Lorrie Moore Quotes

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

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

I loved to press the shutter, to freeze time, to turn little slices of life into rectangle rife with metaphor.

[Photography is ] likewise even French impressionists. So the Sculls bought pop. It was politics, and they moved with it. And I think that could be happening, to some degree, with photography, too. It doesn't cost as much to do it, either.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

I was extremely irritated being photographed for a long time, then I gave up caring. Photography is a nauseating cliche, but there is a lot to it. You can tell so much about a person from it. You are exaggerating the consciousness. It's life-thickening, photography.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

You always want to come back with an image that's interesting visually, and you hope to get something from the person you photograph that's different than other images you know of these people.

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.

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.

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

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.

If you're a photographer, you end up being the raw creative force that allows other people to see what kind of narrative you want to be giving or what kind of art that you want people to see.

If you view your life as a piece of fabric or a tapestry, the photography is the stitching. It keeps everything together.

I believe that the medium of photography prevails entirely as an act of faith in the souls of those who love and practice it. And so every photograph becomes another subtle variation on the theme of the medium itself.

Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

[Photography] remains servile to a thoughtless vision of the world... As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it.

Photography is Art and Art is Photography.

You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.

I have never taken a photograph without one thought in my head to amuse myself.

It is no more easy to make a good picture than it is to find a diamond or a pearl. It means trouble and you risk your life for it.

I love the medium of photography, for with its unique realism it gives me the power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say, This is real, too.

Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.