Quote Responses 2.0

"I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody's face in a photograph. The magic is seeing people in new ways."
- Duane Michals

When you look at a photograph, do you just stare at it for a moment and then move on, or do you look at it and try to come up with stories for the photo? What are the people are doing, wearing, and where are they? And the fun of this, when you look at photos that you see on the internet or in someone's scrapbook is that you can guess and you won't really have a sure answer. Which leaves room for more guessing.

"I believe in imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see."
- Duane Michals

"Seeing is believing."
There are things like love - things we cannot see, but want to believe in. And, well, who doesn't find love important?
Imagination has no limit. We can explore and find new things infinitely. The things we can see have a maximum, and when we hit that we are at a loss for what else to do. The things we imagine are in an alternate reality, where anything can be what it wants to become.

"Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It's an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world."
- Arnold Newman

With photography, we record memories that we want a record of. Mostly this means happy memories (have you ever seen people take photos at a funeral?). No one would want to remember the sadness if they could help it.
But when we hold a stack of photos, and others look through it, it's our own world that we create - who is in it, the places we've been, and all the things that we find important. People may go through our stack of photos and wonder why we have a particular photo, because to the others it will seem worthless, when that may be the most important memory to you.

Quote Responses

"My portraits are more about me than the people I photograph."

- Richard Avedon

When I photograph someone, I try to capture an aspect of them that everyone would recognize. But, I also try to do so in my personal style (which has been changing a lot lately, but what is most pleasing to me is what I do).

"You don't take a photograph, you make it."

- Ansel Adams

You literally do take photos. But, from a somewhat-philosophical point of view, you are making them - the angle you take, where the light is coming from, and all those little details are what create a photo. In portraits, it is the people, in my personal opinion, who are what really make the photo.

"All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this - as in other ways - they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it."

- John Berger

With a painter's eye, he (or she) is showing the world how they see. It goes through their own personal filter - how they grew up and where they grew up and with who they grew up with will affect this filter. Which is when art historians come in and interpret everything that the artist did to depict how they saw the world at that moment. Through the photograph, it is more likely that the viewer will view the photo as they see it, and not how the photographer saw it.

"Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be."

- Duane Michals

I agree and disagree with this quote - I feel that photography is a form of a documentation, and documentation deals with fact and truth. But, photography can also be distorted, with bokeh and different uses of lenses and various angles to distort proportion. In editing, it can be distorted via color and contrast. Even when two people look at the same photo, they can draw different stories from it.

"If I could tell a story with words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera."

- Lewis Hine

I do not agree with this quote, because there are just some things that you cannot express with words. It could be the size of something - you simply cannot capture the impressiveness of the Grand Canyon or the pyramids on a postcard, or even on a photo that covers an entire wall. It is

just too much for a photo to convey properly. Even the facial expressions of someone cannot be properly expressed with words, hence why we say, "You should have seen your face!"

Words reveal the story when setting a scene or mood by providing descriptions, but not everyone knows the meanings of all the words used in those descriptions (I have on several occasions gone to the dictionary to look up the meaning of a word). With images, you see the scene and the mood, and can have a fairly good grasp on what's going on (unless the photographer was subtle about setting up the scene).