On Photography Quotes

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.

The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter - 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites.

I've been a photographer for my whole life and I've done everything with photography that I felt I could do, and I always wanted to be a filmmaker.

Practice the mechanics of making photographs until it becomes second nature.

That portion of reality that can be composed within a frame can be understood.

Light is one of the most important factors in photography.

Photographs that transcend but do not deny their literal situation appeal to me.

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.

I'm not interested into victim photography. Photographing people suffering and putting it on a museum wall is too weird.

I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.

While we're working, we must be conscious of what we're doing.

To some extent, the cult surrounding black-and-white photography is based on nostalgia.

It's not the photographer who makes the picture, but the person being photographed.

Photography to me is an addiction. I get jittery after a couple of days without a camera. Everyone who knows me says I'm happiest when I'm shooting.

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

You can't make a great musician or a great photographer if the magic isn't there.

There is no special way a photograph should look.

Photography, to me, is the dewdrop that reflects my inner and outer worlds simultaneously.

Photography... unites the obvious and the unconscious at the level of the limimal - the border between what we see and what we suspect.

But, o, photography! as no art is,Faithful and disappointing! That recordsDull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,And will not censor blemishes,Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards

My way of photographing is my way of life. I photograph from my experience, my way of seeing things.

The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.

The over-reliance on photography holds so many artists back.

... a mysterious intersection of chance and attention that goes well beyond the existential surrealism of the 'decisive moment'.

I made a decision that to me, photography had to be something that I could feel. I could feel in my stomach. I could not take pictures that were not connected to my own inner life.

Gesture will survive whatever kind of light you have. Gesture can triumph over anything because of its narrative content.

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.

Sometimes just the facts of the matter make it interesting.

The greatest statesmen, philosophers, humanitarians ... have not been able to put an end to war. Why place that demand on photography?

This is the gift of the landscape photograph, that the heart finds a place to stand.

The picture is like a prayer, an offering, and hopefully an opening through which to seek what we don't know, or already know and should take seriously.

When the truth is spoken, it doesn't need to be adorned. It just needs to be simply stated, and often it only needs to be said once.

For me, pointing and clicking my phone is absolutely fine. People say that isn't the art of photography but I don't agree.

We have - through a hundred years of photography and two decades of film - been enormously enriched... We may say we see the world with entirely different eyes.

For me, art is such a wide concept - anything can be art.

There is no truth in photography. One can't reproduce an absolute truth. That said, I don't see [my photographs] as being any less truthful than any other photographs.

Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.

I don't go out looking for pictures. I go out, and if something catches my eye, that's reason enough to photograph it.

Photography has a natural affinity for the strategies of surrealism - the exaltation of chance and eros, the exploration of obsession and the release of the unconscious.

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.

Photography was seen as the enemy of all the values of late modernism... and as things turned out, it was.

Is photography an art? There is no point in trying to find out if it is an art. Art is old-fashioned. We need something else.

Photography, painting or poetry - those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things; they are my way of communicating.

A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.

I feel shabby - because I've made a name, quite a good name, out of photography. And I still find myself asking the same questions: Who am I? What am I supposed to be? What have I done?

In photography, you always have both the medium and the depicted subject at the same time.

You can give some kind of spark of life to a comic that a photograph doesn't really have. A photograph, even if it's connecting with you, it seems very dead on the page sometimes.

I got five kids, and my oldest is a documentary film maker and camera man, and still photographer.

I tried to keep both arts alive, but the camera won. I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!

Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That's the thing about painting, photography, cinema.