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At least the box is full of something useful. On his photo gracing a box of Raisin Bran
-Avery Brooks
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It is not merely the likeness which is precious... but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing... the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think -- and it is not at all monstrous in me to say that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist's work ever produced.
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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Blessed be the inventor of photography! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has cast up in my time -- this art by which even the poor can possess themselves of tolerable of their absent dear ones.
-Jane Welsh Carlyle
in The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (1970), October 21, 1859
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To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.
-Henri Cartier-Bresson
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In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.
note: Leitmotiv is German for 'leading motif'. It is a short musical phrase of specific sound effect that signals the appearance of a person, action, or situation.
-Henri Cartier-Bresson
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Actually, I'm not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks.
-Henri Cartier-Bresson
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The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.
-Henri Cartier-Bresson
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Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.
-Henri Cartier-Bresson
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The camera is a killing chamber, which speeds up the time it claims to be conserving. Like coffins exhumed and priced open, the photographs put on show what we were and what we will be again.
-Peter Conrad
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A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there -- even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.
-Robert Doisneau
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The camera has an interest in turning history into spectacle, but none in reversing the process. At best, the picture leaves a vague blur in the observer's mind; strong enough to send him into battle perhaps, but not to have him understand why he is going.
-Denis Donoghue
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The magic of photography is metaphysical. What you see in the photograph isn't what you saw at the time. The real skill of photography is organized visual lying.
-Terence Donovan
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A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years, but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of mother or father taken many years ago. You see them as you remember them. But as people live on, they change completely. That is why I think a photograph can be kind.
-Albert Einstein
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Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth?
-Paul Gauguin
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Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.
-Johann von Goethe
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The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
-Dorothea Lange
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Photographers never have much incentive to show the world as it is.
-William Leith
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Any one who knows what the worth of family affection is among the lower classes, and who has seen the array of little portraits stuck over a laborer's fireplace will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the tendencies, social and industrial, which every day are sapping the healthier family affections, the sixpenny photograph is doing more for the poor than all the philanthropists in the world.
-Macmillan Magazine
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Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
-Norman Mailer
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If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.
-Janet Malcolm
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I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.
-Edvard Munch
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Photograph is a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne.
-Ambrose Pierce
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Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject.
-Eliot Porter
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I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive. I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.
-Man Ray
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No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.
-John Ruskin
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Books about Photography
