Photographic Representation Quotes

Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.

Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.

We have had bird's-eye views seen by mind's eye imperfectly. Now we will have nothing less than the tracings of nature itself, reflected on the plate.

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.

Black and white is abstract; color is not. Looking at a black and white photograph, you are already looking at a strange world.

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.

I am convinced that any photographic attempt to show the complete man is nonsense. We can only show, as best we can, what the outer man reveals. The inner man is seldom revealed to anyone, sometimes not even the man himself.

I've always said that the only thing a photograph is good at capturing faithfully is another flat surface.

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 vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.

To make a photograph is already the first artificial act.

It took me a long time to get comfortable with the idea of being photographed by a moving or still camera.

When I am preparing my 'lookalike' photographs, I think about the character of the real people, because, if the photographs are going to be plausible, you have to convince the viewer that they could have happened.

Photos tend to organize chaos, to define what we're doing here. It is essential that individuals' voices depict the world around us, as we are increasingly controlled by large institutions, large companies and large systems.

I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.

Every photographed object is merely the trace left behind by the disappearance of all the rest. It is an almost perfect crime, an almost total resolution of the world, which merely leave the illusion of a particular object shining forth, the image of which then becomes an impenetrable enigma.

A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.

The inferiority of photographs to the best works of artists, so far as resemblance is concerned, lies in their catching no more than a single expression. If many photographs of a person were taken at different times, perhaps even years apart, their composite would possess that in which a single photograph is deficient.

Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality.

Photographs [are] of course heavily dependent upon the culture, the disciplinary point of view and the idiosyncratic vision of the particular photographer-analyst.

I was struggling against the flypaper of other arts harnessing film to their own usages, which means essentially as a recording device or within the long historical trap of picture - by which I mean a collection of nameable shapes within a frame. I don't even think still photography, with few exceptions, has made any significant attempt to free itself from that.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

As soon as you put something to bed like the 'Women' book, you're never finished. There were portraits of people that I wanted to photograph - it's an endless subject.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

The faces people make when they are photographed and the face they have when you draw them are very different.

To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.