Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Do not settle for easy. Do not settle for that first image. Craft it, work it, and make something more out of it. And finally, don't forget that the biggest joy in photography is making pictures of those things in your own life.
I had always planned to make a large painting of the early spring, when the first leaves are at the bottom of the trees, and they seem to float in space in a wonderful way. But the arrival of spring can't be done in one picture.
I believe that the problem of how you depict something is a formal problem. It's an interesting one and it's a permanent one; there's no solution to it. There are a thousand and one ways you can go about it. There's no set rule.
What my eyes seek in these encounters is not just the beauty traditionally revered by wildlife photographers. The perfection I seek in my photographic composition is a means to show the strength and dignity of animals in nature.
If you take a good look at the book [ Stock Photographs], it's largely a portrait gallery of faces - faces that I found dramatic. And some of those turned out to be reasonably dramatic photographs. But that's all it is, I think.
The difference between the casual impression and the intensified image is about as great as that separating the average business letter from a poem. If you choose your subject selectively—intuitively—the camera can write poetry.
That's why I felt so at home when I went to Africa. It didn't matter that I was halfway around the world in a foreign country, because all those elements are universal. And I think that's one thing about my work: It's universal.
...There are too many people studying it [photography] now who are never going to make it. You can't give them a formula for making it. You have to have it in you first, you don't learn it. The seeing eye is the important thing.
Most of my work is very temporary, very provisional. You can take it with you or you can leave it. Which is a tough sell for art. Because part of what art is supposed to do is make you immortal, either by making it or owning it.
Light gesture and color of the key compliments of any photograph. Light and color are obvious, but it is just her that is the most important. There is gesture in everything. It's up to you to find a gesture that is most telling.
To me extreme things are like miracles. There is nothing as boring as a person who is just okay. But I could easily live in a world populated with these disjunctive, bizarre things... I operate out of confusion, towards clarity.
Every adventure I've ever had with love and photography has ended in a similar misadventure. As is often the case, the rush of longing detaches from its object of desire, and my photographic ghosts lead me back to myself, alone.
My botanical documents should contribute to restoring the link with nature. They should reawaken a sense of nature, point to its teeming richness of form, and prompt the viewer to observe for himself the surrounding plant world.
I like small things, I like small moments that are almost elliptical, that are not necessarily linear; they're natural things that happen in the world, but if you look at them from a slight angle there's more than meets the eye.
I am a pationate lover of the snapshot, because of all photographic images, it comes closest to the truth ... the snapshooter['s] pictures have an apparent disorder and imperfection which is exactly their appeal and their style.
I've always been fascinated by twins. In my forty years of photographing, whenever there was an opportunity, I would take a picture of twins. I found the notion that two people could appear to look exactly alike very compelling.
My photos are my diary. Every photo is no more than the representation of a single day. And each day contains the past and the projection into the future. That's why I feel compelled to indicate the date on every picture I take.
In the beginning of my photography I controlled everything: rearranging the room, lighting it, and telling people what to do and where to put their hands. By the last project, I was basically totally at the mercy of serendipity.
Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.
I think that it was a great advantage to go into photography not knowing much about it. Not thinking. I think one of the problems with many photographers today is that they never see for themselves, but just like everybody else.
My job is, I'm a photographer. I'm something of a filmmaker. And primarily, I'm an adventurer. My job is to help people fall in love with their world, their planet. With the understanding that you don't save what you don't love.
The film [Dream of Life] came together when we started editing; it was organic, it became nonlinear and it was its own animal. And I didn't want to tame it, either. I wanted it to be different. It's not your typical documentary.
It's easy to play fun forms, surfaces, and languages against each other. Teenagers do this every day, producing winning memes from random patterns. I need the joke to hurt more; I want it to sink deeper than the postmodern grin.
Something very ugly to you as a person can look beautiful through the viewfinder, but being able to find that beauty, oftentimes, means seeing the humanity within the frame. If you turn that off completely, you don't see at all.
The spiritual aspect of my work has more to do with the sense that things in the world can be perceived and accepted as being in some respect alive. I try to approach everything that I photograph with this sense of wide-eyed awe.
