Quotes from André Bazin

Originality in photography as distinct from originality in painting lies in the essentially objective character of photography. For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent. For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man.

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

The film of a painting is an aesthetic symbiosis of screen and painting, as is the lichen of the algae and mushroom. To be annoyed by this is as ridiculous as to condemn the opera on behalf of theater and music.

Hence the charm of family albums. Those grey or sepia shadows, phantomlike and almost undecipherable, are no longer traditional family portraits but rather the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed from their destiny; not, however, by the prestige of art but by the power of an impassive mechanical process.

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

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

The 'Western' is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself.

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