In 2006 I decided to teach myself the critical theory behind photography, since I spend so much of my time taking pictures. So far, I've read Camera Lucida (Barthes), On Photography (Sontag), Regarding the Pain of Others (Sontag), Classic Essays on Photography (Trachtenberg), Why People Photograph, and Beauty in Photography (Robert Adams).
An index for measuring futility and pride. -- Michael Almereyda
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-- and therefore, like power. --Sontag
In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty and beauty. You get dwarfs. --Sontag
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know. --Arbus
The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all. --Sontag
Although photography generates works that can be called art-- it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-- photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. --Sontag
While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects)-- a material vestigate of its subject in a way that no painting can be... Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross. --Sontag
If I could tell a story in words, I wouldn't need to lug a camera. --Lewis Hine
As I progressed further with my project, it became obvious that it was really unimportant where I chose to photograph. The particular place simply provided an excuse to produce work... you can only see what you are ready to see-- what mirrors your mind at that particular time. --George Tice
...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude. --Sontag
Photographs objectify: the turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. --Sontag
In contrast to the written account-- which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-- a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all. --Sontag
If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear-- but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented. --Edgar Allen Poe.
[Photography] is made for the present age, in which the desire for art resides in a small minority, but the craving, or rather necessity for cheap, prompt, and correct facts in the public at large. Photography is the purveyor of such knowledge to the world. She is the sworn witness of everything presented to her view... her business is to give evidence of facts, as minutely and as impartially as, to our shame, only an unreasoning machine can give. -- Lady Elizabeth Eastlake.
We have got the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core. Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth. --Oliver Wendell Holmes
Let photography quickly enrich the traveller's album, and restore to his eyes the precision his memory may lack; let it adorn the library of the naturalist, magnify microscopic insects, even strengthen, with a few facts, the hypotheses of the astronomer; let it, in short, be the secretary and record-keeper of whomsoever needs absolute material accuracy for professional reasons. So far so good. Let it save crumbling ruins from oblivion, books, engravings, and manuscripts, the prey of time, all those precious things, vowed to dissolution, which crave a place in the archives of our memories; in all these things, photography will deserve our thanks and applause. But if once it be allowed to impinge on the sphere of the intangible and the imaginary, on anything that has value solely because man adds something to it from his soul, then woe betide us! -- Baudelaire
Remember, that the original state of the minds of uneducated men is vulgar, you now know why vulgar and commonplace works please the majority. Therefore, educate your mind, and fight the hydra-headed monster-- vulgarity... Vulgarity astonishes, produces a sensation; refinement atracts by delicacy and charm and must be sought out. Vulgarity obtrudes itself, refinement is unobtrusive and requires the introduction of education. --Emerson
Do not call yourself an "artist-photographer" and make "artist-painters" and "artist-sculptors" laugh; call yourself a photographer and wait for artists to call you brother. --Emerson
Pay no heed to the average photographer's remarks upon "flat" and "weak" negatives. Probably he is flat, weak, stale, and unprofitable; your negative may be first-rate, and probably is if he does not approve of it. --Emerson.
Though many painters and sculptors talk glibly of "going in for photography," you will find that very few of them can ever make a picture by photography; they lack the science, technical knowledge, and above all the practice. Most people think they can play tennis, shoot, write novels, and photograph as well as any other person -- until they try. --Emerson
Do not be caught by the sensational in nature, as a coarse red-faced sunset, a garrulous waterfall, or a fifteen thousand foot mountain... avoid prettiness -- the word looks much like pettiness --- and there is but little difference between them. --Emerson
Continual failure is a road to success -- if you have the strength to go on. --Emerson
Art is not to be found by touring to Egypt, China, or Peru; if you cannot find it at your own door, you will never find it. --Emerson
Many photographers think they are photographing nature when they are only caricaturing her. --Emerson
As a matter of fact, nearly all the greatest work is being, and has always been done, by those who are following photography for the love of it, and not merely for financial reasons. As the name implies, an amateur is one who works for love. --Stieglitz
People who wouldn't think of taking a sieve to the well to draw water fail to see the folly in taking a camera to make a painting. --Weston
Since the recording process is instantaneous, and the nature of the image such that it cannot survive corrective handwork, it is obvious that the finished print must be created in full before the film is exposed. --Weston.
The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don't know what to do with it. --Weston.
