Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm a believer in the ordinary person, that the ordinary person is just as important and has an equally unique perspective on the world as someone who is famous or perhaps more privileged.
I struck upon this kind of crazy idea that I was going to go to New York and stop 10,000 people on the streets and take their portrait and create kind of a photographic census of the city.
My mother was a piano teacher, my father an inventor. He invented the reflective paint they still use on airstrips. They had faith in my ambition, and I think that made all the difference.
It therefore should be possible for even the photographer - just as for the creative poet or painter - to use the object as a stepping stone to a realm of meaning completely beyond itself.
In some way, a photo is like a stolen kiss. In fact a kiss is always stolen, even if the woman is consenting. With a photograph it's the same: always stolen, and still slightly consenting.
I knew, of course, that trees and plants had roots, stems, bark, branches and foliage that reached up toward the light. But I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself.
My taking pictures means I'm taking a series of pictures which become an essay and then get extended into a book. That's what's exciting, to take an idea and work it through to completion.
My father was a psycho-analyst and I think that fact was very influential on my development as an artist. Trying to search beneath the surface of things for an unexpected sense of mystery.
I never know what to call the subjects in my pictures because I'm uncomfortable with the word actor. I think maybe subjects might be more accurate - or maybe even more accurate is objects.
In order to give meaning to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what he frames. This attitude requires concentration, a discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry.
Even when I do really big pieces, I do them strips by strips - so you have to paste, you have to involve people. It's a whole process. And I like that. For me, that's where the artwork is.
There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work.
The women who intrigued me [as models] had the most beautiful necks and the most responsive hand movements. At one point, I found El Greco, and that elongated look became my way of seeing.
I don't like a tormented photograph. Something attracts you in them, but the attraction isn't because she has a pot on her head or tonnes of make-up and weird clothes and weird everything.
In the '70s, in Britain, if you were going to do serious photography, you were obliged to work in black-and-white. Color was the palette of commercial photography and snapshot photography.
Comedians are the most challenging people for me to shoot. Because you're not actually in the dialogue with them, they are performing. When I work with a comedian, I become their audience.
The most important part of fashion photography, for me, is not the models; it's not the clothes. It's that you are responsible for defining what a woman today is. That, I think, is my job.
The experience of life that you and I have is pretty much a jigsaw puzzle in the box: Day-to-day experiences of disconnected pieces that don't seem to justify the efforts we make each day.
The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope. This is not to say that he is unconcerned with the truth.
I was a very, very careful printer when I used 8-by-10 film. I probably spent more time on printing than anything else. The more the prints were appreciated, the more time I spent on them.
When I was younger I feared the dark, wondering what evil was watching me. Now it's different, for now it's a game of sneaking the light back on and laughing at how quickly the evil fleas.
I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify.
It seems to me that no one picture can ever be a final summation of a personality. There are so many facets in every human being that it is impossible to present them all in one photograph.
Self-conscious artiness is fatal, but it certainly would not hurt to study composition in general. Having a basic understanding of composition would help construct a better organized image.
The thing that interests me about photography, and why it's different from all other media, is that it's the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece.
OH, I LIKE smoking, I do. I smoke for my health, my mental health. Tobacco gives you little pauses, a rest from life. I don't suppose anyone smoking a pipe would have road rage, would they?
Because I know war... because I know the horror, I don't want to add to it. .........After the war, we felt the need to celebrate life, and for me photography was the means to achieve this.
When the woman is attractive, is it an interesting picture, or is it the woman? I had a lot of headaches with that, which was why it was interesting. I don't think I always got it straight.
Let's put it this way - I photograph what interests me all the time. I live with the pictures to see what that thing looks like photographed. I'm saying the same thing; I'm not changing it.
I wish more people felt that photography was an adventure the same as life itself and felt that their individual feelings were worth expressing. To me, that makes photography more exciting.
All over the planet, nature is being transformed into 'un-nature' at breakneck speed...My life is part of natural history. I long to know where that history came from and where it is going.
Well, I talk about one moment in the book, but I don't know if that's my moment of discovery. It was a moment. In the book, I talk about how I started shooting, how I became a photographer.
I could get my camera and point it at two people and not point it at the homeless third person to the right of the frame, or not include the murder that's going on to the left of the frame.
What I love about the TED is that it's not, 'Hey, take this check and enjoy.' It's, 'Do something with this, and we'll help you.' I think that's the most beautiful prize I've ever heard of.
The romance of the old West vanished so fast and so few ever did anything with it. Does it make you realize the importance of Art and how the main knowledge of history is through Art alone?
You know, of course, the specimens are not alive. We have to fix them in a fixing liquid formaldehyde and then we have to do a rinsing and then we have to coat them in a thin layer of gold.
Understanding that celebrity derives from and is a result of some form of accomplishment, it's always gratifying to work with individuals who have made some sort of contribution to society.
There's no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class. I'm always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don't give a damn how it got made.
I'm a photographer and my pictures are used in advertising campaigns. But I don't do advertising. Do you hear me? I take pictures. I'm not an advertising agency. I'm not an advertising man.
I work to attain a 'state of heart', a gentle space offering inspirational substance that could purify one's vision. Photography, like music, must be born in the unmanifest world of spirit.
When I see my work in a gallery I often wonder how I got to this point. Sometimes the process of making the work feels like a blur, and I look at the work and wonder how I actually made it.
It's important to be honest enough about your work, and the areas in which you can improve. I'm still learning every day and I'm still Hungry to create more and better work, hence the name.
I discovered that close to half the planet is 'pristine.' We live in towns such as London, Paris or Sao Paulo and have the impression that all the pristine areas are gone, but they are not.
We sort of understand how painkillers work. You take one, and it reduces your headache. We don't understand how photographs work. And that, to me, is an essential problem as a practitioner.
If you accept the idea that photographers, or some of them, are actually artists, then you have to look at their work less as a document of something than as a personal vision of the world.
There are photographic fanatics, just as there are religious fanatics. They buy a so-called candid camera there is no such thing: it’s the photographer who has to be candid, not the camera.
The urge to create, the urge to photograph, comes in part from the deep desire to live with more integrity, to live more in peace with the world, and possibly to help others to do the same.
I went from being able to walk down the street and be ignored to having men whistle at me. I was an insecure young girl, and it felt good to have attention, even though it was inappropriate.
I have met people on the subway who have told me the most profound stories, and I am convinced we all have something to teach each other if we just slow down long enough to hear the message.
I get way too sensitive when I get attached to someone. I can detect the slightest change in the tone of their voice, and suddenly I’m spending all day trying to figure out what I did wrong.