Photography Criticism Quotes

Liberman said to me, 'I must cut back on the work you do for Vogue. The editors don't like it. They say the photographs burn on the page. After some years, I began to understand that what they wanted of me was simply a nice, sweet, clean-looking image of a lovely young woman.

Photography should be redefined. It's largely technical... Photography is just unbelievably limiting. I always think of David Bailey and all the fashion photographers - they overlap, you can't always tell who did it. I don't really even like photography all that much. I just think it's so overdone.

Those who call themselves art photographers are pompous, arrogant egoists.

Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already.

I tell you (dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well) a square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that were ever dipped in acid... Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against sculpture. That and no more. (1865)

I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.

I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.

You've got to deal with how photographs look, what's there, not how they're made.

It is because of the servility of photography that I am fundamentally contemptuous of this chance invention which will never be an art but which plagiarizes nature by means of optics. (1848)

I hate red-carpet photographs!

For half a century photography has been the "art form" of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? to the finger on the button? to the law of averages?

I confess that Roy was a little bit dictatorial in his editing and he ruined quite a number of my pictures, which he stopped doing later. He used to punch a hole through a negative. Some of them were incredibly valuable. He didn't understand at the time.

Technically perfect, pictorially rotten. (Stieglitz's standard comment on photographs he rejected for publication in The American Amateur Photographer.)

I mean, taking photographs is a very nasty thing to do. It's very cruel.

In the past, there were many times when I thought, 'This photo doesn't look good with a low angle, or this part bothers me.'

Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.

I never liked dance photography; it's very flat, and dance photography in the studio looks very contrived.

Let me here call attention to one of the most universally popular mistakes that have to do with photography - that of classing supposedly excellent work as professional, and using the term amateur to convey the idea of immature productions and to excuse atrociously poor photographs.

A lot of mainstream photographers seem not to think about what they're doing or feel any responsibility toward anything. By the time they're done, the models don't have any trace of themselves left. This thing about looking young with no wrinkles or expression is all so boring, really.