I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.
— Mark Rothko
Practical Color Photography quotations
Color in a picture is like enthusiasm in life.
One very important difference between color and monochromatic photography is this: in black and white you suggest; in color you state. Much can be implied by suggestion, but statement demands certainty... absolute certainty.
Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving.
When you photograph people in color you photograph their clothes.
When you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their soul!
Black and white are the colors of photography.
To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.
Photography has always been associated with death.
Reality is colorful, yet early photography always took the color out of reality and made it black-and-white. Color is life; black-and-white is death. There was a ghost hidden in the invention of photography.
In black and white you suggest, in color you state.
I believe that the essence of photography is black and white. Color is but a deviance.
Only in black and white can I see the design and textures.
I don't consider color photography art. Black and white is an interpretation. Color is a duplication.
Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face.
My philosophy, like color television, is all there in black and white.
Color is seductive. It changes as it interacts with other colors, it changes because of the light falling upon it, and it changes as it becomes larger in size.
In black and white there are more colors than color photography, because you are not blocked by any colors so you can use your experiences, your knowledge, and your fantasy, to put colors into black and white.
White is the color of decomposition. White is also no color. White is nothing. In photography, the paper is white, next comes the light, which is also white, then the shadow is created, the apparition.
I regard photography and film simply as new technical means which painters must absolutely make use of, just as from time out of mind they have made use of brush, charcoal and color. It is certain, however, that photography and film must become as evocative for the sensibility as pencil, charcoal and brush. (1927)
The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter - 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites.
Kodachrome, it gives us those nice bright colors Gives us the greens of summers Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah! I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph So momma, don't take my Kodachrome away.
In my photography, color and composition are inseparable. I see in color.
Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth? - photography, once it begins to reproduce colors, and that won't be long in coming. And yet you want an intelligent man to sweat for months so as to give the illusion he can do something as well as an ingenious little machine can!
Light is the photographic medium par excellence;
it is to the photographer what words are to the writer; color and paint to the painter; wood, metal, stone, or clay to the sculptor.
...one sees differently with color photography than black-and-white... in short, visualization must be modified by the specific nature of the equipment and materials being used.
To see color as form means looking at the image in a new way, trying to free oneself from absorption in subject matter.
I can appreciate the idea that with e-books more people would publish, the work would be easier to disseminate, and that it could even be interactive. Being a lover of photography, I especially like the idea that you could include lots of pictures - full-color pictures - with your writing. That to me is exciting! We'll all have to stay tuned to see what develops.
Photography could have been invented in color. Colors existed.
Beware of color theories. Theories in color photography are dangerous. The plain fact that there are so many of them proves my point.
Prose is a photography, poetry is a painting in oil-colors.
The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera
My favorite part about costume designing is the artistry of the job.
You meet with a director and a visionary to discuss ideas. You research the characters and figure out the components of their look through your own vision. You create a color palette for a film, television or stage medium and discuss it with the director of photography who then lights your colored subjects.
Color tends to corrupt photography and absolute color corrupts it absolutely.
Consider the way color film usually renders blue sky, green foliage, lipstick red, and the kiddies' playsuit. These are four simple words which must be whispered: color photography is vulgar.
I thought using three cameras was a lot better than one, because you could see where you were going, where you'd been, and all kinds of things - more like life. I think photography has colored our vision. We're now in an area where it might break something. I think this is a time. I feel it. I don't know whether I'll be here long enough to experience it. I've no plans to leave yet.
I have been using the art of photography to research the ways in which the pictorial strategies of the Nineteenth Century color the way in which the American landscape is apprehended by today's viewers.
Photography is much more about elimination than inclusion.
The images we make with a lens typically eliminate ninety percent of our field of view and everything that is out of our field of view. The shutter slices time, eliminating all moments before and after it opens and closes. Three dimensions are reduced to two. And in some cases color is removed. How can we call these kinds of artifacts unaltered?
The difficulty with color is to go beyond the fact that it's color ? to have it be not just a colorful picture but really be a picture about something. It's difficult. So often color gets caught up in color, and it becomes merly decorative. Some photographers use it brilliantly to make visual statements combining color and content; otherwise it is empty.
I like to use really basic or classic colors, things that people have seen over and over and over again. Primary colors, at least in photography, have been around a lot longer than neon colors and really vibrant purples, hot pinks. Red, blue, yellow, orange - because of Kodachrome and the way that things were produced I think that those colors stood out more than any others.