Alvin Langdon Coburn famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

My aim in photography is always to convey a mood and not to impart local information. This is not an easy matter, for the camera if left to its own devices will simply impart local information to the exclusiveness of everything else.
-- Alvin Langdon Coburn

#Photography #Cameras #Information
Photography makes one conscious of beauty everywhere, even in the simplest things, even in what is often considered commonplace or ugly. Yet nothing is really 'ordinary', for every fragment of the world is crowned with wonder and mystery, and a great and surprising beauty.
-- Alvin Langdon Coburn

#Photography #Ordinary #World
I wish to state emphatically that I do not believe in any sort of handwork or manipulation on a photographic negative or print.
-- Alvin Langdon Coburn

#Believe #Wish #Negative
It is my hope that photography may fall in line with all the other arts and with her infinite possibilities, do things strange and more fascinating than the most fantastic dreams.
-- Alvin Langdon Coburn

#Photography #Dream #Art
Why should not the camera artist break away from the worn out conventions and claim the freedom of expression which any art must have to be alive.
-- Alvin Langdon Coburn

#Art #Expression #Cameras
An artist is a man who tries to express the inexpressible.
-- Alvin Langdon Coburn

#Artist #Men #Trying
A photographic portrait needs more collaboration between sitter and artist than a painted portrait.
-- Alvin Langdon Coburn

#Artist #Portraits #Collaboration
I affirm that any sort of photograph is superior to any sort of painting aiming at the same result.
-- Alvin Langdon Coburn

#Painting #Photograph #Results

Photographs are of course about their makers, and are to be read for what they disclose in that regard no less than for what they reveal of the world as their makers comprehend, invent, and describe it.
Photography has the power to undo your assumptions about the world.
How aware were photographers in the past of other visual arts? "No photographer of any distinction at all could approach his work without some awareness of what was going on in other visual media, and for that matter neither the painter nor the draughtsman could ignore photography."
As the language or vocabulary of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted, shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.
I was given a small camera as a wedding gift from a very dear friend. My first pictures were taken on my honeymoon. As soon as I became familiar with the camera, I was intrigued with the possibilities of expression it offered. It was like a discovery for me.
The only nature I'm interested in is my own nature.
The camera can film my face but until it captures my soul, you don't have a movie,
Personal growth is not a matter of learning new information but of unlearning old limits.
Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.
Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.

Alvin Langdon Coburn famous quotes

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