Italo Calvino Quotes

I don't know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs.

Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it.

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

Nothing is as deceptive as a photograph.

Everything that is made beautiful and fair and lovely is made for the eye of one who sees.

The image is an image.

The job of the color photographer is to provide some level of abstraction that can take the image out of the daily.

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

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

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

My wife jokes that any time I want to take a picture of her, it has nothing to do with her - it's just because the light is really nice. She's usually right. I definitely am somebody who notices the way the light skips off the floor.

For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.

There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone's person.

Sometimes it’s like people are a million times more beautiful to you in your mind. It’s like you see them through a special lens—but maybe if it’s how you see them,that’s how they really are.It’s like the whole tree falling in the forest thing.

Is beauty beautiful, or is it only our eyes that make it so?

The images of things are not the things in themselves.

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he has to make others see.

It's like he would take a photograph of Sam, and the photograph would be beautiful. And he would think that the reason the photograph was beautiful was because of how he took it. If I took it, I would know that the only reason it's beautiful is because of Sam.

Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.

I had seen faces in photographs I might have found beautiful had I known even vaguely in what beauty was supposed to consist. And my father's face, on his death-bolster, had seemed to hint at some form of aesthetics relevant to man. But the faces of the living, all grimace and flush, can they be described as objects?

All is as beautiful as we think it.

It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth.