« All Photography Quotes · Susan Sontag's Page
Photography Quotes by Susan Sontag
- The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is…
- In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty and beauty. You get dwarfs.
- ...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.
- A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly…
- While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less…
- Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience…
- It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation…
- 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…
- Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.
- Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art…
- In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has…
- Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.
- Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
- To us, the difference between the # photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded,…
- As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
- It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just…
- The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.
- A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.
- To collect photographs is to collect the world.
- Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.
- The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
- A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
- In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
- The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
- It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious…
More Ways to Read Photography Quotes by Susan Sontag
More Photography Quotes
- All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. — Richard Avedon
- In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present. — Francis Bacon
- It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can… — David Bailey
- Rockers are the nicest people to photograph. They have no inhibitions. — David Bailey
- I never tried to revolutionise photography; I just do what I do and keep my fingers crossed that people will like it. — David Bailey
- You don't take a photograph, you make it. — Ansel Adams
- When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. — Ansel Adams
- There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer. — Ansel Adams
- Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art. — Ansel Adams
- A good photograph is knowing where to stand. — Ansel Adams
- There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs. — Ansel Adams
- There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. — Ansel Adams