Geoffrey Batchen famous quotes

All of us tend to look at photographs as if we are simply gazing through a two-dimensional window onto some outside world. This is almost a perceptual necessity; in order to see what the photograph is of, we must first repress our consciousness of what the photograph is.
-- Geoffrey Batchen

#Order #Two #Gazing

The main difference seems to be that, whereas photography still claims some sort of objectivity, digital imaging is an overtly fictional process. As a practice that is known to be capable of nothing but fabrication, digitization abandons even the rhetoric of truth that has been such an important part of photography's cultural success.
-- Geoffrey Batchen

#Photography #Objectivity #Practice

Over the past two decades, the boundary between photography and other media like painting, sculpture, or performance has become increasingly porous. It would seem that each medium has absorbed the other, leaving the photographic residing everywhere, but nowhere in particular.
-- Geoffrey Batchen

#Photography #Past #Media

Most importantly, postmodernism comes down on the side of photography and power, not photography as power. As a consequence, photography continues to be conceived as an inconsequential vehicle or passage for real powers that always originate elsewhere.
-- Geoffrey Batchen

#Photography #Real #Sides

Everyone concedes that photography is now a medium of exchange as much as a mode of documentation.... photographing has become the visual equivalent of cellphone chatter.
-- Geoffrey Batchen

#Photography #Documentation #Mediums

[A digital snapshot] is meant primarily as a means of communication, and the images being sent are almost as ephemeral as speech, so rarely are they printed and made physical.
-- Geoffrey Batchen

#Communication #Mean #Snapshots

Human experience comes suspended in the sickly-sweet amniotic fluid of commercial photography. And a world normally animated by abrasive differences is blithely reduced to a single, homogeneous National Geographic way of seeing.
-- Geoffrey Batchen

#Photography #Sweet #Differences

In order for answers to become clear, the questions have to be clear.

What's my favourite food? One you order out.

It's a great historical joke that when the Spanish met the Aztecs, it was a blind date made in serve-you-right heaven. At the time, they were the two most unpleasant cultures in the entire world, and richly deserved each other. Still, the story of how stout Cortes blustered, bullied and bludgeoned his way to collapsing an entire empire with a handful of contagious hoodlums is astonishing.

There are two types of people in the world, and I'm one of them.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.

If we spend all our time gazing at the wonders ahead without remembering where we're standing right now, we're going to trip and fall flat on our face, over and over agaain.

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

We use books like mirrors, gazing into them only to discover ourselves.

Look back to the cross, and the disciples gazing on it in terror from afar, and then look around on the nations that are influenced by the faith that there centres--and note the change! Then take these elements, established in history, and calculate the orbit Christianity is to fill.