When subject matter is forced to fit into preconceived patterns, there can be no freshness of vision. Following rules of composition can only lead to a tedious repetition of pictorial cliches. --Weston
Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term -- selectivity. --Abbott
...it was this fetishistic, fundamentally anti-technological concept of art with which the theoreticians of photography sought for almost a hundred years to do battle, naturally without coming to the slightest result. For this view understood nothing except to accredit the photographer before the exact tribunal he had overthrown. --Benjamin
Not for nothing were the pictures of Atget compared with those of the scene of a crime. But is not every spot of our cities the scene of a crime? every passerby a perpetrator? Does not the photographer -- descendent of augurers and haruspices -- uncover guilt in his pictures? --Benjamin
All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty. --Bazin
I want to reproduce the objects as they are, or as they would be even if I did not exist. --Taine
Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer's decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless. --Berger
What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. -Barthes
The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive... Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see. -Barthes
What I feel about these photographs derives from an average affect, almost from a certain training... it is studium... whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions. The second element will break, or punctuate, the studium. This time it is not I who seek it out... it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument... punctum. -Barthes
Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead. -Barthes
Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks. -Barthes
"The necessary condition for an image is sight," Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: "We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes." -Barthes
The realists do not take the photograph for a "copy" of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art. -Barthes
All young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death. -Barthes
If I like many photographers, and I do, I account for this by noting a quality they share-- animation. They may or may not make a living by photography, but they are alive by it. -- Robert Adams
When photographers get beyond copying the achievements of others, or just repeating their own accidental first successes, they learn that they do not know where in the world they will find pictures. Nobody does. Each photograph that works is a revelation to its supposed creator. -- Robert Adams
Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?'" -- Robert Adams
Part of the difficulty in trying to be both an artist and a businessperson is this: you make a picture because you have seen something beyond price; then you are to turn and assign to your record of it a cash value. -- Robert Adams
...assume that art begins in unhappiness. True, the goal of art is to convey a vision of coherence and peace, but the effort to develop that vision starts in the more common experience of confusion and pain. -- Robert Adams
...combining the concrete and the universal is at the center of what makes art important. -- Robert Adams
...I felt that photography ought to start with and remain faithful to the appearance of the world, and in so doing record contradictions. The greatest pictures would then... find wholeness in the torn world. -- Robert Adams
In a foreign country it is far from easy to study a scene at length when you know that at any minute someone may appear and ask what you are doing and that you can't answer, and you haven't many references, and you don't know the law. Neither is it easy to find and know the subjects for portraits or comfortable to make such picture when you cannot apply an anesthesia of small talk. -- Robert Adams
Diane Arbus once said that when she stood in front of her subject she wanted to accept it as it was. 'Instead of arranging it,' she said, 'I arrange myself.' -- Robert Adams
It is just as important to bring people the evidence of the beauty of the world of nature and of man as it is to give them a document of ugliness, squalor, and despair. -- Ansel Adams
Your photography is a record of your living. --Paul Strand.
... If we consider the difference between William Henry Jackson packing in his camera by mule, and the person stepping for a moment from his car to take a picture with his Instamatic, it becomes clear how some of our space has vanished; if the time it takes to cross space is a way by which we define it, then to arrive at a view of space 'in no time' is to have denied its reality. -- Robert Adams
No one, though has to go to college to make or understand or enjoy art. Wonderful artists and critics-- some of the best-- have educated themselves. --Robert Adams
Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities-- geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together, as in the best work of people like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact-- the affection for life. --Robert Adams
We rely, I think, on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know. --Robert Adams
The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope. This is not to say that he is unconcerned with the truth. --Robert Adams
Beauty is, in my view, a synonym for the coherence and structure underlying life... Why is Form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning. --Robert Adams
Most of the pictures (in mass circulation photography magazines) suggest embarrassing strain: odd angles, extreme lenses, and eccentric darkroom techniques reveal a struggle to substitute shock and technology for sight. How many photographers of importance, after all, have relied on telephoto lenses? Instead their work is usually marked by an economy of means, an apparently everyday sort of relationship with their subject matter. --Robert Adams
I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing. --Theodore Roethke
The rancor that one finds now in discussions of photography is complex in origin. In part the ill will can be traced to the fact that photographic criticism is currently mostly the province of the young, some of whom have not yet often enough made fools of themselves to be cautious or suffered enough to be charitable. --Robert Adams
If pictures cannot be understood without knowing the details of the artist's private life, then that is a reason for faulting them: major art, by definition, can stand independent of its maker. --Robert Adams
Silence is after all the context for the deepest appreciation of art; the only important evaluations are finally personal, interior ones. --Robert Adams
...the static visual arts are not well suited to the direct exploration of evil... On the evidence, teh arts that do the best job with evil as their avowed subject are the narrative arts such as drama and fiction; good and evil are important to us finally as matters of choice, and to show the reality of choice requires that time pass, time for decisions to be made and paid for. --Robert Adams
...the only thing that is new in art is the example; the message is, broadly speaking, the same-- coherence, form, meaning. --Robert Adams
Photography today appears to be in a state of flight... The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses. --Dorothea Lange
There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love. --Man Ray