Photograph Quotes

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

My life and work are not separate. I just have more roles than other people. And I have photographs.

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

A single photograph is a mere fragment of an experience and, simultaneously, the distillation of the entire body of one's experience.

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

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

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

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

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.

You can photograph anything. You can be inside, outside, doesn't matter, you're controlling the light. It gives you great flexibility. That was a primary motivation.

PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne.

Irving Penn said he didn't want to photograph anyone under 60, and I think there is some truth about it.

A photograph is not an accident - it is a concept.

If what I see in my mind excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph.

I don't have lights, I don't have assistants, I just go and meet somebody and take a photograph. That's really basic, and that's how I used to work when I was 17 or 18 in Holland.

The photograph may be presented as finely and artistically as you will; but to merit serious consideration, must be directly connected with the world we live in.

But there are times when thinking is misplaced, like when taking photographs. You cannot think your way to making photographs; you can photograph your way to clearer thinking.

Light is everything in photographs and has to be considered in all situations.

I want to make photographs of very elegant women taking the lipstick off their teeth.

What difference does it make whether you're looking at a photograph or looking at a still life in front of you? You still have to look.

Photographs aren't accounts of scrutiny. The shutter is open for a fraction of a second.

He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.

The photograph gives constant reference to the rectangle. This forces any idea into the confines of pictorial illusionism.

The photograph is married to the eye, Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth.

My goal is to make all my paintings clear and realistic, even more understandable than a photograph.

Photographs are detonators. They explode in us. We are the gaze as well as the gazed-at. The observer and the observed.

I like to be fascinated by the people I photograph. Sometimes I don't admire them but I'm interested in them.

Photographs are the most curious indicators of reality.

The viewer must bring their own view to a photograph.

The photograph that discovers and uncovers the world is harder to simulate than an image that simply illustrates one's ideas about it.

The field of action of a photograph should be that chessboard of the heart and mind upon which poetry and art have always operated

Luckily, many other people tell me how they have had a particular landscape photograph of mine in their office or bedroom for 15 years and it always speaks to them strongly whenever they see it

I think that there isn't a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability... They do not tell stories - they show you what something looks like. To a camera.

I said the photograph isn't what was photographed, it's something else. It's about transformation. And that's what it is.

What you photograph is responsible for how a photograph looks - the form, the design, whatever word you want to use.

Photography teaches us to see, and we can see whatever we wish. When I take a photograph, I make a wish. I was always looking for beauty.

The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.

The sophisticated concern about art sinks before a spontaneous love of reality, and I thank the photograph for being so transparent a vehicle for things.

When we describe a process, or make out an invoice, or photograph a tree, we create models; without them we would know nothing of reality and would be animals.

To make a photograph is already the first artificial act.

For me a photograph is most successful when it doesn't answer all the questions and it leaves something to be desired.

I often think we do not take this business of photography in a sufficiently serious spirit. Issuing a photograph is like marriage: you can only undo the mischief with infinite woe.

You must photograph where you are involved; where you are overwhelmed by what you see before you.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

I have my prized possession in my wallet. That's a photograph of the first words I ever uttered to my wife, and her answer to my question when I asked her, "Will you go out with me?"

[A photograph] is a part of the evidence. I'm not saying it's the truth - it's part of the evidence.

But empirically I've come to understand that my photographs really don't do any harm.

The typical nature photograph shows a butterfly on a pretty flower. The conservation photograph shows the same thing, but with a bulldozer coming at it in the background.

Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.