Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I always enjoyed art history because, growing up in California, my exposure was limited, and it was a new experience. To learn the history of art opened up certain things to me, made me see. It intrigued me.
You have to have a lot of 'overage' so that your failures aren't the only thing you come home with. You've got to have a lot of things that were magnificent failures, but you want some magnificent successes.
I don't think it is even possible to define what a good photograph is, so it is difficult to instruct anybody how to make one. Beauty and aesthetics are subjective, and very much in the mind of the beholder.
No matter what. I like to be different. Its not easy to work the way we want, because we have to deal with a lot of judgmental people, but we've always been in that position, so its nothing we cannot handle.
...assume that art begins in unhappiness. True, the goal of art is to convey a vision of coherence and peace, but the effort to develop that vision starts in the more common experience of confusion and pain.
...I felt that photography ought to start with and remain faithful to the appearance of the world, and in so doing record contradictions. The greatest pictures would then... find wholeness in the torn world.
The Jews of the shtetls that Tolstoy remembered were saints... the people I photographed were saints. So now, in 1983, I tell the world: When you learn about Goethe, don't forget to study the Holocaust, too.
I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I've always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.
I now measure my growth as a photographer in terms of the degrees to which I am aware of, have developed my sense of, and have the skills to symbolize visually the four-dimensional structure of the universe.
The underlying tension of a lot of my art is to try and look through the surface appearance of things. Inevitably, one way of getting beneath the surface is to introduce a hole, a window into what lies below.
The subject must be thought of in terms of the 20th century, of houses he lives in and places he works, in terms of the kind of light the windows in these places let through and by which we see him every day.
Performance shots are a waste of time, they look like everyone else's. If you want to shoot a performer, then grab them, own them, you have to own people, then twist them into what you want to say about them.
It is the gift of seeing the life around them clearly and vividly, as something that is exciting in its own right. It is an innate gift, varying in intensity with the individual's temperament and environment.
No theoretician, no writer on art, however interesting he or she might be, could be as interesting as Picasso. A good writer on art may give you an insight to Picasso, but, after all, Picasso was there first.
The key is to photograph your obsessions, whether that’s old people’s hands or skyscrapers. Think of a blank canvas, because that’s what you’ve got, and then think about what you want to see. Not anyone else.
When money enters in - then, for a price, I become a liar - and a good one I can be whether with pencil or subtle lighting or viewpoint. I hate it all, but so do I support not only my family, but my own work.
One of the things I've had to struggle with is that part of what people find critically and curatorially questionable in my work is that I try to make things that don't read as art until they're in a gallery.
Color really doesn't have interaction if it's full of colors. It's the interaction or relationship among or between colors that makes a color image. This usually happens with a few colors, not a glut of them.
I photograph only something that has to do with me, and I never did anything that I did not want to do. I do not do editorial and I never do advertising. No, my freedom is something I do not give away easily.
South America was not really that open - you had to fit in, and I didn't fit in. I was different - my tastes, my point of view - were a bit weird, and I found in Britain a sense of calm, that I could just be.
Craft is important, but cameras for their own sake are not. A sense of aesthetics, a connection with the subject matter, an enquiring and an inquisitive mind, these factors outweigh whatever equipment we use.
Photography is about a single point of a moment. It’s like stopping time. As everything gets condensed in that forced instant. But if you keep creating these points, they form a line which reflects your life.
For most people to be happy, there has to be a person, place, or thing involved in their happiness. In true happiness, there are no things involved. It's a natural state. You will abide in that state forever.
Ansel [Adams] always jumped over the fence to photograph, walked past the garbage. He always looked to get an immaculate view, and I spent my life stepping back to include the garbage in my photographic view.
I don't feel like I'm taking pictures, I feel like I'm just gathering them in. They're all out there. I know where they'll be; I just have to get out of bed early enough to bring them home. Like lost kittens.
There's something about his eyes in the photo. A kind of mystery. His personality comes through. It's always hung on my walls and I've given it to many people as a present. (On his iconic photo of Che Guevara)
In black and white there are more colors than color photography, because you are not blocked by any colors so you can use your experiences, your knowledge, and your fantasy, to put colors into black and white.
There's only one music video that had an emotional impact on me, and that's "Hurt" by Johnny Cash. That's exceptional. There is no music video I can think of apart from that one that really reaches you inside.
There's only one music video that had an emotional impact on me, and that's 'Hurt' by Johnny Cash. That's exceptional. There is no music video I can think of apart from that one that really reaches you inside.
Perhaps why so much of today's photography doesn't grab us or mean anything to our personal lives is that it fails to touch upon the hidden life of the imagination and fantasy, which is hungry for stimulation.
My interviews are very pointed. I'm an active participant; I will kindly interrupt people. But I've learned there is nothing people won't tell you if you ask in a compassionate and legitimately interested way.
In the absence of a subject with which you are passionately involved, and without the excitement that drives you to grasp it and exhaust it, you may take some beautiful pictures, but not a photographic oeuvre.
Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can't.
Restricting too personal, and therefore prejudiced, interpretation leads to revolution - the fusion of an inner and outer reality derived from the wholeness of life - sublimating things seen into things known.
With the business growing, work has become a little more detached from my life. But in the start, before I had a separate studio and a team, everything happened in my house and it was hard to separate the two.
I'm shocked that I can live pretty well, or reasonably, or make a certain amount of my living, anyway, off of prints. I guess it's nuts. I don't believe in it. I never anticipated it; I still don't believe it.
The only time I've ever really felt envy is when I've watched people make music, which made my time living in the now-legendary Jazz Loft at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York a constant source of agony and ecstasy!
After some time passed in studying - and even imitating - the works of others, I would recommend the student to endeavour to be original, and to remember that originality should not be undiscovered plagiarism.
I've tried a few times to depart from what I know I can do, and I've failed. I've tried to work outside the studio, but it introduces too many variables that I can't control. I'm really quite narrow, you know.
By some special graciousness of fate I am deposited - as all good photographers like to be - in the right place at the right time. Go into it as young as possible. Bring all the asset you have and play to win.
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.
From the moment the tourist enters the site, everyone has to be photographed in front of every feature of note.... The photographic record of the visit has almost destroyed the very notion of actually looking.
My grandfather killed himself falling off the dike in Ostend while photographing my two cousins. This can happen so easily when looking through a lens: for a split second nothing else exists outside the frame.
At the same time as the UK Vogue one, I did a shoot that took about 40 days of friends and people I admired in Paris, for French Vogue. This is how I met Maria Schneider in June and which began our friendship.
Some people have become [in U.S] a lot more conservative but I can't really speak about that because I wasn't there. I feel compassion for their pain but it distresses me to see them all become more patriotic.
I was just taking pictures to see what they looked like. Just for the fun of it. It wasn't about anything in some cases. Some of them were just about the joy of opening up an aperture and seeing what shows up.
Each time you take a good picture, you have the wonderful feeling of exhilaration... and almost instantly, the flip side. You have this terrible, terrible anxiety that you've just taken your last good picture.
In almost every photograph I have ever made, there is something I would do to complete it. I take that to be the spirit hole or the deliberate mistake that's in a Navajo rug to not be godlike, but to be human.
Exotic novelty. My statement to [people] is always, well, set this picture in your home town, is it still an interesting picture? Or is it just exotic? Would I care about this same picture minus its exoticism?
I think photography has a huge potential to expand a circle of knowledge. There's a reality that we are all the more linked globally and we have to know about each other. Photography gives us that opportunity.