Historical Photography Quotes

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

In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of 'reality' - and no longer through the elaborations of the text, whether fictional or poetic, which itself is never credible down to the root.

I went to an exhibition at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum about Shanghai, about how courtesans had been influential in bringing western culture to Shanghai. I bought a book and in it saw this striking group of women in a photograph called 'The Ten Beauties of Shanghai'.

Ever since the 1860s when photographers travelled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment.

I came up in photography, and Dust Bowl-era photography is a lot of the reason that I got behind the camera in the first place.

There are so many great 19th-century photographers, and it's really my favorite period, but the amateurs did such beautiful work.

I started photographing people on the street during World War II. I used a little box Brownie. Nothing too expensive.

A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture.

I'd love to do historical pictures more, but I don't know if I can.

One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: ‘I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.’ Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it.