Judith Butler Quotes

Photography can be a volatile situation. It can be very potent.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Photography helps people to see.

I see through my eyes; the camera is just a machine to record it for me.

You know, they always say that the photographer is a hunter of images. That is a flattering image, the idea of a hunter, it's virile, acquired power. Actually though, it isn't that. We are really fishermen with hooks and lines.

Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.

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

Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.

You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them.

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 very idea of photography is as Oliver Wendell Holmes said in the 19th century, "it's a mirror with a memory."

The photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what's going on and what's happening outside.

[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.

The thing is that when you don't carry a camera, that's when you see pictures in particular, or at least that's when you think you see pictures in particular. When you do carry it, if you do see one on the occasion that you do, you can take it.

This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see.

My pictures are my eyes. I photograph what I see - and what I want to see.

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

It's a question of trying to take down by dictation what's already there. I'm not making something, I'm trying to hear it.

Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.

Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.

Draw what you see.