Jean Baudrillard Quotes

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

By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

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

To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

Image is powerful, but image is also superficial.

I've always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.

What I find most satisfying about photography is the way in which it allows me to document 'reality' while at the same time creating my own version thereof; in other words, the reality I present is a reality based upon what I choose to include in the frame and what I choose to leave out.

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

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

I like to think of an image as different from a photo.

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

The world consists of images on a screen, and consciousness is the steady light that emanates from the projector.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

To make a photograph is already the first artificial act.

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.

I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.

The lens freezes time and space in what may be an optical slavery or, contrarily, the crystallization of meaning. The limits of the lens' vision are esthetically often a virtue.

The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer's understanding of his subject and mastery of his process.

I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.

A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera 'saw' a piece of time and space.

Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.