Sunday, August 11, 2019 – Taking Pictures
A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know. ~ Diane Arbus
To photograph is to confer importance. ~ 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
When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. ~ Ansel Adams
A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away. ~ Eudora Welty
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
Today everything exists to end in a photograph. ~ Susan Sontag
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. ~ Susan Sontag
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. ~ Susan Sontag
A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you. ~ Brigitte Bardot
There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit. ~ William S. Burroughs
I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it. ~ Lorrie Moore
It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turned out after all – who they married, the date of their death – with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us. ~ Ian McEwan, Black Dogs
There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes. ~ Abraham Lincoln
It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down…. ~ Kate Morton
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
When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not. ~ Aleksandar Hemon
The photograph, for all its promises of immortality, is always redolent of death. ~ Nathan Jurgenson
My mother’s favorite photograph was one of herself at twenty-four years old, unbearably beautiful, utterly glamorous, in a black-straw cartwheel hat, dark-red lipstick, and a smart black suit, her notepad on a cocktail table. I know nothing about that woman. ~ Amy Bloom
Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs. ~ Ansel Adams
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
A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. ~ Richard Avedon
Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. ~ Alfred Stieglitz
The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words. ~ Elliott Erwitt
Photographs are just light and time. ~ John Green, Turtles All the Way Down
If these pictures have anything important to say to future generations, it’s this… I was here! I existed! I was young, I was happy, and someone cared enough about me in this world to take my picture! ~ Robin Williams
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art. ~ Susan Sontag
Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks. ~ Roland Barthes
If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under World in a second, and examined it at leisure. ~ H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away
~ Paul Simon
At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. ~ Toni Morrison
Just Above Sunset 