Photography as Art Quotes

Before the people at large, and for that matter, the artists themselves, understand what photography really means, as I understand that term, it is essential for them to be taught the real meaning of art.

I've always thought photography was an art form, but it had very low appreciation in the beginning, except for some Europeans, and of course Stieglitz. Stieglitz always considered photography to be an art form and is the "father" of the creative concepts of the twentieth century.

Photography is not something you retire from.

I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important.

The photographic image... is a message without a code.

I am not interested in rules or conventions. Photography is not a sport.

For me the true business of photography is to capture a bit of reality (whatever that is) on film...if, later, the reality means something to someone else, so much the better.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

An unnoticed corner of the world suddenly becomes noticed, and when you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it becomes sacred. (On Robert Frank's photography)

People of my generation who became photographers in the late fifties, early sixties, there were no rewards in photography. There were no museum shows. Maybe MOMA would show something, or Chicago. There were no galleries. Nobody bought photographs.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already.

Some people's photography is an art. Mine is not. If they happen to be exhibited in a gallery or a museum, that's fine. But that's not why I do them. I'm a gun for hire.

In a photograph, if I am able to evoke not alone a feeling of the reality of the surface physical world but also a feeling of the reality of existence that lies mysteriously and invisibly beneath its surface, I feel I have succeeded. At their best, photographs as symbols not only serve to help illuminate some of the darkness of the unknown, they also serve to lessen the fears that too often accompany the journeys from the known to the unknown.

I had an experience that was kind of backward. Instead of thinking that photography was a step down, it brought me a step up, to transpose and modify things.

As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

Arguments against photography ever being considered a fine art are: the element of chance which enters in, — finding things ready-made for a machine to record, and of course the mechanics of the medium. I say that chance enters into all branches of art.

It seems to me that before the photograph can exist as art it must, by its very nature choose whether it is to be a record or a testimony.

...all along I've had an ambivalent relationship to photography - but as to whether I thought it an art form, or a craft, or a technique, well, I've always been taken with Henry Geldzahler's answer to that question when he said, I thought it was a hobby.

I do not think there is any question of photography being an art form!

I believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera.

I didn’t see any difference between being a photographer or being an artist. I didn’t make those boundaries. If someone wants to think it’s art, that’s great, but I’ll let history decide.

At the heart of all photography is an urge to express our deepest personal feelings - to reveal our inner, hidden selves, to unlock the artist. Those of us who become photographers are never satisfied with just looking at someone else's expression of something that is dear to us. We must produce our own images, instead of buying postcards and photo books. We seek to make our own statements of individuality.

Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire