Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've been a photographer for my whole life and I've done everything with photography that I felt I could do, and I always wanted to be a filmmaker.
[Photography] remains servile to a thoughtless vision of the world... As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it.
Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate, and that is an aspect that I have to puncture. I do that by showing the world as I really find it.
I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.
I began drawing as a very young child and had a grandfather who experimented with photography, so those things constituted my first exposure to art.
To know ahead of time what you're looking for means you're then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.
This is the way photography can be cruel... in the sense that it describes everything, even the things we are not necessarily aware we're revealing.
Photography to me is an addiction. I get jittery after a couple of days without a camera. Everyone who knows me says I'm happiest when I'm shooting.
A picture was a motionless record of motion. An arrested representation of life. A picture was the kiss of death pretending to possess immutability.
In any art, you don't know in advance what you want to say - it's revealed to you as you say it. That's the difference between art and illustration.
When I have sex with someone I forget who I am. For a minute I even forget I'm human. It's the same thing when I'm behind a camera. I forget I exist.
[Photojournalism] really is the only branch of photography that's a credit to our profession. We see, we understand; we see more, we understand more.
You must not think of yourself as looking at the stage from the audience. You must think of it as theatre in the round and look at it from all sides.
So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.
You are either born to be a photographer or not. The art of photography is not something you can learn in the classroom or by watching someone do it.
A woman artist could be one of those intuitive geniuses [who] have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience.
If all your life means to you is water running over rocks, then photograph it, but I want to create something that would not have existed without me.
How do you find a way to say what an extraordinary experience it is to be alive in this world? That is the kind of subject matter I try to work with.
Did I express my personality? I think that's quite unimportant because it's not people's selves but what they have to say about life that's important.
I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do - that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.
If I photograph you I don't have you, I have a photograph of you. It's got its own thing. That's really what photography, still photography, is about.
If one really knew what one was doing, why do it? It seems to me if you had the answer why ask the question? The thing is there are so many questions.
I wanted to be a scientist. I did a thesis on lions. But I realised photography can show things writing can't. Lions were my professor of photography.
I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered that I didn't need to. If the thing is true, why there it is.
By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us.
I'm very old fashioned. I still believe in the image and the pictorial quality of the image. It seems that I'm still busy with a truth in photography.
I've finally figured out what's wrong with photography. It's a one-eyed man looking through a little 'ole. Now, how much reality can there be in that?
Speed, the fundamental condition of the activities of our day is the power of photography, indeed the modern art of today, the art of the split second.
You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn't waste either.
If you want to photograph a man spinning, give some thought to why he spins. Understanding for a photographer is as important as the equipment he uses.
Digital photography and Photoshop have made it very easy for people to take pictures. It's a medium that allows a lot of mediocre stuff to get through.
I do believe strongly in photography and hope by following it intuitively that when the photographs are looked at they will touch the spirit in people.
I consider myself fortunate that photography exists, because otherwise I'd be stuck in the tragedy of ephemeralness that can come with installation art.
Growing up, I didn't give my grandfather's photography a second thought. I wasn't involved in his work, except that I helped my dad print his negatives.
I began after college, about 1972. I began to teach myself photography. I went to work for a local newspaper for four years as a kind of basic training.
[The most important factor in making a good picture is] to know who or what you are photographing. It is not about photography; it should be about life.
I thought New York had it coming, that it needed a kick in the balls. When I returned to New York, I wanted to get even. Now I had a weapon, photography.
I think that's the strength of photography - to decide the decisive moment, to click in the moment to come up with a picture that never comes back again.
We could teach photography as a way to make a living, and best of all, somehow to get students to experience for themselves photography as a way of life.
Well, it was kind of an accident, because plastic is not what I meant to invent. I had just sold photograph paper to Eastman Kodak for 1 million dollars.
I just directed another picture called 'American Dream' with Nick Stahl. Just finished shooting principal photography right before I started ['Lincoln'].
It's a process of getting to know people. That's what photography is to me. It's about paying attention, not screwing up and blowing a great opportunity.
My interest in photography is not to capture an image I see or even have in my mind, but to explore the potential of moments I can only begin to imagine.
T.V. has made going to the theatre seem pointless, photography has pretty much killed painting but graffiti has remained gloriously unspoilt by progress.
It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.
If you can imagine photography in the guise of a woman and you’d ask her what she thought of Stieglitz, she’d say: He always treated me like a gentleman.
[Dada is] perfectly kindhearted malice, alongside exact photography the only legitimate pictorial form of communication and balance in shared experience.
If I am at a party, I want to be at the party. Too many photographers use the camera to avoid participating in things. They become professional observers.
... we are there with our cameras to record reality. Once we start modifying that which exists, we are robbing photography of its most valuable attribute.