Photography Quotations | Page 5

See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realise that film. There's really nothing to be afraid of.

I never liked dance photography; it's very flat, and dance photography in the studio looks very contrived.

People criticized me for my photography. They said it's not art.

But sports photography isn't something you just pick up overnight. You can't do it once a year for fun and expect to do a good job. And I take pride in what I do.

Truthfully, I don't really think of myself as a photographer. I don't have all the disciplines and knowledge of a person who's spent their life devoted to photography.

Photography is a demanding action sport. The light can change so quickly. I often find myself sprinting so that I can catch the perfect light falling on a photogenic subject.

My main camera is a Nikon D3. I use a French camera from the 1800s for wet plate photography, I use a Hasselblad sometimes. But to me the camera really doesn't matter that much. I don't have a preference for film or digital.

Madonna is her own Hollywood studio - a popelike mogul and divine superstar in one. She has a laserlike instinct for publicity, aided by her visual genius for still photography (which none of her legion of imitators has). Unfortunately, her public life has dissolved into a series of staged photo ops.

But slowly I began to use cameras and then think about what it was that was going on. It took me a long time, I mean I actually played with cameras and photography for about 20 years.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

The camera can photograph thought.

The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.

Photography has the power to undo your assumptions about the world.

Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.

Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.

If the artist only reproduces superficial features as photography does, if he copies the lineaments of a face exactly, without reference to character, he deserves no admiration. The resemblance which he ought to obtain is that of the soul.

It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop

I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)

Mere exactitude, of which photography and moulage [life casting] are the lowest forms, does not inspire feelings.

The human body is first and foremost a mirror to the soul and its greatest beauty comes from that.

The similarity between Van Gogh, Haiku poetry, and good photography is the concern for mortality. That things are very fleeting, that there are people who are more sensitive to death than others. The threat of time is of great concern to them. And the camera is a very appropriate instrument for many.

What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it.

Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.

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The camera will never compete with the brush and palette until such time as photography can be taken to Heaven or Hell.

Photography is an art which touches and grips one's own heart's blood.

Photography is not a sport. It has no rules. Everything must be dared and tried!

I am not interested in rules or conventions. Photography is not a sport.

Photography has no rules, it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.

No amount of toying with shades of print or with printing papers will transform a commonplace photograph into anything other than a commonplace photograph.

It is essential for the photographer to know the effect of his lenses. The lens is his eye, and it makes or ruins his pictures. A feeling for composition is a great asset. I think it is very much a matter of instinct. It can perhaps be developed, but I doubt if it can be learned. To achieve his best work, the young photographer must discover what really excites him visually. He must discover his own world.

Photographers should follow their own judgment, and not the fads and dictates of others. Photography is still a very new medium and everything is allowed and everything should be tried and dared... Photography has no rules. It is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it was achieved.

If there is any method in the way I take pictures, I believe it lies in this: See the subject first. Do not try to force it to be a picture of this, that or the other thing. Stand apart from it. Then something will happen. The subject will reveal itself.

By temperament I am not unduly excitable and certainly not trigger-happy. I think twice before I shoot and very often do not shoot at all. By professional standards I do not waste a lot of film; but by the standards of many of my colleagues I probably miss quite a few of my opportunities. Still, the things I am after are not in a hurry as a rule.

But I did not always know just what it was I wanted to photograph. I believe it is important for a photographer to discover this, for unless he finds what it is that excites him, what it is that calls forth at once an emotional response, he is unlikely to achieve his best work.

I am not very interested in extraordinary angles. They can be effective on certain occasions, but I do not feel the necessity for them in my own work. Indeed, I feel the simplest approach can often be most effective. A subject placed squarely in the center of the frame, if attention is not distracted from it by fussy surroundings, has a simple dignity which makes it all the more impressive.

The essential things in life are seen, not with the eyes but with the heart.

Photography was the only thing that mattered in my life and I gave it everything.

Photography has taken me from isolation.

My photography is very European. In America, I always get the sense that people are comforted by understanding what they're looking at. Photography's quite clear here [in the U.S.], it's very well-explained. My photography's perhaps not as well-explained.

I don't think I treat my film work as an extension of my photography. There are two different sets of rules there.

The really simple approach to photography is a great balance to making the films.

Photography can still be used to champion activism and change. I believe this, even while standing in the cool winds of postmodernism... Postmodernism looked radical, but it wasn't. As a movement it was profoundly liberal and became a victim of itself. Precisely at this historical moment, when multicultural democracy is the order of the day, photography can be used as a powerful weapon toward instituting political and cultural change. I for one will continue to work toward this end.

I didnt know photography would take me to the places that it has taken me

You can't teach people photography, they've got to learn how to do it the best way possible for them. They can learn from looking at pictures taken by well-known people, but they don't really get intimate with the medium until they've made a few bad shots!

Photography speaks a universal language that does not need translation, and with an immediacy that the written word lacks. It freezes a moment in time, leaving an indelible image.

Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has ''cast up'' in my time or is like to -- this art by which even the ''poor'' can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn't it be acting favorably on the morality of the country?

[The] arresting of time is photography's unique capacity, and the decision of when to click the shutter is the photographer's chief responsibility.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

Thus, during the winter of 2003 I ventured into a new arena as a professional photographer.

