The Photographer's Eye Quotes

“There is a terrible truthfulness about photography. The ordinary academician gets hold of a pretty model, paints her as well as he can, calls her Juliet, and puts a nice verse Shakespeare underneath, and the picture is admired beyond measure. The photographer finds the same pretty girl, he dresses her up and photographs her, and calls her Juliet, but somehow it is no good – it is still Miss Wilkins, the model. It is too true to be Juliet.

George Bernard Shaw
Wilson’s Photographic Magazine, LVI, 1909”
― John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye

“Speaking of photography Baudelaire said: "This industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy." And in his own terms of reference Baudelaire was half right; certainly the new medium could not satisfy old standards. The photographer must find new ways to make his meaning clear.”
― John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye

“And once made objective and permanent, immortalized in a picture, these trivial things took on importance.”
― John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye

“But it was not only the way that photography described things that was new; it was also the things it chose to describe.”
― John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye

“The trained artist could draw a head or a hand from a dozen perspectives. The photographer discovered that the gestures of a hand were infinitely various, and that the wall of a building in the sun was never twice the same.”
― John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye

“Just as nature had once imitated art, so now it began to imitate the picture made by the camera.”
― John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye

“Most of this deluge of pictures seemed formless and accidental, but some achieved coherence, even in their strangeness.”
― John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye

“But whether produced by art or by luck, each picture was part of a massive assault on our traditional habits of seeing.”
― John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye

“All photographs are time exposures, of shorter or longer duration, and each describes a discrete parcel of time.”
― John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye