On Photography Quotes

Photography is my one recreation and I think it should be done well.

While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.

My first reaction at the very idea of this interview was to refuse to talk about photography. Why dissect and comment a process that is essentially a spontaneous reaction to a surprise?

Photography is not difficult - as long as you have something to say.

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

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.

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

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

The French have a different take on photography than Americans do. They consider photography to be absolutely parallel to literature. That often makes for a deeper perception of the work.

I took courses at USC in film editing and art direction and photography when I was still in high school.

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is...the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.

There is still time - in the lee, in the quiet, in the extraordinary light.

It pleases me to take amateur photographs of my garden, and it pleases my garden to make my photographs look professional.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I believe that this whole question of some photography being true and some untrue is a non-question. Photography is not objective; it never was objective.

The point of fashion is that you take the picture you want. And fashion is the only photography that allows fantasy, and I'm a fantasist.

In my photography, color and composition are inseparable. I see in color.

One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.

What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own.

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

All photographers have to do, is find and catch the story-telling moment.

Regarding the creative: never assume you're the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you're masterful.

I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.

I love photography. My boyfriend's got a great camera, which I bought for his birthday.

The practice of photography is no longer a means for recording reality. Instead, it has become reality itself

Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.

The most important thing... is not clicking the shutter... it is clicking with the subject.

I don't like to work with assistants. I'm already one too many; the camera alone would be enough.

Photography is my passion.

The fight for photography became my life.

I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing.

An unnoticed corner of the world suddenly becomes noticed, and when you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it becomes sacred. (On Robert Frank's photography)

It is because of the servility of photography that I am fundamentally contemptuous of this chance invention which will never be an art but which plagiarizes nature by means of optics. (1848)

PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne.

My use of the medium - photography - is in some ways traditional.

The photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what's going on and what's happening outside.

Photography has been a passion of mine since I was 15.

Computer photography won't be photography as we know it. I think photography will always be chemical.

The craft of photography is the key to good images.

The term accessories has come to include a host of photographic gadgets of questionable value.