On Photography Quotes

I would like to see everything, look at everything, I want to be the view itself.

Why should there be only one sort of photography? I want to create images with elements of my choosing, narrative or evocative... I give myself a literary frame, I tell a story.

It's easy to photograph light reflecting from a surface, the truly hard part is capturing the light in the air.

Photography's like this baby that needs to be fed all the time. It's always hungry.

It just struck me that one of the things about photography that made it such a compelling medium to deal with is that it is perhaps the most contradictory of mediums.

Always shoot it now. It won't be the same when you go back.

Art films aren't necessarily photography. It's feeling. If we can capture a feeling of a people, of a way of life, then we made a good picture.

Nothing is more hateful to me than photography coated with gimmicks, poses and false effects. Therefore let me speak the truth in all honesty about our age and the people of our age

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

It might be more useful, if not necessarily more true, to think of photography as a narrow, deep area between the novel and film.

For me, photography is as much about the way I respond to the subject as it is about the subject itself.

I've always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.

If the photographer is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it's already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.

A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.

Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

Photography helps people to see.

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.

Photography is a language more universal than words.

Ease is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you're in trouble.

Don't you think that it is necessary to have a sense of brutality in photography?

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.

The ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired off-hand, but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labor.

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

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

What I like so much about photography is precisely the moment that cannot be anticipated; one must be constantly on the alert, ready to acclaim the unexpected.

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

The trouble with flowers is that invariably, when I'm ready to photograph them, they are not in season.

Favorite People, Favorite Places, Favorite Memories of the past ... These are the joys of a lifetime Those are the things that last

Photography is still a very new medium and everything must be tried and dare.

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

Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts.

For me, photography must be visual, rather than intellectual and ideological.

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

I give the moment permanence.

The video camera dominates art. It's a bore, it makes everything look a bit the same. If you look at things with a pencil and paper in your hand, you are going to see far more.

Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times - the pulse of today.

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.

For me there are no rules. I think I learned that from artists-from painters and sculptors. It took photography a while to catch up to them.

Fall in love. Every day. With everything. With life. If you can fall in love, you can be a photographer. I think that is absolutely essential.

I want the stark beauty that a lens can so exactly render presented without interference of artistic effect.

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

If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up.

I prefer to think of photography as a never ending journey with infinite possibilities. I love to return to places to re photograph. Nothing is ever the same. The options are endless.

The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.

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 knew my destiny when I first experienced Yosemite.

Photography has the capacity to provide images of man and his environment that are both works of art and moments in history.

Rather than a profession, photography has always been a passion for me, a passion closer to an obsession.