Janet Malcolm Quotes

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

I hate cameras. I hate cameras and I hate camera phones. The camera's my worst enemy and my best friend. It's the way I convey my emotions to the world without saying a word, so I use it. People always say, 'You come alive as soon as the camera's on!'

I still take photographs for my own use, personal studies. I do not feel that I can fully express my views through the medium and this is why I have moved towards painting.

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

I just say I'm an artist who works with pictures and words.

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] remains servile to a thoughtless vision of the world... As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it.

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.

I was always interested in photography because it makes a picture.

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.

The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.

My favourite stuff is visual, and I always want to work with visual artwork. I think it depends on the person, but for me, photographs of an image of something interesting or inspiring is worth a lot more than words to me. I think every concept I've come up with and turned into films or that will be hopefully become a film comes from images first.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

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

Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art.

I'm sure that the camera is part of European art.

There are two parts to the process: taking the picture and finding ways of using it.

[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.

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact

I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera.

What most artists using photography feel that they need to do is to show that they are serious, that they are not taking snapshots. To point a camera at something does not qualify you as an artist because everybody has done that.

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

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.