On Photography Quotes

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

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.

Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure.

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.

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.

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

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

What it all boils down to for me is having the enthusiasm to do something for enjoyment and being stimulated by what's around you. That's what photography does for me.

I think that any photographer is an investigator. Photography is a pretext to know the world, to know life. To know yourself.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

I began drawing as a very young child and had a grandfather who experimented with photography, so those things constituted my first exposure to art.

In this, photography is the same thing as love. When my gaze, diving into the sea as my subject, converges with the act of photography, hot sparks fly at the point of intersection.

In short, [photography] is a matter of turning loneliness into thoughts.

I'm not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic.

We live in a society where we never prepare people to be a community.

The photo is a thing in itself. And that's what still photography is all about.

Nothing proves the truth of surrealism so much as photography. The Zeiss lens has unexpected faculties of surprise!

I think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued.

I really don't have any secrets. I've never met a photographer whose work I respected that had a secret because the secret lies within each and every one of us.

If you keep your cool, you'll get everything.

So-called "realist" photography does not capture the "what is." Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.

Something catches your eye, or your interest. You attack it in some way or observe it in some way, and try to put it in some kind of form and take a picture. It's as simple as that.

I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.

The only way to kill death is through photography.

Be sure to take the lens cap off before photographing.

Don't get me wrong-painting's all right. But now that we have photography, what's the point?

Photography is truth.

Photography has the power to undo your assumptions about the world.

Mapplethorpe presented the body as a sexual object, separating it from the humanity of the person. He added nothing to photography as a medium. I hold his work in low regard.

If I had to start over, I'd pursue photography - probably to the exclusion of acting.

I don’t think there’s any such thing as male objectification

I have to be as much diplomat as a photographer.

A theory is no more like a fact than a photograph is like a person.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

Has one hostage from Lebanon come back with a photograph of his abductors? Has any hostage ever come back with a photograph of his abductors smiling? I mean, this was so incredible!

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.

Photography is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do-while an audience of people you can't see watches you.

I had to go. A spirit in my feet said 'go,' and I went.

In twenty years you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked.

Everyone is a photographer now, remember. That's the great thing about photography.

While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.

The raw materials of photography are light and time and memory.

Sharpness is overrated.

I want to be made better personally. That is the gig.

Your ideas come out of the way you conduct your life.

I don't think science is necessarily incompatible with mystical or spiritual sensibilities. I often weigh them equally in my thinking, which sometimes finds itself into the work.

I wanted [photography] to be more than a document, to be something that is as close as you could possibly be to the subject.

I open events for museums and I do charity work and photography.

I have very interesting hobbies like archeology and photography.