Photography History Quotes

I was scared when I went to Conde Nast. I had heard horror stories about how they used you up and then spit you out and went on. But there was this great history of photography that had been done there.

I had an instamatic wind-on camera and remember buying the flashcubes and fixing on top of the frame. The flash credits were limited so you had to be careful not to waste any.

I've always thought photography was an art form, but it had very low appreciation in the beginning, except for some Europeans, and of course Stieglitz. Stieglitz always considered photography to be an art form and is the "father" of the creative concepts of the twentieth century.

I like to think of Photography 1.0 as the invention of photography. Photography 2.0 is digital technology and the move from film and paper to everything on a chip. Photography 3.0 is the use of the camera, space, and color and to capture an object in the third dimension.

Photography could have been invented in color. Colors existed.

You know, the history of California art doesn't start until about 1961, and that's when these photographs start. I mean, we have no history out here.

People of my generation who became photographers in the late fifties, early sixties, there were no rewards in photography. There were no museum shows. Maybe MOMA would show something, or Chicago. There were no galleries. Nobody bought photographs.

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

The problem of direct colour photography has been facing us since the turn of the last century.

I began working with a family camera. It was called a Kodak Autographic, which was one of those things where you flopped it open and pulled out the bellows. And I've been at it ever since; I've never stopped.

The reason I call myself a documentary photographer is the idea of how photographs contain and participate in history.

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

I did have a very advanced grandmother, my mother's mother, who wanted to buy me a camera. My parents wouldn't let her. Eventually she won, and I got a camera in about 1948, a Voigtlander.

You find a lot of junk when you're searching through lost and tossed photo ephemera, but every so often you'll find a gem, a wallet-sized masterpiece you're certain could hang on the wall of a gallery if only someone with a name had taken it. Find one or two of those and you're hooked for life.

The history of photography needs clearing out. It needs something else now. Because photography always acknowledged there were cameras before photography.

Photography's history is bound to the mistake, to the accident.

I didn't invent the word "selfie," but I took tons of Polaroids of myself.

I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both.

Many a fashion designer's career was founded using packs upon packs of Polaroids, and though we love them, we forget that the image quality was often circumspect.

Some of the people who are now manipulating photos, such as Andreas Gursky, make the argument - rightly - that the 'straight' photographs of the 1940s and 50s were no such thing. Ansell Adams would slap a red filter on his lens, then spend three days burning and dodging in the dark room, making his prints. That's a manipulation. Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.

The suffragettes were quite strategic about documenting their events, and there were some good photos. And we developed a roll of film that had never been developed before!

In the history of photography, we have many masterpieces in terms of black and white books. You have Bresson's 'Decisive Moment,' Frank's 'The Americans'... many masterpieces. But there is nothing to this caliber in color. Well, I think I'll waltz with my muse and hope that I might be able to produce something on this order in color.