camera quotes

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.

-John Peter Berger
  New Statesman,17  Aug.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking† Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.

- Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood
  'A Berlin Diary', in Goodbye to Berlin (1939).

I said,'Forgive me, sir,'and plucked the cigar out of his mouth. By the time I got back to my camera, he looked so belligerent he could have devoured me. It was at that instant that I took the photograph. The silence was deafening.

-Yousuf Karsh
  Recalling how he snapped the celebrated 'bulldog' photograph of Sir Winston Churchill in the Speaker's Chambers, House of Commons, Ottawa, on 30 Dec1941. Karsh:  A Fifty-Year Retrospective.

The camera can be the most deadly weapon since the assassin's bullet.Or it can be the lotion of the heart.

-Smith
  In the NewYorker,10 Dec.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

- Susan Sontag
  In the NewYork Review of Books,18 Apr. Later published in book form as On Photography (1976).

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

- (George) Orson Welles
  'Un ruban de re"  ves'in L'Express,5 Jun. Reprinted in English in International Film Annual, no.2.

A typewriter needs only paper; a camera uses film, requires subsidiary equipment by the truckload and Wellington several hundreds of technicians. That is always the central fact aboutthefilmmakeras opposed toanyother artist: he can never afford his own tools.

- (George) Orson Welles
  Letter in the New Statesman.