Art of photography quotes:

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I love photography, and I love the art of photography. -- Helen Mirren
The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer. -- Steven Pinker
For me, pointing and clicking my phone is absolutely fine. People say that isn't the art of photography but I don't agree. -- Annie Lennox
To make the essence of man visible in the exposure is the highest art of photography. -- Friedrich Durrenmatt
The desire to discover, the desire to move, to capture the flavor, three concepts that describe the art of photography. -- Helmut Newton
My greatest aim has been to advance the art of photography and to make it what I think I have, a great and truthful medium of history. -- Mathew Brady
You are either born to be a photographer or not. The art of photography is not something you can learn in the classroom or by watching someone do it. -- Nobuyoshi Araki
To make good photographs, to express something, to contribute something to the world he lives in, and to contribute something to the art of photography besides imitations of the best photographers on the market today, that is basic training, the understanding of self. -- Edward Steichen
I love being photographed, or I should say I love the art of photography. It's about people taking photographs of you, stealing them, and then presuming or assuming or captioning. Words can never be taken back, photographs can never be taken back, nothing can ever be taken back. -- Madonna Ciccone
I was always interested in photography and other forms of art. -- Mikhail Baryshnikov
Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art. -- Ansel Adams
I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms - painting, photography, music, dance, theater. -- James Gray
I feed on art more than I ever do on photographs. I can admire photography, but I wouldn't go to it out of hunger. -- Irving Penn
I would like to do all kinds of things: photography and art and designing; I want to help do charity things for animals and things like that. -- Georgia May Jagger
I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way. -- Sydney Pollack
The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art. -- Alfred Stieglitz
Photography has been a passion of mine since I was 15. After my kids were born I found myself incorporating my photography into different art endeavors and from there it just blossomed. -- Angela Cartwright
Before the people at large, and for that matter, the artists themselves, understand what photography really means, as I understand that term, it is essential for them to be taught the real meaning of art. -- Alfred Stieglitz
I enjoy fashion photography and textiles, that whole aspect of it. As more of an art form, I like Proenza Schouler. Those guys are really cool because they seem to have an interesting approach to it all. -- Gia Coppola
Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me. -- William Eggleston
To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them. -- Elliott Erwitt
If you take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of somebody who creates a new language in film by what he was able to accomplish with art direction, photography, lighting, etc., it is still a gold standard for science fiction. -- Matthew Modine
When I was at college, the idea of fashion was more immediate to me, whereas art photography, the depth of it, was a different thing. Storytelling - fanciful storytelling - can only be told through fashion photography. It's the perfect way to play with fantasy and dreams. -- Tim Walker
The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding. -- Edward Steichen
I cannot draw to save my life, and I'm not a big art scholar, but I worked with many designers throughout my career - in theater, in dance, costume designers, set designers, and I have a lot of artist friends and I do photography, and I think it's kind of in my life. -- Mikhail Baryshnikov
After my kids were born I found myself incorporating my photography into different art endeavors and from there it just blossomed. I have always had to have an outlet for my creativity and when my life became more about raising my family than the bright lights of show business exploring my photo art was a great outlet for me. -- Angela Cartwright
I get so confused about life photography art. -- William Wegman
Photography is art when it's used by an artist. -- Ruth Bernhard
Photography is the art of not pushing the button. -- Frank Horvat
But O, Photography! as no art is, Faithful and disappointing! -- Philip Larkin
Photography is an art of teleporting the past into the future. -- Mehmet Murat ildan
People criticized me for my photography. They said it's not art. -- David Hockney
Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest. -- Lisette Model
The invention of photography destroyed the canons of representational, imitative art. -- Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
I am interested in computers and technology, and art, photography, and design. -- William Landay
Photography is an art which touches and grips one's own heart's blood. -- Edvard Munch
I'd love to go off to college to study photography, art history, humanities. -- Mia Wasikowska
There is no other art with as great a democratic capacity as photography. -- Manuel Alvarez Bravo
Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work. -- John Updike
Street photography is art and if art is a crime, please God, forgive me. -- Thomas Leuthard
I do not think there is any question of photography being an art form! -- Ansel Adams
I love photography and art-directing is something that I really would enjoy to do. -- Gianni Versace
Photography is the dominant and fascinating and only folk art of the twentieth century. -- John Rothenstein
There are two dirty words in photography, one is art, the other is good taste -- Helmut Newton
This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy. -- Charles Baudelaire
Photography is a witness against the mistaken opinion that art is an imitation of nature. -- Heinrich Heine
Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us. -- Paul Gauguin
I wanted not to make photographs that would be art, but art that would be photography. -- Jean-Marc Bustamante
What inspires me still: travel, art, photography, my kids, the places I haven't been to yet. -- Jillian Barberie
Whether it is photography, assemblage art or filmmaking, my work is to see beneath the surface. -- Christophe Agou
The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art. -- Sol LeWitt
Now people ask whether photography is art, but I think the question is of absolutely no interest. -- Peter Lindbergh
Photography has every right and every merit to claim our attention as the art of our age. -- Alexander Rodchenko
A few words about the question of whether photography is art or not: I never understood the question. -- Ernst Haas
