Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was never in a school situation where someone said, This is the way a photograph is supposed to look. I was completely open to cut them up, or do anything like that. I think if I had been in touch with people earlier, then I wouldn't have felt comfortable doing that. It would have been too bizarre.
I think that's an important lesson for young people who want to be artists: You have to find someone who believes in you and who will help you find that time where you don't have to think about a job but just making work. If I didn't have those people in my life, I wouldn't be in the position I'm in.
'Woman on the Plaza,' with its distinct horizon, snow-like surfaces, wintry wall, stunning sunlight, sharp shadows, and hurrying figure, would become the most biographical of my photographs - an abstract image of the landscape and life of northern Ohio where I grew up and first practiced photography.
I believe in the invisible. I do not believe in the definitive reality of things around us. For me, reality is the intuition and the imagination and the quiet voice inside my head that says: isn't that extraordinary? The things in our lives are the shadows of reality, just as we ourselves are shadows.
Part of it has to do with the discipline of being actively receptive. At the core of this receptivity is a process that might be called soft eyes. It is a physical sensation. You are not looking for something. You are open, receptive. At some point you are in front of something that you cannot ignore.
Somebody had given me a copy of 'Hunky Dory,' which had yet to be a hit, although it was starting to percolate. I'd seen a couple of pictures of David, with his interesting hairdo and outfits, and I decided to seek him out, which wasn't difficult back then, as he was eager to do any kind of publicity.
I've got really prolific since I moved to Paris where I am living permanently, for the rest of my life, until I find another idea. I have really close women friends here: Valerie, Raymonde, not Joana so much, Maria Schneider, who was always a real heroine of mine who and has now become a close friend.
I am still covering conflict to some degree. I was back in Iraq. I've covered quite a bit of the Israel and Palestine. But I'm not doing it with the kind of intensity I was before and I'm not seeking out the front line and the kind danger that comes with being at the edge of the war the way I used to.
A work can do many things at once, and it doesn't have to be just about the world, it could also be about photography, it could be about perception, it could be an exploration of the medium. It could be a document, it could be a visual poetry, and it could be a formal exploration all at the same time.
I've been collecting photographs since I don't know when, for a long time, for different reasons. You can find them on eBay and when we were browsing through the shops there were images that attracted me. These are all historical images because these days they're all digital. They don't exist anymore.
At some point during my travels, I had a slight change of focus which would end up defining the rest of my career. I began taking pictures of people. In addition to all the buildings, street signs and fire hydrants, I started photographing some of the interesting humans that passed by me on the street.
With every glance I take in the 'negative-positive' of existence and the inevitability of impermanence to its glowing limits. Alone and haunted, I trust my inner eye, the heart. Everything, absolutely everything, becomes visible. Appearances, disappearances, nothing seems of secondary importance to me.
Many photographers feel their client is the subject. My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I'm trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader. The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.
Photographers should follow their own judgment, and not the fads and dictates of others. Photography is still a very new medium and everything is allowed and everything should be tried and dared... Photography has no rules. It is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it was achieved.
In July of 2010, I lost my finance job in Chicago. Instead of updating my resume and looking for a similar job, I decided to forget about money and have a go at something I truly enjoyed. I'd purchased a semi-professional camera earlier that year and spent my free time taking photos in downtown Chicago.
What is creativity? Having spent my life in one creative endeavor after another, I can tell you it's not something magical or mystical. It's something very simple. To me, it's just a moment - a moment where we look at the ordinary, but we see the extraordinary. It happens all the time in my photography.
In Europe, I am an outsider. I don't really understand anything that I am seeing. I can be welcomed into people's homes, I can be met with suspicion, I can be taken somewhere else altogether. There is always wonderment there for me, even if the person I am photographing may not see it or be aware of it.
I look at my women with a Shakespearean element too - the variant of emotions they are capable of - it's not all completely dour, there is a bit of humor in there too! I actually think the whole Shakespearean world is wrapped up in every human being, from beauty to destruction and everything in between.
I don't want to carry big things around with me. I'm lazy. The snapshot camera, you just carry it around and take the picture. You don't need to think about anything. People in the street are not going to wait for you with a big camera. They would freak out. With a snapshot camera, they are comfortable.
I've got to get the ultimate in composition today. or I've got to get the ultimate in light, I'll stay here until it appears. I was not making any demands. I went purely to see what would come, what might be there. I didn't have to be archaeologist or historian or tourist, I just needed to be available.
My first priority when taking pictures is to achieve clarity. A good documentary photograph transmits the information of the situation with the utmost fidelity; achieving it means understanding the nuances of lighting and composition, and also remembering to keep the lenses clean and the cameras steady.
We either have wild places or we don't. We admit the spiritual-emotional validity of wild, beautiful places or we don't. We have a philosophy of simplicity of experience in these wild places or we don't. We admit an almost religious devotion to the clean exposition of the wild, natural earth or we don't.
I don't want to knock photography, and I don't feel that film is up there but photography isn't. I think they're next to each other really, you know. There's an incredible strength to a still picture. Or there can be an incredible strength to a still picture that can outlive you. That can outlive a film.
I hate to say it because I think people are risk averse these days more than ever. Before they even pick up the phone, they know what the picture's going to be. So there's a certain comfort in that, a certain security that they can lay out the cover of the magazine and kind of know what it's going to be.
I was doing a lot of web design at the time. And anybody that has an agent thinks, "Why do I need an agent?" Maybe it's a little different as an actor - of course you need an agent - but any kind of agency that's selling something for you, you think, "Why can't I sell this myself? It doesn't make sense."
