On Photography Quotes

Beware of color theories. Theories in color photography are dangerous. The plain fact that there are so many of them proves my point.

Photography is space, light, texture, of course, but the really important element is time - that nanosecond when the image organizes itself on the ground glass.

Don't be creative when you should be mechanical, and don't be mechanical when you should be creative.

Art accepts what it finds.

Photography is a distributive act leading to a privileged condition.

Art and accident are one.

Poetic and speculative photographs can result if one works carefully and accurately, yet letting chance relationships have full play.

The camera points both ways. In expressing the subject you also express yourself.

There are no photographs while I'm reloading .

The only thing that's difficult is reloading when things are happening. Can you get it done fast enough?

I didn't choose photography. Photography chose me.

Whenever the medium of photography is useful for a particular task, I use it. If another medium is more suitable I use that.

It's the subject matter that counts. I'm interested in revealing the subject in a new way to intensify it. A photo is able to capture a moment that people can't always see.

I think nearly every artist continually wants to reach the edge of nothingness - the point where you can’t go any further.

They ... asked me: 'How do you make your pictures?' I was puzzled ... I said, I don't know, it's not important.

The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.

I adore shooting photographs. It's like being a hunter. But some hunters are vegetarians - which is my relationship to photography.

Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They're quick things and there's a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting.

In a still photograph you basically have two variables, where you stand and when you press the shutter. That's all you have.

[The photographer's task] is to describe the existing light... Chances are, if you believe the light, you're going to believe that the things photographed existed in the world.

Some of my best work is done when I'm half asleep.

Photographs deceive time, freezing it on a piece of cardboard where the soul is silent.

In my view, photography and painting really share one history. The influences that work on one, work on the other.

What you're shooting at doesn't matter, the real question is: 'Does it give you joy?'

As people, we love pattern. But interrupted pattern is more interesting.

You need minimum color for maximum effect.

You must not think of yourself as looking at the stage from the audience. You must think of it as theatre in the round and look at it from all sides.

Always wait for the trigger. The trigger is the final part of the puzzle, the reason you want to shoot.

Photography could have been invented in color. Colors existed.

Ideally I would like the work to be a hybrid between painting and photography.

Pictures you have taken have an influence on those that you are going to make. That's life!

Our best pictures happen by grace.

Poetry is my first love. Photography often fails to look into things. It looks at things. Poetry is so much more truthful.

I believe photography is about choosing to live, being brave. Looking is an act of courage. It's terrifying. It's possible to see too much, to witness things that we cannot hold.

With a camera like that you don't believe you're in the masterpiece business. It's enough to be able to peck at the world.

I want pictures like these. The kind that can capture a moment, make it real, make it last. I need pictures that do more than reflect. I need pictures that are truth.

You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. (In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz)

The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.

The knack is to find your own inspiration, and take it on a journey to create work that is personal and revealing.

I think photography is a universal language as far as storytelling goes, and I think that's what it's most successful at.

My photography comes from absolute matter-of-fact situations but also from a deep curiosity that I possess for people, for what they do and how they think.

Photography's about the surface, what's happening at the top of the sea. Literature's about all the stuff below.

In 1967 there was no place for photography in a contemporary art gallery. It was almost impossible to get an art dealer to look at, let alone exhibit, anything photographic.

To extend the depth of what has been called 'art' into photography requires... making available to the spectator the amazing transformations the subject undergoes to become the photograph.

I'm paid to be lucky and that means making your own luck - getting yourself in the right position, in front of the right subject at the right time, and in the right light.

I never liked dance photography; it's very flat, and dance photography in the studio looks very contrived.

Just put on the lens and go.

I like there to be a joke in practically every photo I take. Nobody has the right to make photography boring.

Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it; and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.

Photography is motionless and frozen, it has the cryogenic power to preserve objects through time without decay.