There is a lot of social photography being done now to point to the untruth of photography. It's getting very dull now. So, okay photography doesn't tell the truth. So what? Everyone has known this forever.
... the battle for the acceptance of photography as Art was not only counter-productive but counter-revolutionary. The most important photography is most emphatically not Art.
PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne.
A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.
Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.
"Do not call yourself an "artist-photographer" and make "artist-painters" and "artist-sculptors" laugh; call yourself a photographer and wait for artists to call you brother."
Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
Has it led you to the conclusion that photography is an art ? Or it is simply a means of recording ? "I'm glad you asked that. I've been wanting to say this for years. Is cooking an art ? Is talking an art ? Is even painting an art ? It is artfulness that makes art, not the medium itself. Of course photography is an art - when it is in the hands of artists."
He sought a way to preserve the past. John Hershel was one of the founders of a new form of time travel.... a means to capture light and memories. He actually coined a word for it... photography. When you think about it, photography is a form of time travel. This man is staring at us from across the centuries, a ghost preserved by light.
I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models... I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know.
That the outer man is a picture of the inner, and the face an expression and revelation of the whole character, is a presumption likely enough in itself, and therefore a safe one to go on; borne out as it is by the fact that people are always anxious to see anyone who has made himself famous. Photography offers the most complete satisfaction of our curiosity.