#photography

I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost. ↗

— Nan Goldin

#loss #lost-love #photography #art

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men. ↗

— Nick Harkaway

#photography #men

The very secret of life for me, I believed, was to maintain in the midst of rushing events an inner tranquility. ↗

— Margaret Bourke-White

#tranquility #women-artists #life

Once the amateur's naive approach and humble willingness to learn fades away, the creative spirit of good photography dies with it. Every professional should remain always in his heart an amateur. ↗

— Alfred Eisenstaedt

#amateur #approach #away #creative #creative spirit

A boy in the schoolyard handing out the very same love-letter to a bunch of girls. This is what I think of ‘limited editions’ in art photography. ↗

— AtheARTIST

#art-photography #commercialisation #limited-edition #art

The key is to integrate our art into our life, not the other way around. ↗

— Brooks Jensen

#art

He owned an expensive camera that required thought before you pressed the shutter, and I quickly became his favorite subject, round-faced, missing teeth, my thick bangs in need of a trim. They are still the pictures of myself I like best, for they convey that confidence of youth I no longer possess, especially in front of a camera. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#photography #photos #pictures #youth #youth

When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls! ↗

— Ted Grant

#color #photography #street-photography #photography

Another unary photograph is the pornographic photograph (I am not saying the erotic photograph: the erotic is a pornographic that has been disturbed, fissured). Nothing more homogeneous than a pornographic photograph. It is always a naive photograph, without intention and without calculation. Like a shop window which shows only one illuminated piece of jewelry, it is completely constituted by the presentation of only one thing: sex: no secondary, untimely object ever manages to half conceal, delay, or distract... A proof a contrario: Mapplethorpe shifts his close-ups of genitalia from the pornographic to the erotic by photographing the fabric of underwear at very close range: the photograph is no longer unary, since I am interested in the texture of the material. The presence (the dynamics) of this blind field is, I believe, what distinguishes the erotic photograph from the pornographic photograph. Pornography ordinarily represents the sexual organs, making them into a motionless object (a fetish), flattered like an idol that does not leave its niche; for me, there is no punctum in the pornographic image; at most it amuses me (and even then, boredom follows quickly). The erotic photograph, on the contrary (and this is its very condition), does not make the sexual organs into a central object; it may very well not show them at all; it takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate this photograph and that it animates me. ↗

— Roland Barthes

#photography #pornography #punctum #roland-barthes #niche

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit. ↗

— William S. Burroughs

#photography