Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The choice is not between drugs and no drugs, but between illegal drugs and legal drugs. Until the 1920s drugs were legal, why not now? Lots of people are on drugs anyway - it is called medication.
As artists, we can help, visually and intellectually, to make people understand that, at some point, we have to accept that it is our collective impact that is putting the whole planet in jeopardy.
I still love when any editor today says, "it's so cool what you do", or "you inspired me". All these little things make you realize that people are reading your site and that you have an influence.
The contest between form and content is what, is what art is about - it's art history. That's what basically everybody has ever contended with. The problem is uniquely complex in still photography.
...in the theatre the stage keeps the audience aware of the fictional nature of the action. The reader poring over a magazine, on the other hand, identifies what he sees in the photographs as real.
In my heart I like to remain an amateur, in the sense of being in love with what I'm doing, forever astonished again at the endless possibilities of seeing and using the camera as a recording tool.
My creative process begins when I get out with the camera and interact with the world. A camera is truly a license to explore. There are no uninteresting things. There are just uninterested people.
Technology has eliminated the basement darkroom and the whole notion of photography as an intense labor of love for obsessives and replaced them with a sense of immediacy and instant gratification.
You need to learn to see and compose. The more time you waste worrying about your equipment the less time you'll have to put into creating great images. Worry about your images, not your equipment.
I'll always remember Jean Paul Gaultier, who did a project based on Madonnas, remarking on the images, "Yours are much better." Gaultier is really smart, so it's good getting a compliment from him!
I think matching up Vietnam vets with these Iraqi vets would be a really great thing. When soldiers say only other soldiers can understand, that's what they're talking about: what it means to kill.
The one thing that is always clear in my mind is that the people, and their stories, and the themes of life that I photograph are always more important to me than the process of photography itself.
I want to get people to read stone, tree, so forth & so on through the construction of the picture, to lead them to these things exactly as if it were written out on a page. I think it can be done.
I like capturing stuff that is disappearing - that’s the point of photography. What I am photographing is an imaginary place that never existed, but is connected to something that has already been.
When I made 'Polly Maggoo,' it was more or less the end of this collaboration with 'Vogue' because I made a caricature of the editor-in-chief and the fashion people, so they didn't really adore me.
The photographer has almost as much control over his subject matter as a painter. He can control light and shade, form and space, pattern and texture, motion and mood, everything except composition.
One of the beauties of art is that it reflects an artist's entire life. What I've learned over the past 30 years is really beginning to inform what I make. I hope that process continues until I die.
'Humans of New York' wasn't the result of a fully finished idea that I thought of and then executed; it was an evolution. There were hundreds of tiny evolutions that came from me loving photography.
Everyone thinks these are self-portraits but they aren't meant to be. I just use myself as a model because I know I can push myself to extremes, make each shot as ugly or goofy or silly as possible.
Style is something you can use, and you can be like a magpie, just taking what you want. The idea of the rigid style seemed to me then something you needn't concern yourself with, it would trap you.
I made a photograph of a garden in Kyoto, the Zen garden, which is a rectangle. But a photograph taken from any one point will not show, well it shows a rectangle, but not with ninety degree angles.
While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.
That's all the difficulty and the challenge and the battle: to look through this mechanical thing, these bits of glass and metal, at someone. And not lose the sense that this shape is a human being.
What has changed is that when I photographed, most people that I photographed didn't have the right of refusal on their work. It would take a Marilyn Monroe at her height to be able to dictate that.
So many people dislike themselves so thoroughly that they never see any reproduction of themselves that suits. None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.
Attempts by some teachers to adjust school curricula to incorporate programs that children watch on television suggest a new means of 'leading' children by running after them as quickly as possible.
If there’s one theme that connects all my work, I think it’s that of land-lessness; how land makes people into who they are and what happens to them when they lose it and thus lose their identities.
Around the world, human traffickers trick many people into slavery by false promises of good jobs or good education, only to find themselves forced to work without pay, under the threat of violence.
England gave me a chance. It's a very individual country where people have a personal style; they don't all follow a trend. The subtlety and wit of England is incredible, and they are very creative.
I saw that my camera gave me a sense of connection with others that I never had before. It allowed me to enter lives, satisfying a curiosity that was always there but that was never explored before.
Having a book is actually like a great master - helping to build a universe and unify work - especially in my pictures where there is such a strong signature, yet with a set of rigorous rules to it.
I always thought if I photographed anyone or anything enough, I would never lose the person, I would never lose the memory, I would never lose the place. But the pictures show me how much I've lost.
We all perform. It's what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintionally. It's a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we'd like to be.--PERFORMANCE
I would say that the emblematic photographic image is a picture from inside a room looking out. I think this defines photography. It's the metaphor for the notion of first sight. What one saw first.
The ground we walk on, the plants and creatures, the clouds above constantly dissolving into new formations - each gift of nature possessing its own radiant energy, bound together by cosmic harmony.
I've never been in love with fashion, actually; trends and catwalks don't interest me. I love clothes; I love them historically and currently. They represent a spirit of the times and the zeitgeist.
Everything went together perfectly, and this is what I mean by knowing. I didn't have to analyze anything. I just recognized what was in front of me. All I had to do was set up and take the picture.
Every successful photograph, except for lucky shots, begins with an idea and a plan. The more precisely a photographer knows what it is he wishes to do, the better the chances are that he will do it.
You pick up a camera because something has been revealed to you in the landscape or in the human-scape. And you have no choice because it's a gift. And it's like, oh right, I better start doing this!
Like any corporation, I have the benefit of the brainpower of everyone who is working for me. It all ends up being my work, the corporate me, but everyone extends ideas and comes up with suggestions.
I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.
When I don't have anything to say, I don't publish. Rather than posting something that's not very interesting, it's best to wait until you have something that really inspires you and makes you laugh.
You just go through a certain kind of drudgery every time you have to look for something. I've got certain things grouped by now, but there's a drudgery in finding them. There's always stuff missing.
There's a parallel between me going through these enormous efforts to try to make a moment that means something - and in a way, the figures are doing the same thing. There is that parallel, for sure.
I was next to Bobby [Kennedy] when he was shot. It was hideous. Part of me wanted to crawl away. I couldn't... I still wake up in the night and think about it. I even remember the f-stop. It was 1.4.
I try not to tell students where to shoot, when to shoot, or what to shoot. I feel finding the picture is the most important part of being a photographer. The actual shooting is of lesser importance.
Had I not been told to look, I would have quite, ignorant of what was really there, because I had 'made plans' and was wearing visual and emotional blinders that limited my perceptions and my vision.
I think of many of my photographs as being obviously symbolic but not symbolically obvious. There isn't any specific correlation between the symbols in this image and any content that I have in mind.
People think the camera steals their soul. Places, I am convinced, are affected in the opposite direction. The more they are photographed (or drawn and painted) the more soul they seem to accumulate.
It is curious that I always want to group things, a series of sonnets, a series of photographs; whatever rationalizations appear, they originate in urges that are rarely satisfied with single images.