Image Significance Quotes

Even more ominous ... is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. ... he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals ... A visual is more interested in style than in content ... A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph.

If you don't have anything to say, your photographs aren't going to say much.

A picture is what it is and I've never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn't make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they're right there, whatever they are.

Pictures are not incidental frills to a text; they are essences of our distinctive way of knowing.

The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.

The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don't have to explain things with words.

In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The 'anything whatever' then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.

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.

The reason I call myself a documentary photographer is the idea of how photographs contain and participate in history.

The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.

I don't have a favorite photo. As a photographer, I have attachments to each image. Not the one photo: the experience of getting the photos is the challenge or the thing.

If you can't make the image bigger or more important than what you see, then don't push the button

The subject matter is so much more important than the photographer.

One day the photograph is going to become even more important than it is now.... But I am not particularly an advocate of the photograph.

Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus Smith's Minamata photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine, in a book, on a living-room wall. Each o these situations suggest a different use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning.