Arnold Watson > Arnold's Quotes

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
― Susan Sontag

“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.”
― Diane Arbus

“When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!”
― Ted Grant

“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.”
― Marc Riboud

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
― Dorothea Lange

“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson

“It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down....”
― Kate Morton, The House at Riverton

“To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.”
― Ansel Adams

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”
― Susan Sontag

“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”
― Robert Frank

“Art is what we call...the thing an artist does.

It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human.

Art is not in the ...eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist.”
― Seth Godin

“A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.”
― George Bernard Shaw