Magazines that depend on photography, and design, and long reads, and quality stuff, are going to do just fine despite the Internet and cable news.

Photography must be integrated with the story.

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.

When painting portraits a lot of people say, 'Why not get a photograph of the person?' Photography is wonderful and it is an art form in itself, but... my portrait is a culmination of elements... a truer image of a person than just the 'click' of a snapshot.

For black folks, the camera provided a means to document a reality that could, if necessary, be packed, stored, moved from place to place... [Photography] offered a way to contain memories, to overcome loss, to keep history.

When we concentrate on photography, we make it possible to see the walls of photographs in black homes as a critical intervention, a disruption of white control over black images.

I went back to photography in the 1990s. But from the 60s to the 90s I didn't really take any photographs at all, unfortunately. During that period I lived in France, I lived in England, I lived all over the place in different cities. I didn't take any photographs and because I felt I had really accomplished everything that I wanted to in photography during the period between 61 and 67.

I am just a middle-class farm boy from Dodge City and my grandparents were wheat farmers. I thought painting, acting, directing and photography were all part of being an artist. I have made my money that way. And I have had some fun. It's not been a bad life.

Photography and painting, all of that fed into my directing eventually.

We look at a painting to know the painter; it's his company we are after, not his skill.

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.

I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one badass flower, captured in time-lapse photography, going from bud to wild radiant blossom in ten seconds flat.

My big hobby is photography. I collect stereo photographs from the 19th century.

You couldn't make a cheap drama. That would be too low-budget. Drama has to have good photography and well-known actors.

The fact that few painter-fine-artists used photography in their work made it appealing.

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.

Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It's just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.

I think that the exactitude of the photograph has a sort of compelling nature based in its power to duplicate life. But to me the real power of photography is based in death: the fact that somehow it can enliven that which is not there in a kind of stultifying frightened way, because it seems to me that part of one's life is made up of a constant confrontation with one's own death.

... the thing that's happening today vis-á-vis computer imaging, vis-á-vis alteration, is that it no longer needs to be based on the real at all. I don't want to get into jargon - let's just say that photography to me no longer pertains to the rhetoric of realism; it pertains more perhaps to the rhetoric of the unreal rather than the real or of course the hyperreal.

Photography has saturated us as spectators from its inception amidst a mingling of laboratorial pursuits and magic acts to its current status as propagator of convention, cultural commodity, and global hobby.

At this sunset hour, the canyon walls are indescribably beautiful and I fear the magic of photography can never record what I see now. The tall spires near the canyon's top and the walls of the canyon up there look as if God had reached out and swiped a brush of golden paint across them, gilding these rocks in the bright glow of the setting sun.

I just love the world of photography.

The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.

I was drawn to photography as an extension of film, and the beauty of film is that it's a sensuous, fetishistic medium.

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.

I love photography, I love food, and I love traveling, and to put those three things together would just be the ultimate dream.

If acting doesn't work out, I plan to do food photography and just eat my way through the entire world. I'm a big foodie, and if I could make some career out of it, that would be fantastic.

Time stands still best in moments that look suspiciously like ordinary life.

The oceans are in trouble. There are some serious problems out there that I believe are not clear to many people. My hope is to continually find new ways of creating images and stories that both celebrate the sea yet also highlight environmental problems. Photography can be a powerful instrument for change.

The majority of America's colossal fortunes have been made by entering industries in their early stages and developing leadership in them.... Think of what opportunities the present and the future contain in such fields as ship-building and ship-owning, aircraft, electrical development, the oil industry, different branches of the automotive industry, foreign trade, international banking, invention, the chemical industry, moving pictures, color photography, and, one night add, labor leadership.

I do photography and I studied film at school. So I've always really enjoyed that and I've got an eye for camera angles I guess. I've never taken that into filming wildlife.

Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.

Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.

I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.

For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.

I don't know what good composition is.... Sometimes for me composition has to do with a certain brightness or a certain coming to restness and other times it has to do with funny mistakes. There's a kind of rightness and wrongness and sometimes I like rightness and sometimes I like wrongness.

Lately I've been struck with how I really love what you can't see in a photograph. An actual physical darkness. And it's very thrilling for me to see darkness again.

It's always seemed to me that photography tends to deal with facts whereas film tends to deal with fiction.

One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.

We stand on a precipice, then before a chasm, and as we wait it becomes higher, wider, deeper, but I am crazy enough to think it doesn't matter which way we leap because when we leap we will have learned to fly. Is that blasphemy or faith?

These are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups. Wouldn't it be lovely? Yes.

It would be beautiful to photograph the winners of everything from Nobel to booby prize, clutching trophy, or money or certificate, solemn or smiling or tear stained or bloody, on the precarious pinnacle of the human landscape.

There are an awful lot of people in the world and it's going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them... It was my teacher Lisette Model who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it will be.

The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.

And the revelation was a little like what saints receive on mountains - a further chapter in the history of the mystery.

What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own.

What moves me about...what's called technique...is that it comes from some mysterious deep place. I mean it can have something to do with the paper and the developer and all that stuff, but it comes mostly from some very deep choices somebody has made that take a long time and keep haunting them.

One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.

If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.

Daylight is too easy. What I want is difficult - the atmosphere of lamps and moonlight.