Camera Obscura Quotes

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow. Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations. The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight. The camera obscura. Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.

The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?

Memory works like the collection glass in the Camera obscura: it gathers everything together and therewith produces a far more beautiful picture than was present originally.

When I was a kid, back in the days before cell phone cameras, I had disposable cameras I took a lot of pictures with and I just remember something always went wrong.

From my point of view, photography never got any better than it was in 1840.

Creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817)

Years ago - in the 70s, for about a decade - I carried a camera every place I went. And I shot a lot of pictures that were still life and landscape, using available light.

In classical oil painting, there seemed to be a radical turn to seeing things as the camera sees them, with that technological modification. I began to have a tremendous problem with all of this.

Knowing what I know now, any photographer worth his salt could make some beautiful things with pinhole cameras.

You can't name the inventor of the camera. The 19th-century invention was chemical: the fixative.

I like to try to shoot in the city in a way that allows the city to go about its business while we're shooting, and that's always a challenge because, unfortunately, people on the street don't know not to look in the camera or interact with the actors.

In terms of so-called fly-on-the-wall documentaries, there's a claim that the camera is a transparent window into a pre-existing reality. What really is happening is that the film crew and the subjects are collaborating to simulate a reality in which they pretend the camera is not present.

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

Back in the day, I actually studied photography in Florence for a few months, and my photography teacher took away my digital camera and said, 'No, use this - it's analog and it's square.' It was a Holga camera, a very cheap $3 or $4 plastic camera. And that's what inspired 'Instagram'.

If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from the physical life-process.

A good daguerreotype was as perfect a kind of photograph as was ever made.

If you're not going to tell something if you're not going to expose something it's real easy to go in and photograph from behind the camera and not expose any of your weaknesses.

There are cultures that believe having your photograph taken steals your soul. I don't think there is a stolen soul in a picture, but still - why is it so hard to throw them away?