Jean-Luc Godard Quotes

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

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

Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.

I'm not a politician or a scholar or political historian. I'm just a photographer who's trying to capture a spirit. It's not an intellectual process; it's an intuitive process.

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.

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework - that to me is the art of photography.

Photography is Art and Art is Photography.

My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty.

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.

A picture is like a prayer.

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 agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs. Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he 'uncovers' it.

Photographs that transcend but do not deny their literal situation appeal to me.

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

When the good pictures come, we hope they tell truths, but truths 'told slant,' just as Emily Dickinson commanded.

Because I'm interested in depiction, representation, therefore you're interested in photography. You don't ignore it.

Photography my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.

My true program is summed up in one word: life. I expect to photograph anything suggested by that word which appeals to me.

What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.

Photography seduces us into thinking we can believe photographs, whereas we can't really believe that a picture can tell us any kind of truth at all.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

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

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.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.