Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I didn't set out to do something different so much as do something that interested me. I wasn't trying to be avant-garde - that's being fashionable. You don't set out to revolutionize art, you make statements for yourself.
When you're growing up your mother says, "Wear rubbers or you'll catch cold." When you become an adult you discover that you have the right not to wear rubbers and to see if you catch cold or not. It's something like that.
I think the environmental movement has failed in that it's used the stick too much; it's used the apocalyptic tone too much; it hasn't sold the positive aspects of being environmentally concerned and trying to pull us out.
The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer's understanding of his subject and mastery of his process.
I have a good friend who's a very good printer. And he does a certain amount of printing for me. I do all the developing. If somebody's going to goof my film, I'd better do it. I don't want to get that mad at anybody else.
You've got a number of things that take place that are peculiar to still photography. One: how a picture looks - what you photograph is responsible for how a photograph looks. In other words, it's responsible for the form.
You're suddenly seeing the coherence and the interconnectedness of everything, left to right, top to bottom, front to back. It's all connected, and, somehow, it's all in balance. And that's, of course, when you go, 'Yes!'.
I'm thinking about the end of civilization. We may not keep growing like we are now. There must be an end of civilization. That's what I did as a show at the Palais de Tokyo, the 33 scenarios of how this civilization ends.
The majority of the people I've taken photographs of, I've had conversations with. "What are your goals and aspirations?" "What are you about?" It's not just about me capturing the image; I want to know what you are about.
I want to create the largest-ever participatory art project and highlight the concept of Shadow Philanthropy, where people help others create work without taking credit for it - through this we can really change the world.
What's important to me is that [photographs] have the appearance of being documents of what goes on. I like the illusion of veracity, that they look like life rather than movie stills. I don't want them to look fabricated.
My brother had fabulous children before I had children and for some reason I wanted to photograph them, and that was when I got my first camera. Children have something totally unconscious about them. That's how I learned.
The photographer, even in fashion and portraiture, has to have a standpoint. It's important to know what you stand for, no? Most people just take pictures, but they stand for nothing. They follow trends and don't know why.
When I worked on an erotic shoot... I shot digitally. It helped the models get into it because they could come over and see what was happening. It was the closest to being sexual, because it was a participatory experience.
A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.
What ends up in your scrapbook? The pictures where you look like a good guy and a good family man, and the children look adorable - and they're screaming the next minute. I've never seen a family album of screaming people.
I don't like memoirs. I think they're self-serving, and people use them to settle scores, and I really tried not to do that. You have to have a really interesting life to justify memoir, and my life has been pretty ho-hum.
I thought it would be good not to hide the fact that you're taking a photograph, and have people react and come in close and also make a commentary on what's being photographed: 'This is a photo, this is my point of view.'
I will be remembered when I'm in heaven. People won't remember my name, but they will know the photographer who did that picture of that nurse being kissed by the sailor at the end of World War II. Everybody remembers that.
I wanted to do a film for a while, but I never found a script that I felt I was going to be the right person for; because if you've never made a film, you're not taught how to make a film, and you feel like you lack skills.
The vanishing point leads to the missiles of today, which can take us out of this world. It could be that the west's greatest mistakes were the 'invention' of the external vanishing point and the internal combustion engine.
I was an amateur - I am an amateur - and I intend to stay an amateur. To me an amateur photographer is one who is in love with taking pictures, a free soul who can photograph what he likes and who likes what he photographs.
I've been asked if I think there will ever come a time when all people come together. I would like to think there will. All we can do is hope and dream and work toward that end. And that's what I've tried to do all my life.
Most of the time the ones who dislike the pictures the most confirm to me that the picture has hit home and is probably truer than I know. Nobody minds a boring picture, they mind a picture that has gotten to the soft core.
The crazy thing is that practical solutions exist. We don't need to perpetuate these problems. I think our hardest job is to convey a sense of optimism, show how things can get better, and get people to invest in solutions.
