https://art.utk.edu/photography/baldwin/
... the camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness,
the central instrument of our time ... It is,
like the phonograph record and like scientific instruments and unlike
any other leverage of art, incapable of recording anything but absolute, dry truth.
James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
From this day forward painting is dead.
Delaroche, 1839
I photograph what I do not wish to paint and paint what I cannot photograph.
Man Ray
You can photograph anything now.
Robert Frank
I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.
Garry Winogrand
You can’t say more than you see.
Thoreau
In my view, you cannot claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it.
Zola
Photography ... despite its astonishing realism, in many respects,
it is merely a reflection of reality, a copy, which, as it were, falsifies because of its very exactness.
Delacroix
A literal document would be a police photograph ... a document has a use,
whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document ...
Walker Evans
I have yet to see a fine photograph that is not a good document. Berenice Abbott
A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model but despite promptings
of our critical intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith.
André Bazin
If our reading is satisfactory, the photograph analyzed offers us three messages:
a linguistic message, a coded iconic message, and a non-coded iconic message.
Roland Barthes
To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.
Duane Michaels
When all is said and done, reality is stronger than all our wishes.
Werner Heisenberg
With photography I did’t have to make things up; everything was already there.
Jan Groover
I invent nothing. I imagine everything.
Brassai
I am always saying that the best photographs are those I never took.
André Kertész
The thing that’s important to know is that you never know.
One thing that struck me very early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s
going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.
I’ve never taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.
Diane Arbus
... photography is the most difficult of the arts.
It does require a certain arrogance to see and choose.
With the camera, it’s all or nothing.
Walker Evans
Photography doesn’t take any brains.
It takes sensitivity, a finger and two legs.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Perhaps in the future, photography would replace all art.
Man Ray
You press the button, we do the rest.
Kodak, 1888
