On Photography Quotes

Photography... has lived under the tyranny of its subject matter: the object has exercised an almost total domination.

Before, I'd photograph anything. I didn't think there was anything more or less obscene about any part of the body.

I know the families that I photograph extremely well and have known them for a very long time.

The transactions between me and the people that I photograph are very very collaborative.

It's really, really hard to make it as a fine-art photographer exclusively.

Then I thought, Whoa. If there are no photographs, then there is no history. I'm going to get in there. I'm going to make these pictures. We need a record.

Photography has always been capable of manipulation.

Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.

It's good to be around people who see [photography] as a reasonable enterprise when everyone in the neighborhood may think it's ridiculous. (On the benefit of teaching photography)

Photography has always been a simple medium, compared to painting in oil or chipping at marble.

To me, photography was a completely new medium, and I did not... feel the urge to transfer to it my ideas about painting.

We don't have enough words for photography. Can you imagine writers having only one word for writing?

Photography is the dominant and fascinating and only authentic folk art of the twentieth century.

I make photographs and still make photographs of the natural environment. It's a love because that was part of my life before I was involved in photography.

I find the surface of a photograph a thing of beauty in and of itself, and it is this surface that makes a photograph unique relative to other two-dimensional media.

He was a very generous soul and was exceptionally dedicated to the medium of photography.

We all start in this medium because of the magic and the challenge is to keep it going.

In my mind I needed a symbol of today's technology, and I realized that what I wanted to photograph was the Space Shuttle. And so that's where Places of Power came into being.

In 1979, I received a phone call from Ansel Adams asking me if I would be willing to consider coming to work for him. I was teaching photography in Southern California at that point.

Many photographers are consumed with the idea of making beautiful contact sheets. I am far more interested in making the best final print I can.

The reason I do workshops is so I can learn, and I am fortunate that I've probably gained more from the whole experience of teaching than any one participant has. It is all about asking.

Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is inevitably about photography, the container and vehicle of all its meanings.

Photography was not invented to serve a clearly understood function. There was in fact widespread uncertainty, even among its inventors, as to what it might be good for.

In practice a photographer does not concern himself with philosophical issues while working; he makes photographs, working with subject matter that he thinks will make the pictures.

Most of Tina Modotti's work that is known to the photography world was done in Mexico in the years 1923 through 1926, when she lived and worked with Edward Weston.

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.

I'm a big believer in practical and location photography.

If I am dissatisfied, it's simply because good photos are few and far between. A good photo is a miracle.

What matters most to me is to take photographs; to continue taking them and not to repeat myself. To go further, to go as far as I can.

Sometimes I photograph without looking through the viewfinder. I have mastered that well enough, it is almost as if I were looking through it.

Filmmaking became a possible way for me to combine my interest in photography and in gathering stories, as well as my interest in journalism and political science and international relations.

I love feeling that I am opening new worlds for people who don't have time to investigate these things themselves.

Find the one thing you’re good at and FOCUS on it.

The people I work with, the people I photograph, become a kind of family for me.

I never chased after any particular school, never really had mentors; I really just did the work that was true to me.

I have the same themes over and over again. How I'm saying it keeps changing or growing.

Behind the lens, I found refuge and freedom, distance and connection, an intoxicating way to tame the huge, chaotic world.

I have always felt that I have observed life in a different way to others... Music has always been one creative outlet for me, but now I'm happy to add another one too, that being photography

There's this way that photography is always about going out searching. I'm not the kind of a photographer who can photograph my home.

If they want a photograph, then just take it.

Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it.

Photography by nature is spiritual, considering it comes from the darkness to show the light.

Photography has saved my life, over and over again.

What I love about photography is that nothing is really as it seems.

I wanted to tell stories that moved. Nothing stays the same, and that's why photography is important. The world flickers and changes, and that's why video is important.

Getting anywhere you want is hard work. In this photography culture, everything looks so amazing. But it's actually very hard to get to where anybody gets.

My photography is often a sociological look at American culture and it's been very well published in the UK.

When I first moved from photography to filmmaking, I was worried about how big I had to become. I was one person, or maybe me and an assistant, and I had these small cameras, and maybe a flash.

I take more to the subject than to my ideas about it. I am not interested in any idea I have had, the subject is so demanding and so important.