Photography Quotations | Page 8

I thought using three cameras was a lot better than one, because you could see where you were going, where you'd been, and all kinds of things - more like life. I think photography has colored our vision. We're now in an area where it might break something. I think this is a time. I feel it. I don't know whether I'll be here long enough to experience it. I've no plans to leave yet.

I think probably something big can be done with cameras, I'm not saying, er, I'm saying chemical photography's finished, that means you can't have a Cartier Bresson again, you need never believe pictures.

There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don't mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops.

...all along I've had an ambivalent relationship to photography - but as to whether I thought it an art form, or a craft, or a technique, well, I've always been taken with Henry Geldzahler's answer to that question when he said, I thought it was a hobby.

With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That's not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn't it? There will be painting again, absolutely!

A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they'll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won't do a thing for you if you don't have anything in your head or in your heart.

We do not make photographs with our cameras. We make them with our minds, with our hearts, with our ideas.

We don't take pictures with cameras, we take them with our hearts and minds.

Photography is 1% talent and 99% moving furniture.

To be ready is one thing, to be able to wait is another; but to seize the right moment is everything.

Photography has definitely been my favorite way to remember things. At least for me that’s how my brain processes things, of memories or moments.

I'm a photographer, period. I love photography, the immediacy of it. I like the craft, the idea of saying 'I'm a photographer.'

I guess I've shot about 40,000 negatives and of these I have about 800 pictures I like.

To be a photographer, one must photograph. No amount of book learning, no checklist of seminars attended, can substitute for the simple act of making pictures.

Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure. If man wishes to express himself photographically, he must understand, surely to a certain extent, his relationship to life.

Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure.

I realize that we all do express ourselves, but those who express that which is always being done are those whose thinking is almost in every way in accord with everyone else. Expression on this basis has become dull to those who wish to think for themselves.

It's the subject matter that counts. I'm interested in revealing the subject in a new way to intensify it. A photo is able to capture a moment that people can't always see.

In terms of art, the only real answer that I know of is to do it. If you don't do it, you don't know what might happen.

Every time I talked about making a picture I didn't do it. I had already done it - talking about it! I quit talking.

You only do exercises in art school. That's not the real thing. A little bit tells you so much. You have to find your own self. And you don't know what you are! But that's what you have to search for.

I think I came alive when I started photography.

I photograph continuously, often without a good idea or strong feelings. During this time the photos are nearly all poor, but I believe they develop my seeing and help later on in other photos. 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.

A picture is like a prayer; you're offering a prayer to get something, and in a sense it's like a gift of God because you have practically no control-at least I don't.

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.

A picture is like a prayer.

I can't say what makes a picture. I can't say. It's mysterious.

I can tell you for me it goes on forever. There are some things you can't ever find out. You can't find out in one life either.

The mystery isn't in the technique, it's in each of us.

I like the simple things. I don't know why. I'm that way. I came from a simple place.

For me a photograph is most successful when it doesn't answer all the questions and it leaves something to be desired.

Photographs deceive time, freezing it on a piece of cardboard where the soul is silent.

Contrary to the general belief about photography, you don't need bright sunlight: the best moodiest pictures are taken in the dim light of almost dusk, or of rainy days...

A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.

Photographing a cake can be art.

In portrait photography there is something more profound that we seek inside a person, while being painfully aware that a limitation of our medium is that the inside is recordable only insofar as it is apparent on the outside...Very often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.

Working on photography is working on oneself.

Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.

Nudity in photography, whether involving adults or children, is a subject sinking under a freight of political and moral disapproval it could never hope to support, and this is not the place for me to get out the bilge pump. I will only say that critics who tremble so fiercely at the thought of the voyeuristic male gaze miss the point that distance generates mystery and enchantment, and expresses the awe with which the male imagination regards all women.

At the heart of all photography is an urge to express our deepest personal feelings - to reveal our inner, hidden selves, to unlock the artist. Those of us who become photographers are never satisfied with just looking at someone else's expression of something that is dear to us. We must produce our own images, instead of buying postcards and photo books. We seek to make our own statements of individuality.

I began to realize that the camera sees the world differently than the human eye and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.

