Sam Abell Quotes

All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.

The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.

The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive... Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.

Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should?

For example, you now look at pictures from 1968, they are hugely misleading in terms of standing in as an absolute image of the time. Because maybe two percent of the people looked the way that we now associate with that time. I was also aware that what I was aiming for is an idealized, utopian version of how people could be together. I found photography to be a very powerful tool because as long as it looks real, it is perceived as real.

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

My Dad took a workshop from a photographer who worked at the Toledo Blade, a newspaper I delivered. I knew this photographer's work. My Dad took a night class from him at the University of Toledo. Without that class, I wouldn't have become a photographer, because my Dad came home and taught me what he learned in class.

The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.

Everything is minimal, and if it's over, it's over. We're abrupt with things: in and out. Especially if it's an overdub - it's gone. It does something that's not real.

In stamping photography with the patent of realism, society does nothing but confirm itself in the tautological certainty that an image of reality that conforms to its own representation of objectivity is truly objective.

They're hitting harder now more than ever. The only person who would argue that is someone who has never had a physics class. They're faster and stronger, so the reality is the collisions have to be bigger.

Here’s a current example of the challenge we face. At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people. Where did all those jobs disappear to? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?

The heavy odds against finding the desired... work of art in the mess and flux of life, as opposed to the serene orderliness of imagined reality, give a special tense dazzle and an atmosphere of tour de force to any photographs that succeed in the search.

Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.

the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.

One difference with the political writings, whether about feminism or class, is that the intent is to change how people think of a certain political reality; whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there.

While it is unlikely that poetry or art shall eliminate the reality of war in the twenty-first century, it is thrilling to know there remain individuals, and even entire communities, still willing to invest in art and poetry's own uniquely explosive contributions to the great, and small, dramas of human history.

I open each class with an explanation of the singular importance of being a "dealmaker." The manifesto of the dealmaker is simple: Reality is negotiable.

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.

Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it.

Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.

We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.

Truth has not special time of its own. Its hour is now - always and, indeed then most truly, when it seems unsuitable to actual circumstances.

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

Many photographers live in a dream world of beautiful backgrounds. It wouldn’t hurt them to get a taste of reality to wake them up.