I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both. -- John Baldessari
Photography is better than art. It is a solar phenomenon in which the artist collaborates with the sun. -- Alphonse de Lamartine
I have people working together, doing different things: architecture, art installation, photography, publishing, and curatorial works and design. -- Ai Weiwei
Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption. -- Andre Bazin
One reason I was interested in photography was to get away from the preciousness of the art object. -- Cindy Sherman
I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908) -- Auguste Rodin
Real photography is a wonderfully inclusive, democratic medium, whereas art photography is more often a private pursuit by conmen. -- Philip Jones Griffiths
It's the first time that I've ever had an art show based on a film, but it's a photography collage. -- Val Kilmer
I took courses at USC in film editing and art direction and photography when I was still in high school. -- Ray Harryhausen
I myself happen to find, on the basis of experience and nothing else, that photography can be a high art. -- Clement Greenberg
All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation. -- Ansel Adams
I went to university in Colorado and studied art history. I did some photography classes there, although it felt really pretentious. -- Pamela Hanson
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. -- Susan Sontag
For me, photography is not a means by which to create beautiful art, but a unique way of encountering genuine reality -- Daido Moriyama
Photography has the capacity to provide images of man and his environment that are both works of art and moments in history. -- Cornell Capa
As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art. -- Susan Sontag
Photography has all the rights, and all the merits, necessary for us to turn towards it as the art of our time. -- Alexander Rodchenko
I cannot understand why some people try to write a history of photography that is separated from the history of modern art. -- Jean-Francois Chevrier
As an allegorical art, then, photography would represent our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable and stabilizing image. -- Craig Owens
It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium. -- Ansel Adams
If art is the poetic interpretation of nature, photography is the exact translation; it is exactitude in art or the complement of art. (1854) -- Charles Negre
I consider myself fortunate that photography exists, because otherwise I'd be stuck in the tragedy of ephemeralness that can come with installation art. -- Sandy Skoglund
The discussion about whether photography is or isn't art is dated and of no interest. Your work makes you an artist, not your title. -- Peter Lindbergh
... the battle for the acceptance of photography as Art was not only counter-productive but counter-revolutionary. The most important photography is most emphatically not Art. -- A. D. Coleman
Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already. -- Helmut Newton
Photography, when used as a representational art, is not a mere copy of nature. This is proved by the rarity of the 'good' photograph. -- Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
Contemporary art photography, or, more specifically, what I would term mainstream art photography, represents for the most part the mining of an exhausted lode. -- Abigail Solomon-Godeau
There still is some opposition to it in some museums and art schools, but I think photography has really grown into a mature art form. -- Ansel Adams
Is photography an art? There is no point in trying to find out if it is an art. Art is old-fashioned. We need something else. -- Man Ray
The recent extraordinary discovery in Photography, as applied in the operations of the mind, has reduced the art of novel-writing to the merest mechanical labour. -- Lewis Carroll
To me, photography is not just a visual art, but something closer to poetry - or at least to some poetry, such as the haiku. -- Frank Horvat
I began drawing as a very young child and had a grandfather who experimented with photography, so those things constituted my first exposure to art. -- Sigmar Polke
... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve. -- Susan Sontag
Speed, the fundamental condition of the activities of our day is the power of photography, indeed the modern art of today, the art of the split second. -- Lisette Model
Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools !), then photography and art are the same thing. -- Charles Baudelaire
Art films aren't necessarily photography. It's feeling. If we can capture a feeling of a people, of a way of life, then we made a good picture. -- John Cassavetes
Today, because photography exercises such a profound influence upon the study of art, we tend to disregard the way in which prints continue to function as information. -- Edward Lucie-Smith
Photography is a unique art that allows people to go back, not only to rediscover themselves but also to get something in print for the first time. -- David Travis
To my father, art had no restrictions. He was a true 'American Primitive.' He greatly enjoyed sketching and photography, carrying a camera with him whenever he could, -- John Carter Cash
Let us... leave art to the artists, and let us try to use the medium of photography to create photographs that can endure because of their photographic qualities. -- Albert Renger-Patzsch
Only in black and white can I see the design and textures. I don't consider color photography art. Black and white is an interpretation. Color is a duplication. -- Clyde Butcher
To extend the depth of what has been called 'art' into photography requires... making available to the spectator the amazing transformations the subject undergoes to become the photograph. -- Michael Snow
In 1967 there was no place for photography in a contemporary art gallery. It was almost impossible to get an art dealer to look at, let alone exhibit, anything photographic. -- Mel Bochner
... photography is just a medium. It's like a typewriter. Photography as an art doesn't interest me an awful lot; as a participant, though I like to look at it. -- Ezra Stoller
Photography, like any other art, is a form of communication. The artist is not blowing bubbles for his own gratification, but is speaking a language, is telling somebody something. -- William Mortensen
That celebrated marriage of science and art, photography, seemed at the time to join together how we look at the world, art, with how we were coming to know it, science. -- Joseph Kosuth
Edward [Weston] was the first artist - and I don't use the word lightly - to make a living doing art photography. Other photographers did commercial work, or worked for the government. -- Rondal Partridge

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