#photography

Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes. ↗

— Roland Barthes

#photography

The eye should learn to listen before it looks. ↗

— Robert Frank

#photography #photography

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#time #photography

I don't just look at the thing itself or at the reality itself; I look around the edges for those little askew moments-kind of like what makes up our lives-those slightly awkward, lovely moments. ↗

— Keith Carter

#love

I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it. ↗

— Lorrie Moore

#photography

The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal. ↗

— John Dunning

#photography #reading #photography

The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words. ↗

— Elliott Erwitt

#photography #the-joy-of-photographing-people #photography

When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies. ↗

— Roland Barthes

#photography #photography

Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location. ↗

— Joe McNally

#photography

Later, when she sees the photographs for the first time, she will be surprised at how calm her face looks - how steady her gaze, how erect her posture. In the picture her eyes will be slightly closed, and there will be a shadow on her neck. The shawl will be draped around her shoulders, and her hands will rest in her lap. In this deceptive photograph, she will look a young woman who is not at all disturbed or embarrassed, but instead appears to be rather serious. And she wonders if, in its ability to deceive, photography is not unlike the sea, which may offer a benign surface to the observe even as it conceals depths and current below. ↗

— Anita Shreve

#photographs #the-sea #photography