Italo Calvino Quotes

Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

It's not that photography recaptures the world you have been in; more that it creates a new one: photographs are like Post-It Notes reminding us of the deep architectonic forms of space and thought.

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view and to be conceptual with a picture. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

Fine art is knowledge made visible.

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

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

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

A camera must be part of me - an extra limb capable of freezing a situation without complicated preparation.

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

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.

I see no reason for painting anything that can be put into any other form as well.

Photography is Art and Art is Photography.

Photography is truth.

Photography... is either an expression of a cosmic vision, an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing - to me. (1919)

If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.

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.

Paintings are memories. Memories of the painter who painted them. Memories that can be shared as well. Paintings are things to remember things by.