Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The English are very exotic to me.
Don't have rules, taboos, or limits.
The best critics of America are Americans.
I like the streets. I grew up in the streets.
Anybody who pretends to be objective isn't realistic.
Fashion was more of a sideline for me. I did it for the money.
I came from the outside, the rules of photography didn't interest me.
Photography led me to experiment in graphic work and, actually, painting.
I wasn't part of any movement. I was working alone, following my instinct.
What would please me most is to make photographs as incomprehensible as life.
I think that Damien Hirst putting a shark in a bath of formaldehyde is nothing.
My complaint is that Americans drive me crazy, and the politics drive me crazy.
I always dreamt of becoming an artist in Paris. Thanks to the Army, it happened.
I think it's obscene. I don't know how you support the monarchy. How can you do that?
Why did I take fashion photographs? I thought it was fun. And there was a lot of money.
For my first book, 'New York,' I had one camera and two lenses. It was fotografia povera.
I discovered that I could do whatever I wanted with a negative in a darkroom and an enlarger.
If I didn't have to earn a living somehow, I would never have taken a fashion photograph in my life.
Leger was not only the first artist I ever met but also the first pop artist, and he blew our minds.
You do things for yourself, and you do things for other people, and you hope that these things coincide.
Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn't look like somebody else's work.
If a film is a real knockout like 'Raging Bull,' it does not matter that it might not have happened like that.
Most of the other soldiers were older than me and sent money back to their families, so they were more prudent.
I always dreamed of working in Paris, of going to the Coupole and slapping Picasso or Giacometti on the shoulder.
I like dark humor. I think the world is very funny and tragic, and my photographs are basically dark Jewish humor.
I had no real respect for good technique because I didn't know what it was. I was self-taught, so that stuff didn't matter to me.
My father was convinced that America was the greatest place in the world. I'm afraid I didn't have the family I would have dreamed of.
If I look back, I think most of the things I did - the films, the books, the collaborations with these magazines - were mostly by accident.
In fashion, you have assistants, flashes; you can make sets. There are people running around doing things for you. But I can take it or leave it.
My way of living and working is that I'll do my thing. I went from one thing to another. That annoyed people. They didn't know how to categorize me.
I grew up in New York, in a rough neighborhood where our biggest concern was not getting beat up. I was always far from the center of the Big Apple.
I thought New York had it coming, that it needed a kick in the balls. When I returned to New York, I wanted to get even. Now I had a weapon, photography.
Memories. That's the thing about photography. I look at the contact sheet, and it brings back everything: whether I was tired, whether I was full of beans.
People didn't object to me taking their photo. It was something everybody thought was their due: to be King for a Day, win the lottery and be photographed.
I had an experience that was kind of backward. Instead of thinking that photography was a step down, it brought me a step up, to transpose and modify things.
I was a make believe ethnographer: treating New Yorkers like an explorer would treat Zulus - searching for the rawest snapshot, the zero degree of photography.
I have a special relationship with God. And when I take the right photograph, God gives me a little bing! in the camera. And then I know I'm on the right track.
I find it satisfying that what I've done in photography has had so much influence in how people take photographs and what they look at and how they look at things.
When I was a kid in New York, long before saturation sports coverage, the world heavyweight championship was, with the baseball World Series, the great national event.
I did a film on Muhammad Ali before he was champion. I was there when he became champion in 1964. I was happy to be able to document the development of a real American hero.
The kinetic quality of New York, the kids, dirt, madness - I tried to find a photographic style that would come close to it. So I cropped, blurred, played with the negatives.
French photography was basically poetic, and mine was vulgar and brash and violent, except that there's never any violence in the photographs: it's only in the photographic style.
What's very funny is when you see amateurs filming something, they do some things no professionals would dare to do. They instinctively do things that are very avant-garde and useful.
In the late Fifties and early Sixties, I used to think that most of these fashion creators weren't that great, and if the photograph was good, it was mostly thanks to the photographer.
This is supposed to be the Big Apple, with neighborhoods where the houses are all good-looking and the skyscrapers and everything. But to me, New York is kind of shoddy and uncomfortable.
I was 24 years old at the time. I had no real notion of what photography was about. I had no training. By accident, I put a negative in an enlarger, and you can do many things with that negative.
Fashion had no interest for me. I would take photographs in the studio. I would go back home, and my wife would say, 'What is the fashion like for this season?' And I would say, 'I have no idea.'
When I made 'Polly Maggoo,' it was more or less the end of this collaboration with 'Vogue' because I made a caricature of the editor-in-chief and the fashion people, so they didn't really adore me.
In America, kids would go to college and get out and buy a second-hand car and go across the country and discover America. I never did that; I went from New York to Paris, and New York was my America.
I thought it would be a good idea to look at New York with this half-European, half-native eye and really do something to get back at this city that I thought really gave me a hard time when I grew up.