On Photography Quotes

I think of my work as very polarizing; either people really do like it and are touched by it or they really don't get it at all. It's not accessible to all people at the same level.

You are lucky if you have one or two epiphanies in your life, particularly a creative one.

Maybe because it's entirely an artist's eye, patience and skill that makes an image and not his tools.

Lifes light. Life is light. You can make light do anything you want to. Photography means 'light writing'.

I suspect it is for one's self-interest that one looks at one's surroundings and one's self. This search is personally born and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs.

One advantage of photography is that it's visual and can transcend language.

Speed, the fundamental condition of the activities of our day is the power of photography, indeed the modern art of today, the art of the split second.

There is something beautiful about photography; it allows the self to be reunited with the world.

In the same spirit, when the automobile arrived, there were those that declared the horse to be the most perfect form of locomotion.

Photography is the product of complete alienation.

Of course [photography] cannot create, nor express all we want to express. But it can be a witness of our passage on earth, like a notebook.

Photography's central role is to be the absolute medium of the day. It is fantastic that there is no longer any technical intimidation.

Photography Cannot Record Abstract Ideas (Title of a 16x20 inch photograph depicting an index card on which that phrase is handwritten.)

When I was younger I used to be really into photography, and I still am, I just don't really get to do it besides taking my own artists photos and stuff like that.

Photography is a powerful medium of persuasion and propaganda. It has that ring of truth when all the time, in artful hands, it can make any statement the manipulator chooses.

Reaching a 'creative' state of mind thru positive action is considered preferable to waiting for 'inspiration'.

Photography is painting with light

Photography started as a means of getting reference material for my paintings of nature subjects.

Photography is a source of raw materials as I believe the camera is never perfect and will never be able to express in full what I see and feel.

Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.

I started thinking of digital imaging, not photography, in 1994 as it seemed the most appropriate way to deal with ideas of biotechnology and advertising. My practice is conceptual.

My introduction to photography and a lot of how I developed aesthetically was through '50s and early-'60s fashion magazines like Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.

Photography today is so accurate and so good that it's really so much easier just to take photographs and work from them.

Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us.

Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth?

The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.

The one thing that is always clear in my mind is that the people, and their stories, and the themes of life that I photograph are always more important to me than the process of photography itself.

[Documentary photography] is unwittingly literary, because it is nothing other than an observation of contemporary life apprehended at the right moment by an artist capable of seizing it. (1928)

Without my photography life would be boring. Photography adds an extra dimension to my life. Somehow it confirms my place in the world

Art does not in fact prove anything. What it does do is record one of those brief times, such as we each have and then each forget, when we are allowed to understand that the Creation is whole.

The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope. This is not to say that he is unconcerned with the truth.

If I like many photographers, and I do, I account for this by noting a quality they share - animation. They may or may not make a living by photography, but they are alive by it.

By stealthily teaching dependence, photography can turn out to be dangerous.

As every artist who has used the method knows - photography's a loyal slave and a tyrannical master.

Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new

You have to follow your instinct all the time. Otherwise you don't make it.

Editorial photography has to be energetic and visually competitive.

My father taught me photography. It was his hobby, and we had a small darkroom in the fruit cellar of our basement. It was the kind of makeshift darkroom that was only dark at night.

I consider myself fortunate that photography exists, because otherwise I'd be stuck in the tragedy of ephemeralness that can come with installation art.

I have tried to bring about better communication between people. I believe that humanitarian photography is like economics. Economy is a kind of sociology, as is documentary photography.

If you paint from 35mm Kodachrome, you end up with a 4x5 foot Kodachrome!

No image, however accomplished, could have captured the agonizing poignancy of that moment. It was a moment to be lived, not framed, analysed or reduced in any way.

Even in ordinary reproduction [photography] verges on facsimile.

The photograph, the clothes, the sets - this was about 1974, and I started hanging out with my friend Richard Sold, who was playing in a band with Patti Smith.

A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

Street photography is art and if art is a crime, please God, forgive me.

I really got into filmmaking through photography.

When photography was invented, it was thought to be an equivalent to truth. It was truth with a capital T.

When I first came to America there still was Look Magazine and LIFE Magazine, and the photography in those magazines was amazing to look at. They had the best portraits, and their news photography.