John Pfahl Quotes

• I want to make photographs whose very ambiguity provokes thought, rather than cuts it off prematurely. I want to make pictures that work on a more mysterious level, that approach the truth by a more circuitous route.

  John Pfahl

  Cutting, Levels, Want

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• While making my picture window photographs, I came to think that every room was like a gigantic camera forever pointed at the same view.

  John Pfahl

  Thinking, Views, Forever

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• Photography, of course, is the perfect medium for the investigation. It can reveal the truth of present day specifics and particularities, while at the same time, by conscious choice of lighting and pictorial structure, suggest the aesthetic legacy of the past.

  John Pfahl

  Photography, Past, Perfect

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• People think the camera steals their soul. Places, I am convinced, are affected in the opposite direction. The more they are photographed (or drawn and painted) the more soul they seem to accumulate.

  John Pfahl

  Pensamiento, Opuestos, Personas

  John Pfahl (1997). “Permutations on the picturesque”

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• I often wondered why I was attracted to certain landscapes and not others and why my photographs (and depictions by other artists) looked the way they did, Archetypes imprinted on my mind started me on a search.

  John Pfahl

  Artist, Mind, Landscape

  John Pfahl (1997). “Permutations on the picturesque”

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• I became wary of simple interpretations that assumed fixed and final meanings.

  John Pfahl

  Simple, Finals, Photographer

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• Somehow I felt that if Fox Talbot had had more time and more drawing talent, he would have filled in the interval between his two drawings and made a complete panorama. Now, 163 years later, I was able to use his great invention to elaborate on his youthful dream of capturing and fixing the fleeting image. In doing so, I may also have added another little bit to the soul of this extraordinary place.

  John Pfahl

  Dream, Drawing, Filled In

  John Pfahl (1997). “Permutations on the picturesque”

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• It would have been possible to structure my photographs in such a way that no indicators of the present were discernible. However, I wanted to incorporate into the project as a whole the jostling of time-frames I would feel as I set up my tripod on various rocky promontories.

  John Pfahl

  Way, Photographer, Structure

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• As Estelle Jussim wrote, it is almost impossible for a single photograph to state both the problem and the solution.

  John Pfahl

  Impossible, Photographer, Problem

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• No es sin inquietud que me he apropiado de los códigos de lo sublime y lo pintoresco en mi trabajo. Después de todo, los fotógrafos serios han pasado la mayor parte de este siglo tratando de eliminar tales extravagancias de su arte. La tradición perdura, sobre todo en calendarios y postales. Se me planteó el reto de reelaborar y revitalizar lo que había sido tan rotundamente denigrado.

  John Pfahl

  Art, Sublime, Trying

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• 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.

  John Pfahl

  Photography, Art, Color

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• Strangers with puzzled looks were amazingly cooperative in letting me into their rooms with my photographic gear. They let me take down the curtains, wash the windows, and rearrange the furniture. Often, too, they expressed their desire to share their view with others, as if it were a non-depletable treasure. I liked the idea that my photographic vantage points were not solely determined by myself. They were predetermined by others, sometimes years earlier, and patiently waited for me to discover them.

  John Pfahl

  Views, Years, Ideas

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