Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't write as many songs as I used to. But, I find myself writing for social media more - times have changed. And I love photography, so a lot of my creative energy gets caught up that way.
When subject matter is forced to fit into preconceived patterns, there can be no freshness of vision. Following rules of composition can only lead to a tedious repetition of pictorial cliches.
I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.
One impulse of photography, as immediate as its impulse to extend the visible, is to theatricalize its subjects. The photographer's command, Watch the birdie! is essentially a stage direction.
I think of myself as a reportage photographer. I like the word. It implies a personal account of an observed event with connotations of subjectivity but honesty. It is eye-witness photography.
You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.
The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it.
Sometimes it’s not how much light you use to get an effect, it’s how little you use and still make it work. There are a lot of rules to be broken in photography, and you’ve got to have courage.
A studio session ... provides the greatest chance for control. Even though there is total freedom, I still dislike studio photography and the contrived images that usually stem from this genre.
Photography - the new, rapid, concrete reflector of the world - should surely undertake to show the world from all vantage points, and to develop people's capacity to see from all sides. (1928)
Art does not in fact prove anything. What it does do is record one of those brief times, such as we each have and then each forget, when we are allowed to understand that the Creation is whole.
I think this is the most exciting time in the history of photography. Technology is expanding what photographers can do, like the microscope and the telescope expanded what scientists could do.
I suffered first as a child from discrimination, poverty ... So I think it was a natural follow from that that I should use my camera to speak for people who are unable to speak for themselves.
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.
When I first moved from photography to filmmaking, I was worried about how big I had to become. I was one person, or maybe me and an assistant, and I had these small cameras, and maybe a flash.
If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.
What’s so incredibly amusing with photography is that while seemingly an art of the surface, it catches things I haven’t even noticed. And it pains me not to have seen things in all their depth.
Many cherish the idea that a photograph is an exact presentment of nature, and accept without question the paradox that a photograph cannot lie. Actually there never was a more unmitigated liar.
I was a dog groomer. I delivered radiators; I was a photography producer. I typed classified ads for many years. It was my longest term job - years of typing classified ads while I was in bands.
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.
Above all, the photographs I use are not arty in any sense of the word. I think photography is dead as fine art; its only place is in the commercial world, for technical or information purposes.
To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.
[Documentary photography] is unwittingly literary, because it is nothing other than an observation of contemporary life apprehended at the right moment by an artist capable of seizing it. (1928)
Faces in the everyday impress us as hives of subtlety. That impression must be sharpened in photography, which discloses only a microsecond of the face's behaviour, immersed in a social process.
[Love] can be found in making little dresses for stuffed birds, or in a garden of tenderness like I have done - mixing writing, photography, and real spaces. There are all kinds of acts of love.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am very much aware of the visual side of things. I do a lot of photography. I often take Polaroids of things that strike me as visually interesting, just to remember them and perhaps use later.
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.
A film carries six fine arts - it consists of architecture, painting, music, writing or literature, photography and performance. It's a conjecture of all these things and yet based on literature.
The destination of the photograph is to reveal what something or somebody looked like, under a particular set of conditions, at a particular moment in time, and to transmit the results to others.
If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.
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.
I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models... I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know.
Photographers, along with dentists, are the two professions never satisfied with what they do. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and inside every photographer is a painter trying to get out.
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.
When I first came to America there still was Look Magazine and LIFE Magazine, and the photography in those magazines was amazing to look at. They had the best portraits, and their news photography.
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.
In photography we possess an extraordinary instrument for reproduction. But photography is much more than that. Today it is [a method for bringing optically] some thing entirely new into the world.
I rode it once, which was up the driveway in the opening credits of the show. I didn't know how to stop it. I actually nearly killed the director of photography, and I smashed into the sound truck.
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.
It's all the same. It's the same face. We always look for an idea, for the same face, for the same position. There is no such thing as a European or an African photography. It's all the same thing.
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.
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.
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.
It's not that photography recaptures the world you have been in; more that it creates a new one: photographs are like Post-It Notes reminding us of the deep architectonic forms of space and thought.
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 photogram, image formation outside the camera is the real key to photography,it embodies the essence... that allows us to capture light on light sensitive material without the use of any camera.