Photography

(323 votes)   It is not merely the likeness which is precious... but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing... the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think -- and it is not at all monstrous in me to say that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist's work ever produced.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1806-1861, British Poet

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(189 votes)   If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, ''I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life.'' I mean people are going to say, ''You're crazy.'' Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.

Diane Arbus
1923-1971, American Photographer

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(187 votes)   The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.

Brooks Atkinson
1894-1984, American Journalist, Drama Critic

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(179 votes)   I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term -- meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching -- there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.

Ansel Adams
American Painter

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(128 votes)   The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera -- and himself.

Daniel J. Boorstin
1914-, American Historian

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(111 votes)   That the outer man is a picture of the inner, and the face an expression and revelation of the whole character, is a presumption likely enough in itself, and therefore a safe one to go on; borne out as it is by the fact that people are always anxious to see anyone who has made himself famous. Photography offers the most complete satisfaction of our curiosity.

Arthur Schopenhauer
1788-1860, German Philosopher

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(101 votes)   The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.

George Bernard Shaw
1856-1950, Irish-born British Dramatist

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(97 votes)   Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
1749-1832, German Poet, Dramatist, Novelist

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(94 votes)   Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has ''cast up'' in my time or is like to -- this art by which even the ''poor'' can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn't it be acting favorably on the morality of the country?

Jane Welsh Carlyle
1801-1866, British Diarist

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(91 votes)   All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this -- as in other ways -- they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.

John Berger
1926-, British Actor, Critic

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(88 votes)   At least the box is full of something useful. [On his photo gracing a box of Raisin Bran]

Avery Brooks
1949-, American Actor

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(83 votes)   Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

Wallace Stevens
1879-1955, American Poet

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(73 votes)   If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.

Charles Baudelaire
1821-1867, French Poet

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(71 votes)   The camera has an interest in turning history into spectacle, but none in reversing the process. At best, the picture leaves a vague blur in the observer's mind; strong enough to send him into battle perhaps, but not to have him understand why he is going.

Denis Donoghue

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(70 votes)   Any one who knows what the worth of family affection is among the lower classes, and who has seen the array of little portraits stuck over a laborer's fireplace will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the tendencies, social and industrial, which every day are sapping the healthier family affections, the sixpenny photograph is doing more for the poor than all the philanthropists in the world.

Macmillan Magazine

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