Alison Jackson Quotes

Words have great cumulative power, but in the 21st century, a single image is much stronger. An image suggests the unvarnished truth. That is its power and its fiction.

People believe that photographs are true and therefore cannot be art.

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

Seeing is no longer believing. The very notion of truth has been put into crisis. In a world bloated with images, we are finally learning that photographs do indeed lie.

I've always been so surprised by how people interpret my photos in context.

The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.

I think there's a connection with 'Nightcrawler' and 'Blowup' and other films where visual imagery is integral to the story. It allows you to play with images.

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

My job is to take the pictures, communicate a message, to bring those images to the greater public through whatever publication I'm working for. My job is really to be a messenger, and that's what I've been doing.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea.

Much of the way we understand the world is through images. That's what I think good art does - it teaches you how to see the historical moment that you live in.

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.

Photography is truth.

No matter what lens you use, no matter what speed the film, no matter how you develop it, no matter how you print it, you cannot say more than you can see.

You don't have to pose your camera. The pictures are there, and you just take them. The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda. (On the Spanish Civil War, 1937)

Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.

I think that there isn't a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability... They do not tell stories - they show you what something looks like. To a camera.

Every photograph is a fake from start to finish.

We are image-makers and image-ridden... We work until we vanish.

What is truth in photography? It can be told in a hundred different ways. Every thirtieth of a second when the shutter snaps, its capturing a different piece of information.

My eyes has been my camera taking pictures of the world and my songs has been my messages that I tried to scatter across the back sides and along the steps of the fire escapes and on the window sills and through the dark halls.

A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.

I don't believe that you can talk about a photograph being true or false. I don't think such a claim has any meaning.

It is a great honor for me to be compared to Henri Cartier-BressonBut I believe there is a very big difference in the way we put ourselves inside the stories we photograph. He always strove for the decisive moment as being the most important. I always work for a group of pictures, to tell a story. If you ask which picture in a story I like most, it is impossible for me to tell you this. I don't work for an individual picture. If I must select one individual picture for a client, it is very difficult for me.

Photography should be redefined. It's largely technical... Photography is just unbelievably limiting. I always think of David Bailey and all the fashion photographers - they overlap, you can't always tell who did it. I don't really even like photography all that much. I just think it's so overdone.