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Pure photography is a system of picture-making that describes more or less faithfully what might be seen through a rectangular frame from a particular vantage point at a given moment.

John Szarkowski

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John Szarkowski
Age: 81 †
Born: 1925
Born: December 18
Died: 2007
Died: July 7
Art Historian
Curator
Exhibition Curator
Historian
Photographer
Writer
Ashland
Wisconsin
Thaddeus John Szarkowski
John Thaddeus Szarkowski
Less
Frame
Moment
Picture
Making
Photography
Given
Pure
Moments
Particular
Rectangular
Might
System
Vantage
Seen
Faithfully
Point
Describes

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The simplicity of photography lies in the fact that it is very easy to make a picture. The staggering complexity of it lies in the fact that a thousand other pictures of the same subject would have been equally easy.
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They were ... pure and unadulterated photographs, and sometimes they hinted at the existence of visual truths that had escaped all other systems of detection.
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The goal is not to make something factually impeccable, but seamlessly persuasive.
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The world now contains more photographs than bricks, and they are, astonishingly, all different.
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Because we see reality in different ways, we must understand that we are looking at different truths rather than the truth and that, therefore, all photographs lie in one way or another.
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Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.
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In practice a photographer does not concern himself with philosophical issues while working he makes photographs, working with subject matter that he thinks will make the pictures.
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It isn't what a picture is of, it is what it is about.
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Photography's central sense of purpose and aesthetic: the precise and lucid description of significant fact.
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Luck is the attentive photographer's best teacher.
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