A photographic session is a joint, interpersonal exchange, a kind of creative encounter session at a high level of intensity. For me, photography is more a process of creating an experience than one of looking for pictures.
I grew up in Manhattan. For Manhattanites, Brooklyn was the sticks, a second-rate civilization. My friends and I, we were so snobby. Living in the Bronx or Brooklyn was incredible... for me, that was like a foreign country.
When I was younger, I did things with a camera I would not do by myself. I remember going down to the docks in San Francisco and asking a fisherman if he would take me out on his boat. I would never do that without a camera.
Let us leave a splendid legacy for our children...let us turn to them and say, this you inherit: guard it well, for it is far more precious than money...and once destroyed, nature's beauty cannot be repurchased at any price.
I am convinced that any photographic attempt to show the complete man is nonsense. We can only show, as best we can, what the outer man reveals. The inner man is seldom revealed to anyone, sometimes not even the man himself.
None. They should just go out and photograph and stop talking about it. That's the only way they are going to find themselves. They can't do it in their heads - they have to go out and do it in the camera and get it on film.
Sometimes they are a matter of luck; the photographer could not expect or hope for them. Sometimes they are a matter of patience, waiting for an effect to be repeated that he has seen and lost or for one that he anticipates.
It's important to take bad pictures. It's the bad ones that have to do with what you've never done before. They can make you recognize something you hadn't seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again.
I've never not been sure that I was a photographer any more than you would not be sure you were yourself. I was a photographer, or wanting to be a photographer, or beginning - but some phase of photographer I've always been.
I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women.
Part of my impetus to get famous is to have access to printed matter. I love all the stuff like postcards, books, little things. I can make my own zines, but it just helps if you've got somebody behind you publishing things.
When you shoot, that is opportunity number one to make a statement. When you edit, you have opportunity number two to make your statement. It could be an affirmation of your first choice or could go off in another direction.
I don't know about other people's cameras. Mine is a thing I had cobbled up, it holds together with tape and is always losing parts. All I need to set is the distance and that other thing - what do you call that other thing?
Photos tend to organize chaos, to define what we're doing here. It is essential that individuals' voices depict the world around us, as we are increasingly controlled by large institutions, large companies and large systems.
I would urge everyone to start looking at the world in a different way. Spend some time looking at everyday objects, at their design, their shape, their individual characteristics. Think ahead and imagine their significance.
One very important difference between color and monochromatic photography is this: in black and white you suggest; in color you state. Much can be implied by suggestion, but statement demands certainty... absolute certainty.
[Photography] is the non-complacence of the eye. To practice my right to look is also a critical attitude. If I stare at you, I will make you uncomfortable, and culturally we have a difficulty of staring and being stared at.
I show elements of the set in my pictures because it's not real. When I see movies, I often love the 'making of' more than the movie itself. It's not so final. When you have a woman just standing there, it doesn't mean much.
I have always felt that my work is religious, not sacrilegious. I would say that there are many individuals in the Church who appreciate it and who do not have a problem with it. The best place for Piss Christ is in a church.
You expressed yourself by looking different from other people. We even looked different from each other. But among the Exis, there was a close group of us, Klaus Voormann, Jurgen Wollmer and me. Klaus and I always wore black.
Great photography comes about at the right time but it also needs the right cut that enhances that precise moment. Photography must feed on both contents and form, if it gives up the one for the other it is not going to last.
Andre Breton once said that a portrait should not only be an image but an oracle one questions, and that the photographer's aim should be a profound likeness, which physically and morally predicts the subject's entire future.
I discovered about 150 dots is the minimum number of dots to make a specific recognizable person. You can make something that looks like a head, with fewer dots, but you won't be able to give much information about who it is.
Day and night I try, in my studio with its six two-thousand watt suns, balancing between the extremes of the impossible, to shake loose the real from the unreal, to give visions body, to penetrate into unknown transparencies.
[Me book is] called Stock Photographs. It was done at the Fort Worth livestock show and rodeo. I was commissioned to shoot there by the Fort Worth Art Museum for a show. I probably shot a total of fourteen days, give or take.