Photographic Medium Quotes

If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it - the grain, how it feels, the texture.

The fundamental peculiarity of the photographic medium; the physical objects themselves print their image by means of the optical and chemical action of light.

The photo is a thing in itself. And that's what still photography is all about.

Since the photographic medium has been digitized, a fixed definition of the term photography has become impossible.

Whenever the medium of photography is useful for a particular task, I use it. If another medium is more suitable I use that.

As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used - as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts - to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera.

There is a difference between film and digital. Because digital, you know, it's perfect and whatever. But with film, you get depth. You get subject.

I would love if film doesn't disappear, if we can have film forever so we would have all these brushes, all these possibilities available.

All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.

The digital print is becoming the look of our time, and it makes the C-print start to look like a tintype.

The photographer's problem is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium, for it is precisely here that honesty no less than intensity of vision is the pre-requisite of a living expression. The fullest realization of this is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation, through the use of straight photographic methods.

No individual photo explains anything. That's what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium. It is the photographer's job to get this medium to say what you need it to say. Because photography has a certain verisimilitude, it has gained a currency as truthful - but photographs have always been convincing lies.