On Photography Quotes
If you are interested in photography because you love it and are obsessed with it, you must be self-motivated, a perfectionist, and relentless.
They kept me in short pants as long as they could, until they were shaving the hair on my legs because it was beginning to photograph.
Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important.
Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.
I don't like captions. I prefer people to look at my pictures and invent their own stories.
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.
Any time you talk about the look of the film, it's not just the director and the director of photography. You have to include the costume designer and the production designer.
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.
What is right? Simply put, it is any assignment in which the photographer has a significant spiritual stake...spiritually driven work constitutes the core of a photographer's contribution to culture.
They were ... pure and unadulterated photographs, and sometimes they hinted at the existence of visual truths that had escaped all other systems of detection.
My true program is summed up in one word: life. I expect to photograph anything suggested by that word which appeals to me.
Photography... is either an expression of a cosmic vision, an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing - to me. (1919)
Pure photography is a system of picture-making that describes more or less faithfully what might be seen through a rectangular frame from a particular vantage point at a given moment.
in the smallest cells are reflections of the largest. And in photography, through an interplay of scales, a whole universe within a universe can be revealed.
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.
In photography one should surely proceed from essence of the object and attempt to represent it with photographic terms alone.
There is indeed something omnivorous about the act of photography. It offers a way of responding to everything about everything.
I'm fond of implied narratives, oblique angles, and leaving a little room for the viewer to finish a picture.
Photography is humbling, it really is, and it really allows for me to atone for some of the missteps I've made throughout the course of my life.
Few speeches which have produced an electrical effect on an audience can bear the colourless photography of a printed record.
To visualize an image (in whole or in part) is to see clearly in the mind prior to exposure, a continuous projection from composing the image through the final print.
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.
Photography, too, reduces the world to strips and rectangles; photographers scrutinize the surfaces of reality in hope of unlocking the potential for significance that is latent within them.
...photography is made essentially of time. I often think that what we show is a point in time, more than a window onto space.
It is a peculiar part of the good photographer's adventure to know where luck is most likely to lie in the stream, to hook it, and to bring it in without unfair play and without too much subduing it.
I think women's bodies are a battleground and photography is partly to blame. Our society is so photographic now, it becomes more difficult to see all of those different varieties of shape.
The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.
The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.
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.
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.
Photography is only a new road from a different direction, but moving toward the common goal, which is life.
I got into photography because of the immediacy of the medium. I used to sit in front of a canvas for weeks trying to create something. Now I can see the image right away.
We must avoid however, snapping away, shooting quickly and without thought, overloading ourselves with unnecessary images that clutter our memory and diminish the clarity of the whole.
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.
What the eye sees is a synthesis of who you are and all you have learned. This is what I would call the language of photography.
Photography works hand in glove with image and memory and therefore possesses their notable epidemic power.