About Photography

By Andrea A. L. Scala

Many people, from the beginning at today, have talked about Photography. Everyone telling a different story in a very personal way.

So Baudelaire talked against Photography because he thought it wasn't and would never be an Art. Someone thought otherwise. Avedon said that if he didn't do every day something related to photography, it was just like if he had forgotten to wake up.

I started collecting quotes about Photography almost 10 years ago. I'm sure I can learn so much, about people and photography, if I can understand the mood and feelings of people when they discover and approach to Photography. There is something very deep and emotional about photography and one can choose to love or hate it but not ignore it.

In this book I've selected over 400 quotes from famous people somehow related to photography. Famous people that had something to say… About Photography.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781471627026

Book preview

About Photography

Andrea A. L. Scala

to Angelo Visconti

You was my first sight

on this wonderful world.

Many people, from the beginning at today, have talked about Photography. Everyone telling a different story in a very personal way.

So Baudelaire talked against Photography because he thought it wasn't and would never be an Art. Someone thought otherwise. Avedon said that if he didn't do every day something related to photography, it was just like if he had forgotten to wake up.

I started collecting quotes about Photography almost 10 years ago. I'm sure I can learn so much, about people and photography, if I can understand the mood and feelings of people when they discover and approach to Photography. There is something very deep and emotional about photography and one can choose to love or hate it but not ignore it.

In this book, I've selected over 400 quotes from famous people somehow related to photography. Famous people that had something to say… About Photography .

Andrea A. L Scala

A

Berenice Abbott (Springfield 1898)

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework  that to me is the art of photography.

I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs. Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he uncovers it…

I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time... Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism - real life - the now.

Photography at the Crossroads 1951

To chart a course, one must have a direction. In reality, the eye is no better than the philosophy behind it. The photographer creates, evolves a better, a more selective, more acute seeing eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world.

1951, Universal Photo Almanac [cited in: Creative Camera November 1974, p. 365]

Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.

None. They should just go out and photograph and stop talking about it. That’s the only way they are going to find themselves. They can’t do it in their heads – they have to go out and do it in the camera and get it on film.

when asked if she had any gems of wisdom for the photographer today. Professional photographer's survival guide by Charles E. Rotkin , ISBN: 0817454098 , Page: 242

...people say they need to express their emotions I'm sick of that. Photography doesn`t teach you to express your emotions it teaches you to see.

Art News, January 1981

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. To define selection, one may say that it should be focussed on the kind of subject matter which hits you hard with its impact and excites your imagination to the extent that you are forced to take it. Pictures are wasted unless the motive power which impelled you to action is strong and stirring.

Photographers on Photography: A Critical Anthology by Nathan Lyons (Editor), Page: 21

I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph.

The Berenice Abbott Protfolio," Preface, 1976.

Photography helps people to see.

Berenice Abbott: An American Matter, ASMP Bulletin, Oct 1989.

What the human eye observes causally and incuriously, the eye of the camera notes with relentless fidelity.