Shutterbabe Quotes

“I loved to press the shutter, to freeze time, to turn little slices of life into rectangle rife with metaphor.”
― Deborah Copaken Kogan, Shutterbabe

“We women are cursed. Never mind the blood and the mess; that I can deal with. I'm talking about the fear of female sexuality, pure and not so simple. What is it about our bodies that scares men so, makes them take such extreme measures to put us in our places? If they're not stopping us on the streets in the supposedly enlightened parts of the world to whistle, grab their crotches, lick their tongues between opened fingers, yell obscenities or proposition us with erect bananas - I, like most women, speak from a deep well of experience here - then they're hiding us under burkas or veils in other parts of the world so that they won't be tempted to do so.”
― Deborah Copaken Kogan, Shutterbabe

“People should not be allowed to be born that beautiful. They get away with too much. Beauty is truth? That last couplet always bothered me. In art, in an urn, maybe, but in people, no way. In fact, sometimes I think physical beauty may be the biggest scam ever played upon mankind.”
― Deborah Copaken Kogan, Shutterbabe

“I stop to change my film. Without the camera to shield my eyes, I start to feel weak. Queasy. The room tilts. I see the heart lying there, inert and cold. I see the women shoving it back inside the chest cavity... I picture the cavity behind my eyes, and instead of a brain I imagine an enormous roll of film, winding maniacally inside a bloodless metallic skull. A simple recording device, nothing more.”
― Deborah Copaken Kogan, Shutterbabe

“Call it the curse of the photographer. Unlike the memories of my childhood--fuzzy around the edges, suffused more with movement and smell and sound than with the rigidity of graphic lines and shapes--most of the memories I have since becoming a photographer are four-sided and flat. When you learn to properly frame an image in the viewfinder of a camera, you start to frame and catalog everything you see, whether you photograph it or not. And suddenly, memory has the shape of a rectangle. The vastness of a forest becomes twelve trees with a rock balancing out the foreground. A person becomes a close-up of the crow's-feet around his eyes. A war becomes red blood in white snow. Sometimes I feel like my brain has become nothing more than an overstuffed spiral notebook full of negatives, printed at will in a disorganized flurry by the slightest provocation.”
― Deborah Copaken Kogan, Shutterbabe