows, vineyards and woods. The western sky hung golden and green above the velvet blue mountains. Oh, to be able to work now, in the last enchanted quarter hour of ripe summerâs day which would never come again !
Hermann Hesse
I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.
Buddha
“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.”
Ansel Adams
I don't know but he is Picasso! Maybe it was a kind of envy about photographers... I'm thinking now this, once upon a time, artist was making paintings like a photography! Especially before the cameras... and today where we reached. Photography is an art too. Actually everything begins in the mind by our eyes. Eyes... but magic is in the heart!