#photograph

The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#photography #pornography #movies

A paradox: the same century invented History and PHotography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening. ↗

— Roland Barthes

#modernity #photography #age

Esquire, in a July, 1957 issue, has a photograph of me playing the French horn at the Five Spot. ↗

— David Amram

#five #french #french horn #horn #issue

Results are uncertain even among the more experienced photographers. ↗

— Matthew Brady

#even #experienced #more #photographers #results

It is a peculiar part of the good photographer's adventure to know where luck is most likely to lie in the stream, to hook it, and to bring it in without unfair play and without too much subduing it. ↗

— James Agee

#bring #fair play #good #hook #know

What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own. ↗

— Diane Arbus

#photographs #photography #art

I imagine that the essential gesture of the Operator is to surprise something or someone (through the little hole in the camera), and that this gesture is therefore perfect when it is performed unbeknownst to the subject being photographed. From this gesture derive all photographs whose principle (or better whose alibi) is “shock”; for the photographic “shock” consists less in traumatizing than in revealing what was so well hidden that the actor himself was unaware or unconscious of it. ↗

— Roland Barthes

#imagination

I realized I didn't want to be a photographer. I gave it up, but I still worked that job in the restaurant and I found myself constantly hanging out in the kitchen. ↗

— Sally Schneider

#found #gave #hanging #i #job

Always point your finger at the chest of the person with whom you are being photographed. You will appear dynamic. And no photo editor can crop you from the picture. ↗

— Ken Auletta

#appear #being #chest #crop #dynamic

Am I in the picture? Am I getting in or out of it? I could be a ghost, an animal or a dead body, not just this girl standing on the corner…? ↗

— Francesca Woodman

#photography #inspirational