On Photography Quotes

I think there is a period of esthetic discovery that happens to a man and he can do all sorts of things at white heat.

As a painter, taking photos is a form of shorthand - note-taking.

Photography has become an outstanding and indispensable means of propaganda in the revolutionary struggle.

My friend who I went to boarding school with was interested in photography. He insisted that I buy a camera and marched me downtown.

I was born on a tiny cot in southwestern Massachusetts during World War II. A sickly child, I turned to photography to overcome my loneliness and isolation.

What I've always liked about photography is that it's such a direct way of showing what's on my mind. I see something. I show it to you.

The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.

A picture was a motionless record of motion. An arrested representation of life. A picture was the kiss of death pretending to possess immutability.

I know the best moments can never be captured on film, even as I spend nearly half my life trying to do just that.

I am a professional photographer by trade and an amateur photographer by vocation.

People don't have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography.

Digital photography and Photoshop have made it very easy for people to take pictures. It's a medium that allows a lot of mediocre stuff to get through.

On digital photography: It's fantastic, but it's not a freebie for anything. You still have to have this (he points to his eyes), and this (points to his heart), and feet.

I think this is the most exciting time in the history of photography. Technology is expanding what photographers can do, like the microscope and the telescope expanded what scientists could do.

In the final analysis, photography... is ever a hireling, ever the hired gun.

I admire photographers that don't need a destination. In some ways, street photography is like that. There's a quality of wanderlust for sure in my work, but I need a destination.

How does photography serve to legitimate and normalize existing power relationships? ... How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs?

Photography promises an enhanced mastery of nature, but photography also threatens conflagration and anarchy.

Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.

My father did advertising photography.

Photography is a way of putting distance between myself and the work which sometimes helps me to see more clearly what it is that I have made.

...photography repeats itself unconsciously and unavoidably, producing stereotypes that then are repeated ad infinitum.

All photography is Pop, and all photographers are crazy... they feel guilty since they don't have to do very much - just push a button.

Photographers feel guilty that all they do for a living is press a button.

[Love] can be found in making little dresses for stuffed birds, or in a garden of tenderness like I have done - mixing writing, photography, and real spaces. There are all kinds of acts of love.

I'm pretty used to people not liking having their picture taken. I mean, if you do like to have your picture taken, I worry about you.

A photograph is just a little, teeny-weeny, small piece of life. I feel like I see so much more than what I can actually get.

If there is a good thing about photography, it is that it can be easily enjoyed.

We are not interested in the unusual, but in the usual seen unusually.

If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.

Photographers have already photographed everything too many times, except cheese.

Asked for your opinion on the prints, you have two choices: truth or tact. I ask for the bathroom.

Photography is a weapon against what's wrong out there. It's bearing witness to the truth.

I would say that the off-frame effect in photography results from a singular and definitive cutting-off which figures castration and is figured by the click of the shutter.

Whether it is photography, assemblage art or filmmaking, my work is to see beneath the surface.

I myself happen to find, on the basis of experience and nothing else, that photography can be a high art.

Photography is a very important part of my life.

As an allegorical art, then, photography would represent our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable and stabilizing image.

Learn from the best; the second raters have nothing to offer.

The destination of the photograph is to reveal what something or somebody looked like, under a particular set of conditions, at a particular moment in time, and to transmit the results to others.

Photography and painting, all of that fed into my directing eventually.

And the revelation was a little like what saints receive on mountains - a further chapter in the history of the mystery.

The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.

Photography today appears to be in a state of flight... The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses.

Photography is very presumptuous. Photographers are always photographing other people's lives - something they know nothing about - and drawing great inferences into it.

...photography can lie as convincingly as literature or painting. The angle, the selected content, the assumed context.

Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.

I see my finished platinum print (in the viewfinder) in all its desired qualities, before my exposure.

My emotions, instincts, and interests are all with nature.

You have to devote yourself totally to be successful at it.