World Photography Day

August 19 of every year is celebrated as World Photography Day across the world, dedicated to the art, craft, science and history of photography.

Photography is a very important medium of storytelling. It conveys emotions instantly and sometimes more effectively than words. With the rapid advancements in camera technology, it has become one of the primary modes of communication in the digital world.

History

The day traces its origins to 1837 when the first-ever photographic process, the ‘Daguerreotype’ was developed by the Frenchmen Louis Daguerre and Joseph Nicephore Niepce. On January 9, 1839, the French Academy of Sciences announced this process, and later in the same year, the French government purchased the patent for the invention and gave it as a gift, "free to the world.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson

French photographer (1908 – 2004)

It’s an illusion that photos are made with the camera… they are made with the eye, heart and head.

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

Robert Capa

Hungarian-American photographer (1913 – 1954)

If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough.

I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life.

For a war correspondent to miss an invasion is like refusing a date with Lana Turner.

Ansel Adams

American photographer (1902 - 1984)

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment.

Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.

Susan Sontag

American writer / Photographer (1933-2004)

“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”

“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.”

“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”

“The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.”

“To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.”

“A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs—especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past—are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic

feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.”

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In 2020, the World Photography Day theme was 'Pandemic Lockdown through the lens'. In 2019, World Photography Day theme was 'Dedicated to History'. 'Be Nice' and 'Understanding Clouds' were the themes of World Photography Day in 2017 and 2018, respectively.