Retouching is an incredible tool but can also create unrealistic expectations for women who don't understand that an image is not how the subject really looks. Even the subjects themselves can't live up to their retouched images.
For me the future of the image is going to be in electronic form... You will see perfectly beautiful images on an electronic screen. And Id say that would be very handsome. They would be almost as close as the best reproductions.
We started playing the Baltimore Colts early, and I was still very impressed with Johnny Unitas, who just passed away recently. I thought he was one of the best quarterbacks at the time when I was very young, he was in his prime.
Most portraits are lies. People are rarely what they appear to be, especially in front of a camera. You might know me your entire lifetime and never reveal yourself to me. To interpret wrinkles as character is insult not insight.
I'm exchanging molecules every 30 days with the natural world and in a spiritual sense I know I am a part of it and take my photographs from that emotional feeling within me, rather than from an emotional distance as a spectator.
I like to think of photographing as a two-way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject, by describing it as it is. A photograph must be responsible to both.
But I was very disappointed that I didn't get a chance to go overseas with that group, might not have gotten back but I wanted very much to go because there's not much of a record of the exploits of the first Negro fighter group.
I began photographing in 1946. Before that, I was a painter and drawer, with my mother and father's support. They were a bit pissed when I went into photography. They thought photographers were guys who took pictures at weddings.
Climate change is real. Climate change is being substantially increased by humans and the carbon we put into the atmosphere. And it appears to be speeding up. If science has made any mistakes, science has been underestimating it.
My pictures are not really about the children that I photograph. They're more like actors in a film. I think you can always recognize the children, but they are alienated from their real appearance and become more like metaphors.
I always like to meet the people I'm going to photograph. I need to have a conversation. I need to feel a vibe. I need to see what's going on in the person. I'm not just interested in physical beauty. I really need a personality.
This fascination with the human face has never left me... Every face I see seems to hide and sometimes, fleetingly, to reveal the mystery of another human being... Capturing this revelation became the goal and passion of my life.
My enthusiasm for joining the New York Film Academy is predicated on my personal explorations into video as well as a sense of responsibility to share my extended experience of photography with committed students in both mediums.
There's a time when people say your work is revolutionary, but you have to keep being revolutionary. I can't keep shooting pop stars all my life. You have to keep changing, keep pushing yourself, looking for the new, the unusual.
Of all the sacred places on the coast, none is more comforting than where rivers join the sea. By the river's disappearance we are reminded of life's passing, while by the ocean's beauty we accept it, in a hope we cannot explain.
My quest, through the magic of light and shadow, is to isolate, to simplify and to give emphasis to form with the greatest clarity. To indicate the ideal proportion, to reveal sculptural mass and the dominating spirit is my goal.
The human body represents to me the same universal innocence, timelessness and purity of all seed pods, suggesting the mother as well as the child, the parental as well as the descendant, conceived according to nature's longings.
What most artists using photography feel that they need to do is to show that they are serious, that they are not taking snapshots. To point a camera at something does not qualify you as an artist because everybody has done that.
Searching is everything - going beyond what you know. And the test of the search is really in the things themselves, the things you seek to understand. What is important is not what you think about them, but how they enlarge you.
Millions of men have lived to fight, build palaces and boundaries, shape destinies and societies; but the compelling force of all times has been the force of originality and creation profoundly affecting the roots of human spirit.
My urge to photograph is activated by an almost biological instinct for preservation from disorder. The camera is a mechanical apparatus that extends my natural ability and desire for meaningful organization. I need it to survive.
I think I always resented the fact that people thought I was trying to entertain them with my multifaceted, chameleonlike character changes. Although I liked doing that, I wasn't out to fool people and say 'Guess which one is me.'
It seems so utterly naive that landscape - not that of the pictorial school - is not considered of "social significance" when it has a far more important bearing on the human race of a given locale than excrescences called cities.
I find going back through things sometimes exhilarating because I find things I didn't know I had, and sometimes it's very off putting because there are things I never quite finished, and there's nothing at all to do about it now.
Well, in terms of what a camera does. Again, you go back to that original idea that what you photograph is responsible for how it [the photograph] looks. And it's not plastic, in a way. The problem is unique in photographic terms.