Beaumont Newhall famous quotes

The fundamental belief in the authenticity of photographs explains why photographs of people no longer living and of vanished architecture are so melancholy.
-- Beaumont Newhall

#Photography #People #Fundamentals

If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.
-- Beaumont Newhall

#Photography #Faithful #Historian

More and more are turning to photography as a medium of expression as well as communication. The leavening of aesthetic approaches continues. While it is too soon to define the characteristic of the photographic style today, one common denominator, rooted in tradition, seems in the ascendancy. The direct use of the camera for what it can do best, and that is the revelation, interpretation, and discovery of the world of man and of nature. The greatest challenge to the photographer is to express the inner significance through the outward form.
-- Beaumont Newhall

#Photography #Communication #Men

We are not interested in the unusual, but in the usual seen unusually.
-- Beaumont Newhall

#Photography #Usual #Unusual

Over the years, photography has been to me what a journal is to a writer - a record of things seen and experienced, moments in the flow of time, documents of significance to me, experiments in seeing.
-- Beaumont Newhall

#Photography #Years #Flow

The present challenge to the photographer is to express inner significance through outward form.
-- Beaumont Newhall

#Challenges #Photographer #Form

It has been important to me, as an historian of photography, to understand photography by photographing.
-- Beaumont Newhall

#Photography #Important #Historian

Documentary is, therefore, an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give vivification to fact - to use Walt Whitman's definition of the place of poetry in the modern world.
-- Beaumont Newhall

#Giving #Documentaries #Facts

Wherever there is disaster, the newsman is there. If he cannot find disaster, he searches for the odd and the peculiar, the exotic and the unfamiliar. His photographs, seen by millions, make momentary events and strange occurrences all over the world our common property.
-- Beaumont Newhall

#World #Events #Peculiar

The traditional difficulty of balancing the mechanical with the imaginative schools of photography still operates. In schools of photography meaningful art education is often lacking and on the strength of their technical ability alone students, deprived of a richer artistic training, are sent forth inculcated with the belief that they are creative photographers and artists. It is yet a fact that today, as in the past, the most inspiring and provocative works in photography come as much (and probably more) from those who are in the first place artists.

What is the subject matter of this apparently very personal world? It has been suggested that these shapes and images are underworld characters, the inhabitants of the vast common realm of memories that have gone down below the level of conscious control. It may be they are. The degree of emotional involvement and the amount of free association with the material being photographed would point in that direction.

The only nature I'm interested in is my own nature.

When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order (unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder).

We must see what in the Israeli identity - in the Israeli - we can give to other people rather than speaking so often of taking, expanding territory.

The question of boundaries is a major question of the Jewish people because the Jews are the great experts of crossing boundaries. They have a sense of identity inside themselves that doesn't permit them to cross boundaries with other people.

Worrying that banning flag desecration would inhibit free speech reveals a misunderstanding of the flag's fundamental nature.

Access to information and freedom of access to it may seem like a fundamental right but there are many people who think, rightly or wrongly, it is for your own good that it is hidden.

If we can't begin to agree on fundamentals, such as the elimination of the most abusive forms of child labor, then we really are not ready to march forward into the future.

Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.