Photographs Quotes

“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.”
― Ansel Adams

“When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they're related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“A photograph shouldn't be just a picture, it should be a philosophy.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.”
― diane arbus

“What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own.”
― Diane Arbus

“Old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it's not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him or herself in us, 'Who's that looking at me so sadly,' he or she would say.”
― José Saramago, All the Names

“One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.”
― Diane Arbus

“Later, when she sees the photographs for the first time, she will be surprised at how calm her face looks - how steady her gaze, how erect her posture. In the picture her eyes will be slightly closed, and there will be a shadow on her neck. The shawl will be draped around her shoulders, and her hands will rest in her lap. In this deceptive photograph, she will look a young woman who is not at all disturbed or embarrassed, but instead appears to be rather serious. And she wonders if, in its ability to deceive, photography is not unlike the sea, which may offer a benign surface to the observe even as it conceals depths and current below.”
― Anita Shreve, Fortune's Rocks

“Max had once read in one of his father's books that some childhood images become engraved in the mind like photographs, like scenes you can return to again and again and will always remember, no matter how much time goes by.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Prince of Mist

“Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.”
― Imogen Cunningham

“In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“I used to capture the vastness and the immensity of the world and confine it to the limited pages of the parchment.”
― Hark Herald Sarmiento

“LaMont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Besides the tablecloths, the decor is all old photographs and postcards that they scrounged up from wherever, because you know how white people love their history right up until it's true.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“Suppose every photo of me ever taken was an infinitesimal piece? Every magazine ad, every negative, every frame of motion picture film - another tiny molecule of me, stolen away to feed an audience that is *never* satiated. And when someone is fully consumed - vampirized - they move on, still hungry, to pick their next victim by making him or her a star. That's why they're called consumers. ("Red Light")”
― David J. Schow, Seeing Red

“Photographs are the reflection of untold stories, unseen beauties, unexpressed emotions, and the unheard songs of life.”
― Debasish Mridha

“Any files I give to the model are downsized (typically 800x1200 pixels)... By not giving out my high resolution files, they cannot be used without my knowledge.”
― A.K. Nicholas, True Confessions of Nude Photography

“Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“Franny?” Rosy held up the four little Franks. “Could I keep one of these?”
Franny looked at her hard for a moment then nodded. “’Course you can, hen,” she said, “But that’s not your daddy.”
Rosy gaped. “It’s not?”
“That’s my wee darling. That’s my wee Frankie before the devil twisted him into a monster.” She poked her finger into another hole where Frank’s face should have been. Her eyes glinted.”
― R.G. Manse, Screw Friendship

“I never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency.

I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock.

I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that "the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda." Some members of the visiting party were unable to go through the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton's headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Our assignment, I believe, is to reach our specific potential.”
― Annette O. Brown, Encounters and Reflections: Can you hear me now?

“Sometimes you see a photograph, a long novel pops up in your mind! A photo that draws you into a world of thoughts and dreams is undoubtedly a good photo!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Photographers live for beautiful light and the sweetest light presents itself in the hours surrounding dawn and dusk.”
― Michael ONeill, Road Work: Images And Insights Of A Modern Day Explorer

“...[Pierson] wrote in his treatise Photography, the History of Its Discovery: "Light is a paroxysmal instrument that never obeys the desires of the photographer in a complete way.”
― Nathalie Léger, Exposition

“The lover's photograph hidden in a married woman's wallet, the poster photograph of a rock star tacked up over an adolescent's bed, the campaign-button image of a politician's face pinned on a voter's coat, the snapshots of a cabdriver's children clipped to the visor--all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“A Thought:

Can we stop showing Black and White pictures of the entire decade of the 1960s so people stop thinking it was 1000 years ago. I'm two years younger than the Civil Rights movement. And Ruby Bridges lives down the street from me and is on Instagram.

(8/1/2020 on Twitter)”
― Hannah Beachler

“Those family photographs may speak a thousand words but most of them are lies.”
― Holly Jackson, A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

“A picture can be taken so quickly, and reproductions of it can be so accurate, that it can be impossible not to see it again and again over the years. After a while, the effect is numbing. I have seen the original Ecstasy of St. Francis many times, and I've also seen it projected in classrooms, in books, and even on postcards. With more popular paintings, the situation is even worse. Paintings like Munch's The Scream and Leonardo's Mona Lisa have been effectively ruined for me. Not only have I forgotten my first encounters with them, which were sometimes intense, but I have almost forgotten that they mean anything”
― James Elkins, Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings

“Having to wait to develop my pictures before I can see them, is part of the fun of film photography. However, when I see them I always ask myself, "Why the heck did I shoot that?” - Chris Geiger”
― Chris Geiger