I want to let [my photographs] be something that comes from the model in her own way. I don't want to take the models too much out of their own skin. I realized that I wanted to create a marriage between who the person was, the nature, the beauty in the figure, and how the models sat or posed themselves.
I had the right amount of detachment to go back and really appreciate what I had grown up with. There’s a particular style that is very Peru that you don’t see anywhere else; it’s got so many different imprints. When you mix Incan minimalism with the heavy, ornate Spanish Baroque, it is very interesting.
Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate. Most of the photographs in your paper, unless they are hard news, are lies. Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality... Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.
Still photographs often differ from life more by their silence than by the immobility of their subjects. Landscape pictures tend to converge with life, however, on summer nights, when the sounds outside, after we call in children and close garage doors, are small - the whir of moths, the snap of a stick.
I have always been fascinated by the poetic condition of twilight. By its transformative quality. Its power of turning the ordinary into something magical and otherworldly. My wish is for the narrative in the pictures to work within that circumstance. It is that sense of in-between-ness that interests me.
I kept shooting but started making drafts of the work, essentially spending a few days a month sequencing and editing, hanging things up on the board, showing them to trusted confidantes from in and outside the photo world. It started to take its shape naturally over time until I kind of ran out of ideas.
There is something about this process, and about the whole 8 x 10 [camera] business, that takes it out of the arena of the snapshot, even though, of course, I'm always desperate for that feeling. I wanted those family pictures to look effortless. I wanted them to look like snapshots. And some of them did.
In a world where the 2 billionth photograph has been uploaded to Flickr, which looks like an Eggleston picture! How do you deal with making photographs with the tens of thousands of photographs being uploaded to Facebook every second, how do you manage that? How do you contribute to that? What's the point?
There have been many beautiful women since Marilyn Monroe. But who is there that has her total magic? Nobody has that vulnerability any more. We turn to child models in an instinctive search for that innocence and freshness, but they don’t have the deep feminine sexuality that came from Marilyn like light.
My images were surreal simply in the sense that my vision brought out the fantastic dimension of reality. My only aim was to express reality, for there is nothing more surreal than reality itself. If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary.
In order to figure this artmaking stuff out, it's trial and error and experimentation, and takes some time and hard thinking. Putting work out in many forms and stages is an extension of how I see things. I feel the art process is best served when it invites comments and constructive criticism from people.
People who hate what I make hate me, too. They must think I am a demon or some kind of evil sorcerer. Those who understand what I do appreciate the determination, love, and courage it takes to find wonder and beauty in people who are considered by society to be damaged, unclean, dysfunctional, or wretched.
It fascinates me that there is a variety of feeling about what I do. I'm not a premeditative photographer. I see a picture and I make it. If I had a chance, I'd be out shooting all the time. You don't have to go looking for pictures. The material is generous. You go out and the pictures are staring at you.
I've become really interested in the landscape but not as landscape but more as it relates to mood and how we live and how the outside impacts on the inside. I didn't really look at the outside world during the years I was photographing the Ballad as I was locked inside my house and I lived totally inside.
Photography is a life of learning. That's all I want from photography. I don't want the money. I don't need the fame. I don't need the admiration. I'd like all of those things, but I don't need them. Because what I get from photographing is learning. I have spent my life learning by looking through a lens.
One problem that I kept in mind was that in avoiding the BODY BEAUTIFUL as exhibited in the pseudo-lesbians of David Hamilton or J. Frederick Smith, I ran the risk of reinforcing negative myths, i.e. that lesbians are women who cannot attract men because they do not conform to society's standard of beauty.
All I can do in my writing is to stimulate a certain amount of thought, clarify some technical facts and date my work. But when I preach sharpness, brilliancy, scale, etc., I am just mouthing words, because no words can really describe those terms and qualities it takes the actual print to say, “here it is.
I wanted to combine science and photography in a sensible, unemotional way. Some people’s ideas of scientific photography is just arty design, something pretty. That was not the idea. The idea was to interpret science sensibly, with good proportion, good balance and good lighting, so we could understand it.
I'm not even really attempting to brand myself outside of 'Humans of New York.' I think part of the reason for my success is that I've put my ego aside and said I'm not going to put all of my effort into trying to promote myself. I'm going to try to promote my work and am going to try to promote my project.
I'm not that particularly talented in terms of making anything or - I'm not technically efficient. I certainly don't know how to draw very well or paint, and I'm not good with computers. But I think the thing that I'm good at is willing something into life, no matter what. I do what it takes to get it done.
Normally I do all my own post work. It's not that I do it better than anyone else, I just do it my way. I make decisions. People who print at labs are probably far better printers, but they won't make my decisions mid-process. I don't want to be out of the loop. I want to be a photographer and do all of it.
Seems Google management figured out it is cheaper, happier and more productive to take care of their employees and create a positive work environment than to burn them to a crisp, make them afraid of the future, and send them off into the highways and byways of California in search of a Taco Bell for lunch.
'Tough' meant it was an uncompromising image, something that came from your gut, out of instinct, raw, of the moment, something that couldn't be described in any other way. So it was tough. Tough to like, tough to see, tough to make, tough to understand. The tougher they were the more beautiful they became.
Photographs are like our children. We put the best of ourselves into them - the best of our vision, our minds, our hearts - and then we send them out into the world. At some moment, perhaps the moment we click the shutter, they are being released. From that moment on, they don't really belong to us anymore.
This ongoing coexistence which makes life sensational. The eyes have this ability to flip around what they see from one second to another, to see something as an object, and then as a design. That's really liberating, and I try to convey that in my work, that your eyes are free and you are free to use them.