Andre Bazin Photography Quotations

Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.

The essential factor in the transition of the baroque to photography is not the perfecting of a physical process... rather does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays not part. The solution is not to be found in the result achieved, but in the way of achieving it.

All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.

Photography can strip from the world that spiritual dust and grime with which our eyes have covered it.

Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.