Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In a lot of ways I look at these old photos, and I don't know if I would have been able to communicate with these people on this level if I didn't have a camera. I think I would still be so shy.
Online, you have things like Slate Magazine, which has a lot of commentary and analysis of stories, so it gives you a fuller picture. I would compare that to a news magazine or the New Republic.
I often have to feel my way through the alternatives. The 99-cent store is attractive because it offers objects that aren't promoted in glossy magazines. The work then becomes a form of alchemy.
I want the pictures to be working in both directions. I accept that they speak about me, and yet at the same time, I want and expect them to function in terms of the viewer and their experience.
The art is the challenge which you must meet every day: the technique you should learn to control with time. The science and the art of photography are really one, and not opposed to each other.
From the ages of 12 to 35 my body, not my mind, was my primary currency. My ideas, my humor, my curiosity - none of those were valued as much as my body, which preceded me into almost every room.
If there was anyone primed to raise their kids feminist, it was me. My parents treated me no differently from my brother. I was raised to believe I was capable of doing anything I set my mind to.
In retrospect I can see that my desire to create abstractions has become more and more radical. Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what's behind something.
The process of growth is obviously critical to my understanding of the land and myself. So the process is far more unpredictable with far more compromises with the day, the weather, the material.
Everyone has a point of view. Some people call it style, but what we're really talking about is the guts of a photograph. When you trust your point of view, that's when you start taking pictures.
I was out there with the White House press squad, and after his helicopter took off, and the carpet rolled up...This wasn't a photograph that others were taking, but I continued to take pictures.
I think when you are the parents of a gifted athlete, the best thing in the world you can do is to encourage them, in my opinion. My dad didn't push me and I didn't push my children in athletics.
Actors are hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are. You don't know if you're getting a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. It depends what mood they're in.
What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing. You wouldn't be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought.
Shadows sometimes people don't see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures, oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.
What's shocking is cruelty and torture, and that's become our entertainment. Kids can play violent video games, but God forbid they look at a naked woman. That's pornography, that's perverse. No!
There is nothing like a Bach fugue to remove me from a discordant moment... only Bach hold up fresh and strong after repeated playing. I can always return to Bach when the other records weary me.
Photography is a strong tool, a propaganda device, and a weapon for the defense of the environment...and therefore for the fostering of a healthy human race and even very likely for its survival.
There are things I back off from trying to talk about, you know. Particularly my own work. Also, there may be things better left unsaid. At times I'd much rather talk about other (people's) work.
If there's one thing I've always taken care of with my work, it's that it's never an advertisement for anything other than the work itself and for the people it's about - no 'Coca-Cola presents.'
It seemed clear to me early on that one of the things a photograph could do was make a reality, and I wanted to do that. I always think of looking inside an Easter egg and seeing a perfect world.
We were really poor when I was growing up; my parents, both artists, were bohemians. Life was a desperate struggle, but in service of a high ideal, which is exactly what my photographs are about.
The plant never lapses into mere arid functionalism; it fashions and shapes according to logic and suitability, and with its primeval force compels everything to attain the highest artistic form.
I don't just look at the thing itself or at the reality itself; I look around the edges for those little askew moments-kind of like what makes up our lives-those slightly awkward, lovely moments.
The greatest tool at our command is the very thing that is photography. Light. Light is our paintbrush and it is a most willing tool in the hands of the one who studies it with a sufficient care.
Fashion photography should say something about the stability of a certain time you live in or what kind of women you like. The most interesting thing is not what they're wearing but who they are.
I believe that the average person can help a lot, not by giving material goods but by participating, by being part of the discussion, by being truly concerned about what is going on in the world.
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.'
Once the amateur's naive approach and humble willingness to learn fades away, the creative spirit of good photography dies with it. Every professional should remain always in his heart an amateur.
What I learned from Lennon was something that did stay with me my whole career, which is to be very straightforward. I actually love talking about taking pictures, and I think that helps everyone.
Every time you have to come up with a new body of work for a new show, you're aware that people are just ready to rip you apart, they're just waiting for you to fall or make the slightest trip up.
And then I went round the corner and there's a Van Gogh portrait, and you just think, well, this is another level. A higher level, actually. I love the Sargent, but it's not the level of Van Gogh.
I believe in the relatedness of all forms of life from the simplest to the most complex. We humans share the same family tree as all life on earth, back to the first stirrings in the primal ocean.
The abstracting of visual elements in order to recognize their particularity has become automatic, but seeing, combining, and creating them as integrated 'wholes' will remain a lifelong challenge.
Art and religion have the same origin. Art first, or religion first? Maybe consciousness first! Consciousness always comes with religious feeling and artistic identification. It's the same origin.
When you put the subjectivity of the art together with the context of the science, you have this very powerful conjunction of opposites and together they are greater than either one could ever be.
Nature is a mirror in which I am reflected, because by rescuing this land from sad devastation [through recreating it in photographs], I am in fact trying to save myself from my own inner sadness.
You have to be you. You can't be anybody else. If you speak loudly, and people tell you to speak quietly, you can do it for a little bit, but loud people are loud, and people who are not, are not.
Magnum photographers were meant to go out as a crusade ... to places like famine and war and ... I went out and went round the corner to the local supermarket because this to me is the front line.
I believe that we photographers don't benefit very much with answers from other photographers. What is more beneficial is to ask questions of ourselves and see what thoughts float out from within.
The smoke and the fire and the speed, the action and the sound, and everything that goes together, [the steam engine] is the most beautiful machine that we ever made, there's just nothing like it.
In 1958, a year before the revolution, Magnum wanted to send me to Cuba because they had contacts with the rebels. I'd just spent six months in South America and said 'No', so I missed everything.
It is most often not our strengths, our courage or our successes that bring two human hearts together, but it is often our shared vulnerability, our fears and our common failures that make us one.
Angelo Corrao was our editor [in Dream of Life], and he was just so diligent and so old-school in the way he looked at editing. He would take my far-out ideas and tame them and make sense of them.
Finding a photograph is often like picking up a piece from a jigsaw-puzzle box with the cover missing. There’s no sense of the whole. Each image is a mysterious part of something not yet revealed.
We may never be able to pay directly for the gifts of true friendship - but pay we must, even though we make our payment to someone who owes us nothing, in some other place and at some other time.
And yet, in a superficial sense, it is true that the camera does not "lie": given a chance, it will faithfully render everything within the field of view of the lens and show it precisely as it is.
My art recognizes the human place, the human context - especially in Britain, which is a landscape so worked by people for thousands of years, written, deeply ingrained with the presence of people.
...a photographer must be aware of and concerned about the words that accompany a picture. These words should be considered as carefully as the lighting, exposure and composition of the photograph.