Memory selects single important images, just as the camera does. In that manner both are able to isolate the highest moments of living.

Often when I walked alone in the mountains, I tried to make sense out of the two halves of my life. What went on in the city during the week seemed chaotic and unrelated to the events in my mountain world.

When the light is right and everything is working for me, I feel as tense as when making a difficult maneuver high on a mountain. A minute - and sometimes mere seconds - can make the difference between a superb image and a mundane one.

My interest in photography did not begin with books or mentors, or with any burning desire to see the world through a camera. It evolved from an intense devotion to mountains and wilderness that eventually shaped all the parts of my life and brought them together.

My first thought is always of light.

The camera creates a magical transformation. It's not enough to exist; we must chronicle that existence. ... Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don't feel any experience is complete unless it's recorded.

Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.

I collect art on a very modest scale. Most of what I have is photography because I just love it and it makes me happy and it looks good in my home. I also have a pretty big collection of art books mainly, again, on photography. A lot of photography monographs, which is great because with photography, the art itself can be reproduced quite well in book form.

If the audience gets everything, if they see the photography and notice that it is good, then the story goes out the window, but if you become involved with the lives of the actors and forget that you are seeing mechanical devices on a huge screen - forget the make-believe - this is the job of the director to involve the audience with the actors.

Emotion or feeling is really the only thing about pictures I find interesting. Beyond that is is just a trick.

At one point cinema and photography weren't treated as art. Now it's crazy to think they're not. The key question is "What is art today?" The most important artists of the last 20 years are Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, because the influence they have had is incredible and they've changed the world. That is art.

I'm not very eloquent about things like this, but I think that writing and photography go together. I don't mean that they are related arts, because they're not. But the person doing it, I think, learns from both things about accuracy of the eye, about observation, and about sympathy toward what is in front of you... It's about honesty, or truth telling, and a way to find it in yourself, how to need it and learn from it.

It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart and head.

One eye of the photographer looks wide open through the viewfinder, the other, the closed looks into his own soul.

Photography is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It's a way of life.

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept

It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.

Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.

You just have to live and life will give you pictures.

Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

I'm not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It's drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff, sniff - being sensitive to coincidence. You can't go looking for it; you can't want it, or you won't get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens.

As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace.

Of course it's all luck.

It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.

He made me suddenly realize that photographs could reach eternity through the moment.

Photography is only intuition, a perpetual interrogation - everything except a stage set.

What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values.

Life is once. Forever.

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.

There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. 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. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing.

...it is seldom indeed that a composition which was poor when the picture was taken can be improved by reshaping it in the dark room.

And no photographs taken with the aid of flash light, either, if only out of respect for the actual light - even when there isn't any of it.

The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera.

A photographer must always work with the greatest respect for his subject and in terms of his own point of view.

Inside movement there is one moment in which the elements are in balance. Photography must seize the importance of this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it.

As far as I am concerned, taking photographs is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from other means of visual expression. It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It is a way of life.

It seems dangerous to be a portrait artist who does commissions for clients because everyone wants to be flattered, so they pose in such a way that there's nothing left of truth.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression... In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotif.

I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us.

Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important.

To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.

Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time.

I suddenly understood that photography can fix eternity in a moment. It is the only photo that influenced me. There is such intensity in this image, such spontaneity, such joie de vivre, such miraculousness, that even today it still bowls me over.

I adore shooting photographs. It's like being a hunter. But some hunters are vegetarians - which is my relationship to photography.

A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.

Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.

In photography, you've got to be quick, quick, quick, quick...Like an animal and a prey.

The Photography is a chopper which in the eternity seizes the moment which dazzled it.

They ... asked me: 'How do you make your pictures?' I was puzzled ... I said, I don't know, it's not important.

The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.

Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument.

There is no closed figure in nature. Every shape participates with another. No one thing is independent of another, and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape.

Pictures should never be posed. They are 'revealed' so must be accepted as they are. Left alone.

Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They're quick things and there's a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting.

Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience.

In photography, the smallest thing can become a big subject, an insignificant human detail can become a leitmotiv. We see and we make seen as a witness to the world around us; the event, in its natural activity, generates an organic rhythm of forms.