favourite photo quotes

From memory, and therefore only approximate, from George Bernard Shaw (a keen photographer) writing in Camera Work:

The camera is like the codfish, which lays a million eggs in order that one may survive.

Tashi delek,

R.
 
Albeit about filmmaking:
"I love that young people want to hold on to film as long as they can. It’s been with us for the hundred years of cinema, but it’s really over now. The new digital medium can be beautiful, but it’s really the lens and photographer that make the image beautiful."

Francis Ford Coppola, in L.a. Weekly June 5, 2009
 
The Winogrand's "I photograph to see what something looks like photographed"....
and Erwitt's "...not what you, but how you see them..." (or something like that).
 
I love good quotations. Can we revive this thread and make it a sticky (or point me to another thread if it's already been done)?

Here is one I like:

"If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time." - Robert Doisneau
 
"We photographers deal with things that are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory."
- Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment, 1952
 
I love the caption which is in my RFF Signature:


'The question is not what you look at, but what you see' - Thoreau

cheers,

Frans
 
"All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." Richard Avedon

"Because we see reality in different ways, we must understand that we are looking at different truths rather than the truth and that, therefore, all photographs lie in one way or another."- John Szarkowski

"All photographs lie, therefore all photographers are liars." - Monte H. Gerlach
 
“It’s not YOUR picture, it’s MY picture!” - Garry Winogrand to a guy who told him not to take his picture.
 
“There’s a lot of talk how making photographs has become so much harder given the state of things, given there are cameras everywhere. But then, if you are complaining about that – doesn’t that show the limitations of your own creativity? What can you photograph when every picture has already been taken? Well – isn’t it liberating to know that every photograph has been taken already, so now you can really take your photographs?”

- Joerg Colberg
 
My favorite Winoquote is (from memory): "there are no pictures when I reload my camera." In response to a question whether he was worried that he would miss a great shot while he was loading another roll.

I took this to really emphasize the role of the photographer's eye as if even the most amazing scene would not matter and have photographic value unless you brought your game to it.
 
Gueorgui Pinkhassov about shooting without looking (from the Magnum Photos blog):

"Good photos have come when I least controlled the situation. The process reminds me more of fishing than it does of shooting. I look through the lens; I create my composition – banal, boring. Get tired, get distracted – click and success. As though the photographic angels, upon whom it all depends, had begged, ‘Don’t look through the lens, let us work in peace.’ Sometimes I have not even recognized my own photographs. I have even hesitated to call them my own."

And here's one by Karlheinz Stockhausen, from Weltmusik (1973) (I know, he's not a photographer, but still! :)):

"If one can only produce specific notes on a very limited instrument, that very limitation guarantees highly original music, unlike what can be produced with other instruments offering completely different possibilities. Universal electronic equipment, with which one can in theory do anything, is more likely to kill the spirit than to inspire it. An unwritten law has always proclaimed that it is precisely through limitation that mastery can be revealed. Any kind of restrictive channelling accelerates and intensifies the flow of a river."
 
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