#photography

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

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 task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us. ↗

— Vilém Flusser

#ethics #photograph #photography #art

If the photographer isn't going to pay attention to the picture he is making, that if he thinks the camera is just a machine and not an avenue of expression, then he has no business asking anyone for anything, let alone their time and interest. Don't show the world, he said, invent the world. ↗

— Whitney Otto

#images #photography #art

You think too much and I bet it kills the magic," he says simply. "Some things are just instinct and if you try and replace that with thinking they die. You can read and think as much as you want before and after, but in the moment, man, you have to, like, let go. ↗

— Blue GhostGhost

#turkish #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