Photograph Quotes

The photograph annihilates the person.

When you photograph a lot of women, you get to know things.

I see myself in [the] tradition of encounter and witness - a witness that sees the photograph as evidence.

For a photographer, it's a necessity that you can shoot stuff magically. Accidents are necessary, but after I take the photograph, it's not over. I work on it more.

There is no special way a photograph should look.

I don't consider [my] photographs fashion photographs. The photographs were for fashion, but at the same time they had an ulterior motive, something more to do with the world in general.

Many claim I am a photographer of tragedy. In the greater sense I am not, for though I often photograph where the tragic emotion is present, the result is almost invariably affirmative.

[The photographs] were there simply to indicate a radical art that had already vanished. The photograph was necessary only as a residue for communication.

What I have tried to do is involve the people I was photographing... if they were willing to give, I was willing to photograph.

I have a terror of things being nice and knowing what to expect. Making a photograph is a license to have experiences that I would not otherwise have.

I like what Wallace Stevens said: "Poetry must almost successfully resist intelligence." I just change the word "poetry" to "my photographs".

My first reaction to finding Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in a book was, Wow, what a great photograph! I could not believe that someone had gone to so much trouble just to end up with a picture.

I tried to keep both arts alive, but the camera won. I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!

One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.

Permanence can only be found in the immortality offered by the click of a camera. Like it or not, life moves on as fleetingly as the photograph is enduring.

This is the gift of the landscape photograph, that the heart finds a place to stand.

I have never been interested in making a photograph that describes what the world I live in looks like, but I am interested in what pictures (of the world) look like.

An eyewitness account is evidence that an artist has proposed a work of art. But documentary evidence (i.e. a photograph) is more conclusive.

A photograph is not an accident - is a concept. It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative.

It must be hard to be a model, because you'd want to be like the photograph of you, and you can't ever look that way.

The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.

Real people move, they bear with them the element of time. It is this fourth dimension of people that I try to capture in a photograph.

A good daguerreotype was as perfect a kind of photograph as was ever made.

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

I don't regret the numerous pictures of Brigitte Bardot, but I'd rather have a good photograph of my father.

I don't go out looking for pictures. I go out, and if something catches my eye, that's reason enough to photograph it.

In a place like Afghanistan where the society is completely segregated, women have access to women. Men cannot always photograph women and cannot get the access that I get.

The photograph is an incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readability.

There is a word we haven't used yet: virginity... To make a photograph, the plate must be virgin, but your eye as well.

When I photograph, I try to use my instincts as much as possible. It is when pictures are unconsidered and irrational that they come to life; that they evolve from showing to being.

I find still photographs make me quite self-conscious.

A theory is no more like a fact than a photograph is like a person.

My photographs recall the memories of the human race.

When students scoff at the idea of a magical relation between a picture and what it represents, ask them to take a photograph of their mother and cut out the eyes.

The photograph is kind of a proof - a proof that I actually met these people, that they actually have lives, and that they're worth considering.

There are wonderful museums with lots of photographs of 1920's musicals.

It seemed clear to me early on that one of the things a photograph could do was make a reality, and I wanted to do that. I always think of looking inside an Easter egg and seeing a perfect world.

Photographs are not ideas. They give us ideas.

Whenever I am tired of making photographs of drawings, I make drawings of photographs.

Has one hostage from Lebanon come back with a photograph of his abductors? Has any hostage ever come back with a photograph of his abductors smiling? I mean, this was so incredible!

If you can take photographs with language, I'm taking one right now.

There's no way a photograph has to look... in a sense. There are no formal rules of design that can apply.

What is it that angers us?... We have been tricked. In essence, we have been lied to. The problem is not that the photograph has been manipulated, but that we have been manipulated by the photograph.

The subject gives you the best idea of how to make a photograph. So I just wait for something to happen.

After a few days [in Iceland] I tried to take a photograph. But with my attempt to distinguish the first shot, the place disappeared on me.... I hadn't been in Iceland long enough to simply be there.

I can photograph someone if I can touch them.

I know most of the photographers in Ireland. And if I don't want my photograph taken, they will leave me alone.

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

I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.

Everyone looks the same to me in a photograph: stupid.