Quotes by John Szarkowski - Page 1

A camera has interesting ideas of its own.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Ideas
Interesting
Photography
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Luck is the attentive photographer's best teacher.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Teacher
Luck
Photography
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A skillful photographer can photograph anything well.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Photograph
Photographer
Wells
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Photography is choosing where to point your eye-cone.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Cones
Eye
Photography
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It isn't what a picture is of, it is what it is about.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
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A photographer's best work is, alas, generally done for himself.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Best Work
Done
Photographer
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To quote out of context is the essence of the photographer's craft.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Crafts
Essence
Photography
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The very best pictures adapt themselves to many changes in meaning.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Best Picture
Photography
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The goal is not to make something factually impeccable, but seamlessly persuasive.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Goal
Impeccable
Persuasive
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The photographer’s vision convinces us to the degree that the photographer hides his hand.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Convince Us
Hands
Vision
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The world now contains more photographs than bricks, and they are, astonishingly, all different.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Bricks
Different
World
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Photography's central sense of purpose and aesthetic: the precise and lucid description of significant fact.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Facts
Photography
Purpose
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Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Discovery
Lying
Photography
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Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is inevitably about photography, the container and vehicle of all its meanings.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
May
Photography
Vehicle
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Trained as a musician, [photographer Ansel] Adams understood the richness of variation that could be unfolded from a simple theme.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Music
Simple
Variation
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Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Contests
Photographer
Photography
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They were ... pure and unadulterated photographs, and sometimes they hinted at the existence of visual truths that had escaped all other systems of detection.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Existence
Photography
Sometimes
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Most of Tina Modotti's work that is known to the photography world was done in Mexico in the years 1923 through 1926, when she lived and worked with Edward Weston.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Mexico
Photography
Years
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Photography was not invented to serve a clearly understood function. There was in fact widespread uncertainty, even among its inventors, as to what it might be good for.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Facts
Might
Photography
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In practice a photographer does not concern himself with philosophical issues while working; he makes photographs, working with subject matter that he thinks will make the pictures.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Philosophical
Photography
Thinking
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Pure photography is a system of picture-making that describes more or less faithfully what might be seen through a rectangular frame from a particular vantage point at a given moment.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Might
Photography
Vantage Point
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Because we see reality in different ways, we must understand that we are looking at different truths rather than the truth and that, therefore, all photographs lie in one way or another.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Different
Lying
Reality
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What's happening is that people are making a billion photographs a year of their cats, frequently with the cats wearing costumes. Do you think I should be doing shows of cat photography?
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Cat
Photography
Thinking
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The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Lines
Photography
Shapes
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The simplicity of photography lies in the fact that it is very easy to make a picture. The staggering complexity of it lies in the fact that a thousand other pictures of the same subject would have been equally easy.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Lying
Photography
Simplicity
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The basic material of photographs is not intrinsically beautiful. It's not like ivory or tapestry or bronze or oil on canvas. You're not supposed to look at the thing, you're supposed to look through it. It's a window.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Beautiful
Ivory
Photography
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Photography is the easiest thing in the world if one is willing to accept pictures that are flaccid, limp, bland, banal, indiscriminately informative, and pointless. But if one insists in a photograph that is both complex and vigorous it is almost impossible
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Impossible
Photography
World
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The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process - a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made - constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes - but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Attitude
Photography
Taken
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Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Numbers
Photography
Writing
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One of the leading uses of photography by the mass media came to be called photojournalism. From the late 'twenties' to the early 'fifties' what might have been the golden age of this speciality - photographers worked largely as the possessors of special and arcane skills, like the ancient priests who practiced and monopolized the skills of pictography or carving or manuscript illumination. In those halcyon days the photographer enjoyed a privileged status.
John Szarkowski / Photographer
Illumination
Media
Photography
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John Szarkowski Quotes - Page 1

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