Pablo Picasso Quotes

Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it.

Photography brought a lot to painting because it forced artists to think about what painting could do that photography couldn't.

If the photographer is to create works that will stand for his spirit in the same way as artists in other genres, he must first - having no ready-made, abstract components such as works and sounds - supply other means to abstraction instead.

The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances.

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

I remember going through school and doing art, which was the only thing that I actually found fulfilling, and I couldn't really figure out why. Then I got into college and started messing around with photography, and I realised that it was about getting the images that were in my head out in a way that didn't have to be spelt correctly.

Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it. Degas liked it not only because it provided an accurate record, but because the snapshot showed him a means of escape from the classical rules of design. Through it he learnt to make a composition without the use of formal symmetry.

I was struggling against the flypaper of other arts harnessing film to their own usages, which means essentially as a recording device or within the long historical trap of picture - by which I mean a collection of nameable shapes within a frame. I don't even think still photography, with few exceptions, has made any significant attempt to free itself from that.

I think we seem to remember things in still pictures. I never gave up on painting. When they said painting was dead, I just thought, Well, that's all about photography, and photography's not that interesting, and it's changing anyway.

The fact that few painter-fine-artists used photography in their work made it appealing.

The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.

The painters have no copyright on modern art!... I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be - compared to painting - it has different means and aims.

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.

The Germans were much more graphical. The expressionism is much more than cinema. It was a movement with artists, painters, music and architecture, so it's really graphic and visual. And the French were something else.

I don't own a camera, so I travel with a police sketch artist.

A photograph is not an accident - is a concept. It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative.

By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?

I paint when I cannot photograph.

DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)

Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time.

The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

I think nearly every artist continually wants to reach the edge of nothingness - the point where you can’t go any further.

The video camera dominates art. It's a bore, it makes everything look a bit the same. If you look at things with a pencil and paper in your hand, you are going to see far more.