On Photography Quotes

The camera's only job is to get out of the way of making photographs.

You don't have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today you will do what you did yesterday, and tomorrow you will do what you did today. Eventually you will get somewhere.

A picture should be looked at - not talked about.

There's nothing worse than a brilliant beginning.

One impulse of photography, as immediate as its impulse to extend the visible, is to theatricalize its subjects. The photographer's command, Watch the birdie! is essentially a stage direction.

The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.

You must have a visual sense if you want to be a photographer. It is a very subtle thing, this visual business.

I try to use whatever I know about photography to be of service to the people I'm photographing.

Photography means releasing oneself from one type of gravity and placing oneself in a space where a different force is trying to move you.

I was brought up on art. My father thought I had a great hand at art and sent me to art school. But he did not want me to become a photographer.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Sometimes just the facts of the matter make it interesting.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no special way a photograph should look.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Light is one of the most important factors in photography.

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

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

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.

We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer.

It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.

The work I care about is terribly simple. I observe. I try to entertain. But above all I want my pictures to be emotional. Little else interests me in photography.

I think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued.

The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.

Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, and so many others before me, sexual imagery has always been a part of my photography.

It can happen anytime, anywhere. I mean, you don't have to be in front of stuff that's going to make a good photograph. It's possible anywhere.

I believe that photography can only reproduce the surface of things. The same applies to a portrait. I take photographs of people the same way I would take photographs of a plaster bust.