Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst. Henri Cartier-Bresson
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. Diane Arbus, 1923-1971, cited Patricia Bosworth, ‘Diane Arbus, A Biography’, 1985
But there are some items that still intrigue and baffle once hoaxes, photographic mishaps and anomalies are ruled out. This photograph of a Navy unit taken in 1919 for example. Despite extensive analysis, no-one has come up with an explanation of the presence of the apparition in the back row – a former member of the unit who had been killed three days earlier. Strange But True? s3e5: photograph of Freddy Jackson, ITV 1996
It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary. David Bailey, English photographer, interview The Face December, 1984
David Bailey became the foremost photographer of his generation. David Bailey: Four Beats to the Bar, BBC 2010
For over half a century Bailey has travelled the world. ibid.
‘Photography can have the same depth as painting.’ ibid. David
‘My biggest influence in a way is Picasso.’ ibid.
If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough. Robert Capa, Hungarian-born American photojournalist
I would say that the war correspondent gets more drinks, more girls, better pay and greater freedom than the soldier, but that at this stage of the game having the freedom to choose his spot and being allowed to be a coward and not be executed for it, is his torture. The war correspondent has his stake – his life – in his hands, and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute. Robert Capa
It’s quite common that you’ll get an effect of a light appearing in the lens, sort of hanging in the sky – this can look like a square or diamond shape, or even a pentagon, that’s actually caused by stray light coming into the lens and being reflected off the internal surfaces of the lenses, and you get a mirror image inside the lens of the lens iris unit, that in effect you’re seeing something that’s not really there. Jonathan Brandon, Canon UK
A photograph is a biography of a moment. Art Shay
There are no rules for good photographs; there are only good photographs. Ansel Adams, cited Elizabeth T Schoch, 2002
A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety. Ansel Adams, A Personal Credo
The herculean task of a photographer is to capture a momentary frame as beautiful in reality, as it would be in a dream. Ansel Adams, radio interview 1972
8For me the future of the image is going to be in electronic form ... You will see perfectly beautiful images on an electronic screen. And I’d say that would be very handsome. They would be almost as close as the best reproductions. Ansel Adams, interview Paul Hill March 1975
I eagerly await new concepts and processes. I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them. Ansel Adams, The Negative introduction second edition
There is a reality – so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. That’s what I’m trying to get down in photography. Alfred Stieglitz, cited M Orvell, 1989
Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze. Alfred Stieglitz, 1887
Photography is a strong tool, a propaganda device, and a weapon for the defense of the environment ... Photographs are believed more than words; thus they can be used persuasively to show people who have never taken the trouble to look what is there. They can point out beauties and relationships not previously believed or suspected to exist. Eliot Porter, cited Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
You put your camera around your neck in the morning, along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera. Dorothea Lange, cited Partridge ‘Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life’
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it. ibid.
Pictures produced by camera can resemble paintings or drawings in presenting recognizable images of physical objects. But they have also characteristics of their own, of which the following two are relevant here: first the photograph acquires some of its unique visual properties through the technique of mechanical recording; and second, it supplies the viewer with a specific kind of experience, which depends on his being aware of the picture’s mechanical origin. To put it more simply: (1) the picture is coproduced by nature and man and in some ways looks strikingly like nature, and (2) the picture is viewed as something being by nature. Rudolf Arnheim, On the Nature of Photography
What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce. Karl Lagerfeld
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
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time. Susan Sontag
A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second. Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
What’s really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer. William Albert Allard
A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you. Brigitte Bardot
I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it. Lorrie Moore, Anagrams
Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumes as such, publicly. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
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
There are 65 to 70 photography galleries in New York alone. In the UK there are no more than five, and they’re all in London. Martin Parr
Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world. Steven Pinker
The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer. Steven Pinker
West London: With an insider’s street knowledge, Charlie [Phillips] made portraits that are strikingly intimate. Face of Britain by Simon Schama II, BBC 2015
Hill and Adamson: this was undeniably great [photographic] art. ibid.
These are genuine 3-D photographs of real Cowboys and Indians ... Stereograph prints were popular all over the world. Tony Robinson’s Wild West I, Discovery 2015