A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.
A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model but despite the promptings of our critical intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith.
Poetry is like a portrait of a moment or person, and the poem is almost like looking at a photograph; it slaps you in the face and kisses you at the same time. Nothing else does that, with that brevity. Songs try to do it, but that's three minutes. A poem, you read it and it kind of changes your life and you don't know how it happened and you can never forget it. It's like the best song lyric, the best line from a film-everything in the world that's short and great put together.
The thing about photography is, some people surround themselves with extremely strong subject matter. And unless you're a moron, you're going to get a really strong photograph.
For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ('this-has-been'), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.
Everyone has seen photographs of Mexicans wearing those big sombreros. When you come to Mexico, the astonishing thing is, nobody wears these hats at all.
It is hard to avoid the aspect of time when producing what ones sees as a photograph. . . . my images [are] something that is not a frozen moment, but an image made up of many moments and that is created over time rather than taken.
The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects. So that no one would say, how did you do it, where did you find it, but they would say that such things could be.
I've always said that the only thing a photograph is good at capturing faithfully is another flat surface.
People photograph everything and nothing - no interaction is deemed to have actually happened unless somebody has a picture of it.
The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.
The photograph is a coarse fraud, and seems to delight only in taking the whole beauty out of the picture.
When you can't think of anything else, photograph graffiti, nudes, or plants.
Photography is one big scrapbook of your life.
If I photograph you I don't have you, I have a photograph of you. It's got its own thing. That's really what photography, still photography, is about.
The photograph suggests that our image of reality is made up of images. It makes explicit the domination of mediation.
When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don't know what I am doing. My work is far closer to the Informel than to any kind of 'realism'. The photograph has an abstraction of its own, which is not easy to see through.
A photograph is analogous to a plaster cast taken from life, which is always inferior to a good statue.
Life is a photograph too, so thank you,for not removing yourself from the picture just yet.
. . . anybody who has spent time with cameras and photographs knows that images, like gravestone rubbings, are no more than impressions of the truth.