Trevor Paglen Quotes

Photography has become so fundamental to the way we see that 'photography' and 'seeing' are becoming more and more synonymous. The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge to curators, practitioners, and critics.

Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.

Looking out at the photographic landscape that surrounds us - the world of images and image-making that we inhabit - it seems obvious that photography has undergone dramatic changes in its technical, cultural, and critical composition.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

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

The first half of the 20th century belongs to Picasso, and the second half is about photography. They said digital would kill photography because everyone can do it, but they said that about the box brownie in 1885 when it came out. It makes photography interesting because everyone thinks they can take a picture.

Since 1970, I've been using text and ephemera as well as photographs in order to tell stories of one kind or another. There's a thread that runs through all the work that is to do with bearing witness. The photographs are about asking questions, though, not answering them.

Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.

There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. I photograph to see what something will look like photographed.

Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

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

Contemporary art will never achieve the audience of football, pop music, or television, so I think we should stop comparing its possible area of influence to that of big mass-media events.

I really loved taking photos when I was younger. I think my love for photography sparked my love for creating the visuals to support my music.

We do want to be diverted and be interested and be provoked by popular culture - by art, if we're lucky. And it's amazing how often people have lost sight of this.

I believe that art can make relevant and progressive contributions to culture and society.

Thinking about the artists I've loved through the years, my favorites are the ones who've made music with cultural, societal and political significance.

Photography brought a lot to painting because it forced artists to think about what painting could do that photography couldn't.

I had become obsessed with the control-freak aspect of photography and with the rising importance of the image in our social media age it ended up working.

I would hope to make a record that interacts with culture in a macro sense. That is something to aspire to.

I got a camera at a very young age, but I always kind of thought of it as a hobby.

A photograph is not an accident - it is a concept.

However, I must stress that my own interest is immediate and in the picture. What I am conscious of and what I feel is the picture I am making, the relation of that picture to others I have made and, more generally, its relation to others I have experienced.

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

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.