Henry Adams
[Writer and historian, b. 1838, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 1918, Washington, D.C..]
I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.
We sit in our native house, receiving visits, watching what goes on among the natives of the village, firing off our Kodaks at everything worth taking; but remember the photograph takes all the color, life and charm out of the tropics, and leaves nothing but a conventional hardness that might as well be Scotch or Yankee for all the truth it has.
(1890)
The photograph is a coarse fraud, and seems to delight only in taking the whole beauty out of the picture.