Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The greatest statesmen, philosophers, humanitarians ... have not been able to put an end to war. Why place that demand on photography?
I'm pretty used to people not liking having their picture taken. I mean, if you do like to have your picture taken, I worry about you.
Nothing is ever the same twice because everything is always gone forever, and yet each moment has infinite photographic possibilities.
The camera, you know, will never capture you. Photography, in my experience, has the miraculous power of transferring wine into water.
They kept me in short pants as long as they could, until they were shaving the hair on my legs because it was beginning to photograph.
Experience is the best teacher of all. And for that, there are no guarantees that one will become an artist. Only the journey matters.
What I like best about underwater photography is giving a visual voice to the invisible. What I like least is the prospect of drowning.
What matters most to me is to take photographs; to continue taking them and not to repeat myself. To go further, to go as far as I can.
Photography is a magic thing. A thing that has mysterious odors, a little strange and frightening, something one quickly grows to love.
Photography... unites the obvious and the unconscious at the level of the limimal - the border between what we see and what we suspect.
There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.
Words of wisdom for every photographer: 'Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking'. So said Goethe.
Photography's central role is to be the absolute medium of the day. It is fantastic that there is no longer any technical intimidation.
It is the unexpected and the surprise quality of a personal vision, rather than the emotion, which make people respond to a photograph.
I felt like I was in the best photography school in the world - I had Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn teach me.
It doesn't upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.
I had luck, but I worked hard and I suffered. It's not just photography I'm talking about. It's about whatever dream you want it to be.
Memory selects single important images, just as the camera does. In that manner both are able to isolate the highest moments of living.
All photography is Pop, and all photographers are crazy... they feel guilty since they don't have to do very much - just push a button.
And no photographs taken with the aid of flashlight either, if only out of respect of the actual light—even when there isn't any of it.
I tried to keep both arts alive, but the camera won. I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!
A photograph doesn't gain weight or lose weight, or change from being happy to being sad. It's frozen. You can use it, then recycle it.
Working from photos makes you a little more analytical, a little more cerebral, because you're less connected to the intensity of life.
What difference does it make whether you're looking at a photograph or looking at a still life in front of you? You still have to look.
Photography Cannot Record Abstract Ideas (Title of a 16x20 inch photograph depicting an index card on which that phrase is handwritten.)
I love writing, directing and photography; if I could figure out a way to put the three things together, that's what I would love to do.
This profession [photography] is deserving of attention and respect equal to that accorded painting, literature, music and architecture.
You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.
I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated.
Now, to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravity before going for a walk.
Just as typography is human speech translated into what can be read, so photography is the translation of reality into a readable image.
Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.
What I've always liked about photography is that it's such a direct way of showing what's on my mind. I see something. I show it to you.
If photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a natural process but because the latter is also coded.
I think that, in a sense, there's something about photography in general that we could associate with memory, or the past, or childhood.
The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person.
Photography teaches us to see, and we can see whatever we wish. When I take a photograph, I make a wish. I was always looking for beauty.
The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.
The reason I don't like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.
Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.
Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.
Photography was the first available demonstration that light could indeed exert an action sufficient to cause changes in material bodies.
The drama of light exists not only in what is in the light, but also in what is left dark. If the light is everywhere, the drama is gone.
While photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is the hardest in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision.
I joke around sometimes and say that the DP [director of photography] is like a shrink for the director, but there's some truth in there.
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.
The point of fashion is that you take the picture you want. And fashion is the only photography that allows fantasy, and I'm a fantasist.
Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should?
In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.
Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere.