Photograph Quotes by Damian Loeb, Emmet Gowin, Ansel Adams, Roland Barthes, Elton John, James Nachtwey and many others.
Ironically, my paintings don’t photograph well.
I want my photographs to say: “Look-there’s this thing you haven’t seen that you should see.”
When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.
A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony.
I’m lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don’t want a Picasso on my wall; it’s great art, but it’s dead art to me. I’d rather have a photograph by someone I’ve never heard of that really inspires me.
If you make an honest picture of war, it will be an antiwar photograph.
What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
I seldom think when I take a picture. My eyes and fingers react – click. But first, it’s most important to decide on the angle at which your photograph is to be taken.
I see things going on before my eyes and I photograph them as they are, without trying to change them. I don’t warn people beforehand. That’s why I’m a chronicler. I speak about us and I speak about myself.
Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.
I want to make photographs whose very ambiguity provokes thought, rather than cuts it off prematurely. I want to make pictures that work on a more mysterious level, that approach the truth by a more circuitous route.
The purpose of photography is the transmission of a visualized sector of life through the medium of the camera into a mental process that starts with the photographer’s thinking about the subject he photographs and is continued in the mind of the spectator.
I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.
I often wondered why I was attracted to certain landscapes and not others and why my photographs (and depictions by other artists) looked the way they did, Archetypes imprinted on my mind started me on a search.
The photographs that excite me are photographs that say something in a new manner; not for the sake of being different but ones that are different because the individual is different and the individual expresses himself.
My biggest fear always is that I’ll photograph an idea rather than a person, so I try to be quite sensitive to how people are.
I admit that I am hopelessly hooked on the printed newspaper. I love turning the pages and the serendipity of stumbling across a piece of irresistible information or a photograph that I wasnt necessarily intending to read.
Initially I borrowed the word “perverse” from Roland Barthes, meaning pleasure-driven and not geared to inform or promote a service or a product. An unproductive photograph designed to keep you in the process of looking is of course something larger than an expression of aberrant sexuality.
The simple fact is this: There are no neutral photographs.
I’m not a great one for chatting people up, because it’s phony. I don’t want people to feel at ease. You want a bit of edge. There are quite long, agonized silences. I love it. Something strange might happen. I mean, taking photographs is a very nasty thing to do. It’s very cruel.
The changes taking place in this part of Europe are enormous and very rapid. One world is disappearing. I am trying to photograph what’s left. I have always been drawn to what is ending, what will soon no longer exist.
There’s something essentially fictive about a photograph. That doesn’t mean that if you understand that, and you understand how the world is transformed by the camera, that you can’t use the limitations or the transformation to have an observation that is a very subtle perception of the world.
Well, it was kind of an accident, because plastic is not what I meant to invent. I had just sold photograph paper to Eastman Kodak for 1 million dollars.
So Thomas Pynchon wants a private life and no photographs and nobody to know his home address. I can dig it, I can relate to that (but, like, he should try it when it’s compulsory instead of a free-choice option).
You cannot explain the whole world in one photograph. Photography pretends. You can see everything that’s in front of the camera, but there’s always something beside it.
My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.
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.
No one will understand a Japanese garden until you’ve walked through one, and you hear the crunch underfoot, and you smell it, and you experience it over time. Now there’s no photograph or any movie that can give you that experience.
Noise does not disturb me, as I think that it gives a quaint atmosphere to a picture that fully matches my vision of nature and the wild species I like to photograph.
I don’t have anything against colour. It is just not my first preference. I have always found black and white photographs to be quieter and more mysterious than those made in colour.
This stupid celebrity thing is just a consequence of being good at what you do. I mean, no one would photograph David Beckham if he wasn’t the best attacking midfielder in the country – much as I hate Man. U!
Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate. Most of the photographs in your paper, unless they are hard news, are lies. Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality… Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.
The aeroplane should open a fruitful occupation for women. I see no reason they cannot realize handsome incomes by carrying passengers between adjacent towns, from parcel delivery, taking photographs or conducting schools of flying.
…throughout the history of art it has been art itself – in all its forms – that has inspired art…today’s photographs are so geared to life that one can learn more from them than from life itself.
A lot of the people that I photograph are master musicians themselves, whether they’re singers or great jazz players and it’s kind of fun to figure out who they came up with and who they emulated or who they idolized actually.
During prom season, I travel around the country with a 20-by-24 camera – which is logistically complicated – and photograph proms. My husband made a film of it.
The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!
I went through a long period when I thought my photographs were not visible – on the wall, but not visible.
I prefer a taken to a made photograph.
Composition in photography is almost as varied as composition in music or words — melodic or atonal, safe or daring — and can enhance subject, theme, and style. Every photograph you take involves you in some compositional decision, even if this is simply where to set up the camera or when to press the button.
Film can express things that computers never will. Film is a series of photographs separated by split seconds of darkness. Film is light and shadow.
One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.
Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
You all looked so happy together in the photograph. You looked like the perfect family. Is there such a thing anymore because if there is, my happy little unit was definitely not in the queue when they were handing out the titles.
I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.
To me a photograph is a page from life, and that being the case, it must be real.
Because we see reality in different ways, we must understand that we are looking at different truths rather than the truth and that, therefore, all photographs lie in one way or another.
The camera can photograph thought. It’s better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.
All my photographs are about meetings and about coups de foudre – love at first sight. To do that type of photography, one must wipe the canvas clean to prepare for chance encounters, be open and aware to such moments, otherwise it becomes a clichГ© – already seen and expected.
A skillful photographer can photograph anything well.
Sometimes we work so fast that we don’t really understand what’s going on in front of the camera. We just kind of sense that, ‘Oh my God, it’s significant!’ and photograph impulsively while trying to get the exposure right. Exposure occupies my mind while intuition frames the images.
I know these will become old stories someday and our pictures will become old photographs and we’ll all become somebody’s Mom or Dad, but right now, these moments are not stories. This is happening and I’m here.
No one can really explain in a rational way what makes a good photograph or a bad photograph… This is why the art world will not throw billions of dollars at photography the way it has at painting; and that is what makes it an exciting medium.
Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.
Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.
I approached photography the only way that I knew how to approach anything: as a job. I would get up, photograph all morning, stop and have lunch, and then, photograph all afternoon. I didn’t think that I had to wait for some inspiration.
The person who looks at a photograph as a complete picture, unable to say anything about anything except the facts which existed at the moment of exposure, does not see very far.
The Queen is frequently on her own, walking the dogs, riding her horses, playing patience, completing a jigsaw, sorting her photograph albums, watching television, phoning friends, doing the Telegraph crossword. Is she neglected? Is she suffering? Or does she simply understand her man?
It’s quite an experience to have filming done in your house. When they come in, they photograph every piece of furniture and where it is so they can get them back exactly where you had them. You’d never know they’d been here.
There is no such thing as a good paparazzo. A good paparazzo, that’s a paparazzo who has had his camera broken. In fact, they are bandits, thieves of photography. (Statement after photographs were published showing Jackie Onassis sunbathing nude.)
If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.
I want my photographs not only to be real but to portray the essence of my subjects also. In order to do that, you have to be patient.
I like to think I keep my mind open. When I walk the streets I don’t look for anything in particular. I come from a philosophy that believes you shouldn’t have preconceived notions – that you don’t need a gimmick. That you should just photograph what you react to – what you see.
I don’t pretend to make my photographs speak the truth of what Mexico is all about. But in its villages I can feel the way culture is changing, and it’s fascinating to live through it and try to capture it on camera.
I try to photograph people’s spirits and thoughts. As to the soul-taking by the photographer, I don’t feel I take away, but rather that the sitter and I give to each other. It becomes an act of mutual participation.
Taking photographs and writing is my way of saying I was here, I saw this, I felt this, I heard this.
I remember seeing a photograph of myself en pointe with my hand over my head and the other hand turned in under my breast curtseying. I took dance lessons at Miss Debbie’s Dance Studio, and she put this picture of me in the storefront window. I was so unbelievably humiliated by the sight of myself.
Natural talent means to have the ability to transform, to evolve, to play and role-play with the photographer and the stylist. And really be an actress rather than just a mannequin. So that involves a tremendous amount of confidence and your ability to expose yourself to anything that will make a better photograph.
The urge to create, the urge to photograph, comes in part from the deep desire to live with more integrity, to live more in peace with the world, and possibly to help others to do the same.
In my life, I don’t wear makeup, I don’t care about any of the trappings of the “feminine,” or how I look in photographs. To me, it’s irrelevant, which I think is really shocking to people in the industry that I’m in, because it’s like, “You should always look good”, but I honestly don’t care. It’s not important to me.
A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.
If there is pain in my photographs, it relates to the pain in my own existence.
The magic possibility of framing a certain space and time is what brought me to photography. This process of recording elements of 3 dimensions in the flow of time, and fixing them in a 2 dimensional image, creates a new context for the elements of the photograph.
I have asked students at the beginning of their careers, what things of that sort might haunt them – what things they must photograph, things they have to try to shoot even before they master the intricacies of making dye transfer prints.
My photographs are a picture of the chaos in the world, and of my relationship to that chaos. My prints show the world’s constant upsetting of man’s equilibrium, and his eternal battle to reestablish it.
A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so.
I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.
The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart – so I’m about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.
I remembered seeing it and it was this metallic turbine and I thought it was beautiful. I had never been in a power plant before, but I felt, without being overly dramatic, compelled to make photographs of this for myself.
All of our media is made of language: our films, our music, our images, and of course our words. How different this is from analog production, where, if you were somehow able to peel back the emulsion from, say, a photograph, you wouldn’t find a speck of language lurking below the surface.
I don’t use photographs because photographs don’t give me the kind of information I need.
I don’t photograph for other people. I love an audience, mind you. Once I’ve got them there, then I love an audience. Not a big audience, though. I’d rather please ten people I respect than ten million I don’t. But I don’t play to an audience, I do it for myself.
I was never in a school situation where someone said, This is the way a photograph is supposed to look. I was completely open to cut them up, or do anything like that. I think if I had been in touch with people earlier, then I wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing that. It would have been too bizarre.
I have a photograph of myself when I was 2 years of age, and I don’t recognize the person in the photograph. She doesn’t look anything like me, and I can’t find any trace of her in me physically. And yet I remember her very, very well – even her anxiety.
During the work, you have to be sure that you haven’t left any holes, that you’ve captured everything, because afterwards it will be too late.
I used to take photographs just to remember people.
I think we get into all kinds of difficulty by saying photographs should be taken in a certain way which guarantees their veracity. I think that’s a slippery slope to hell.
Americans are always mortified when I tell them this, but in England, it’s a tradition to put your plaques and photographs and awards and gold records and stuff in your bathroom. I don’t know why.
I don’t photograph life as it is, but life as I would like it to be.
Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.
In the late nineties, Katy Grannan began making haunting photographs of people who had extraordinary inner yens to be seen by strangers.
The formal artistic gesture is already expressed in the act of taking the photograph.
Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left – or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story The Adventure of a Photographer )
I am fascinated by how images and motifs move between and adjust to different cultures. I’m a Norwegian living in Los Angeles showing a photograph inspired by Japanese image culture in an American beach town named after a sinking city in Italy.
I really wanted to die at certain periods in my life.
Death was like love, a romantic escape.
I took pills because I didn’t want to throw myself off my balcony
and know people would photograph me lying dead below
Death was like love, a romantic escape.
I took pills because I didn’t want to throw myself off my balcony
and know people would photograph me lying dead below
To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.
If you were to ask me to define a photograph in a few words, I would say it is a fossil of light and time.
Becoming a mother hasn’t necessarily changed how I shoot, but it certainly has made me more sensitive, and it certainly makes it much harder for me to photograph dying children.
Photographs are believed more than words; thus they can be used persuasively to show people who have never taken the trouble to look what is there.
It isn’t an easy job to paint oneself – at any rate if it is to be different from a photograph. And you see – this, in my opinion, is the advantage that impressionism possesses over all the other things; it is not banal, and one seeks after a deeper resemblance than the photograph.
One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.
Photographs deceive time, freezing it on a piece of cardboard where the soul is silent.
My first priority when taking pictures is to achieve clarity. A good documentary photograph transmits the information of the situation with the utmost fidelity; achieving it means understanding the nuances of lighting and composition, and also remembering to keep the lenses clean and the cameras steady.
… a fact about photography: we can look at people’s faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states – for a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
I never saw a pyramid, but I’ve seen photographs; I know what a pyramid or a sphinx looks like. There are pictures that do that, but they satisfy a different kind of interest.
To enter Europe, you must have a valid passport with a photograph of yourself in which you look like you are being booked on charges of soliciting sheep.
There are things that I teach, about building photographs, and that’s why people come to my workshops. When people come to the workshops, they’re consumed with seeking the subject, and I teach seeking the setting.
When you photograph a lot of women, you get to know things.
A technically perfect photograph can be the world’s most boring picture.
Photographers – idiots, of which there are so many – say, “Oh, if only I had a Nikon or a Leica, I could make great photographs.” That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life. It’s nothing but a matter of seeing, and thinking, and interest.
I was working with mud and photographs and thread, eyelashes, carrots and acetone… I was throwing radios off buildings and… remember floating styrofoam commas down the Milwaukee River.
Old photograph: amid the set poses of her family, a young girl smiles and raises her hand a little.
The photograph as an objective representation of reality simply does not exist. The photograph does not explain to you what is going on to the left or to the right or above or below the frame. Oftentimes, it doesn’t even explain to you what is going on inside the frame.
[A photograph] should do something to the beholder; either give a more complete appreciation of beauty, or, if nothing else, even a good mental kick in the pants.
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.
Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. ‘The necessary condition for an image is sight,’Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: ‘We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.
The camera’s only job is to get out of the way of making photographs.
As much as I’m not a journalist, I use journalism. And when you photograph a relationship, it’s quite wonderful to let something unfold in front of you.
There have to be at least two copies of a photograph, otherwise it’s not a photograph.
Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.
Photographs help people look at things they may not be able or may not want to look at. Until you can look at something, you can’t change it. First you have to look at it, then you have a chance to understand it and can change it.
A photograph has edges the world does not.
Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings.
Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other peoples pictures too – photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community.
At the end of the day, it’s only a photograph and if someone is going to get really upset about a photograph, then they have a lot of issues. I just roll with it and see what happens.
My work has no theme. I don’t care if my photographs get published, and I have no interest in the news. But the invasion of Prague was not news, it was my life.
The one thing that is always clear in my mind is that the people, and their stories, and the themes of life that I photograph are always more important to me than the process of photography itself.
The fundamental belief in the authenticity of photographs explains why photographs of people no longer living and of vanished architecture are so melancholy.
… to became neighbours and friends instead of journalists. This is the way to make your finest photographs.
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.
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.
You think you photograph a particular scene for the pleasure it gives. In fact it’s the scene that wants to be photographed. You’re merely an extra in the production.
It would be beautiful to photograph the winners of everything from Nobel to booby prize, clutching trophy, or money or certificate, solemn or smiling or tear stained or bloody, on the precarious pinnacle of the human landscape.
Before the ’80s, no girl would ask to click a photograph. That was modest and demure.
Something happens between a novel and its reader which is similar to the process of developing photographs, the way they did it before the digital age. The photograph, as it was printed in the darkroom, became visible bit by bit. As you read your way through a novel, the same chemical process takes place.
I don’t photograph anyone if I can’t meet with them first because if I don’t do that, then they’re just going to the dentist and they’re filled with fear. They don’t know who I am.
Photographs are two-dimensional. I work in four dimensions.
To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.
There’s a discipline. When you take someone’s portrait, you don’t have to take 50 photographs, just find that one so that when you release the shutter, that’s the image that you took.
Obviously, we can see what was in front of the camera, but if a photograph is honestly made, it’s a bit of a self-portrait. I think it’s impossible for a photographer who is working honestly to keep this from happening.
I believe that photography can only reproduce the surface of things. The same applies to a portrait. I take photographs of people the same way I would take photographs of a plaster bust.
Photograph the world as it is. Nothing’s more interesting than reality.
A good photograph will prove to the viewer how little our eyes permit us to see
The field of action of a photograph should be that chessboard of the heart and mind upon which poetry and art have always operated
The reason I do photographs is to help people understand my music, so it’s very important that I am the same, emotionally, in the photographs as in the music. Most people’s eyes are much better developed than their ears. If they see a certain emotion in the photograph, then they’ll understand the music.
To be a photographer, one must photograph. No amount of book learning, no checklist of seminars attended, can substitute for the simple act of making pictures.
Like an old photograph, time can make a feeling fade, but the memory of a first love never fades away.
Photographing these flowers has made me see the world differently. It was as if I had lifted a secret veil from a subject I had loved and appreciated my whole life. I offer these photographs with the hope that they will open a new visual or meditative universe for you as well.
You can’t photograph everything.
Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, we shall, in an emotional sense, acquire an additional dimension.
The photograph itself doesn’t interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.
If you open up a magazine and there’s a photograph of you with a giant red circle around your thigh, like, look at this cellulite, any person – I don’t care what you do – would be mortified. It’s no wonder people get crazy about it.
The artist’s task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual reality. (On photographs by Helen Levitt)
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 enjoy places that have mystery and atmosphere, perhaps a patina of age, a suggestion rather than a description, a question or two. I look for memories, traces, evidence of the human interaction with the landscape. Sometimes I photograph pure nature, sometimes urban structures.
For me, documentary photography has always come with great responsibility. Not just to tell the story honestly and with empathy, but also to make sure the right people hear it. When you photograph somebody who is in pain or discomfort, they trust you to make sure the images will act as their advocate.
Richard Prince’s most famous photograph was made by me.
I don’t look at other photographs much at all. I don’t know why. I study my own a lot.
I think, actually, that it’s a really fascinating time in history because the development of modern technology and the photographs the satellites were taking from space were mapping the earth in a new way, making us feel like the globe we inhabit is much smaller than previously conceived of, in the human mind.
[A photograph] is a part of the evidence. I’m not saying it’s the truth – it’s part of the evidence.
I photograph Nature, which includes human beings.
I’d never seen Rigondeaux’s face without it being obscured by headgear or a photograph of Fidel he was holding up after winning a tournament. Finally I saw him, only to recognize the saddest face I’d ever seen in Cuba.
Thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards – never while actually taking a photograph.
When people call me a photographer, I always feel like something of a charlatan—at least in Japanese. The word shashin, for photograph, combines the characters sha, meaning to reflect or copy, and shin, meaning truth, hence the photographer seems to entertain grand delusions of portraying truth.
Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow.
During the mission, Walter Jones, a team member was given a package containing bone fragments by a Lao. The source said they were from a crash site. He presented photographs showing himself in company with others digging around obvious aircraft debris.
A photograph permits a first viewing, and then an individual reflection. It solicits participation, and encourages individuality in interpretation. Television is an autarchy, a dictatorship.
Don’t become a random photograph in the eyes of friends, and even your enemies, for each glance at your face will cause a declination of value and reputation. Create value, through scarcity.
When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order (unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder).
While we cannot describe its appearance (the equivalent), we can define its function. When a photograph functions as an Equivalent we can say that at that moment, and for that person the photograph acts as a symbol or plays the role of a metaphor for something that is beyond the subject photographed.
If I didn’t have to earn a living somehow, I would never have taken a fashion photograph in my life.
What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.
A photograph is a moment when you press the button. It will never come back.
A great photograph needs no explanation; it functions by suggestion. There is no need to be explicit.
A lot of people who look at my photographs think it is an easy joke, but it does take a bit of thinking about.
I find it strangely beautiful that the camera with its inherent clarity of object and detail can produce images that in spite of themselves offer possibilities to be more than they are a photograph of nothing very important at all, nothing but an intuition, a response, a twitch from the photographer’s experience.
I find still photographs make me quite self-conscious.
… photographs are so loaded with information. They’re remarkable. As I said, you get both the tree and the forest.
The camera itself, the photograph itself, calls up death.
I never thought that my work was going to become well-known. It started happening slowly, without my realizing it. But when I did, it was terrifying. I still can’t believe that people let me photograph them. The trust is amazing. But I’ve always put them in a context that is dignified, and that’s really important.
While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.
Exposure to the reproductions [of Corbis-owned fine art photographs] is likely to increase rather than diminish reverence for the real art and encourage more people to get out to museums and galleries.
I don’t have anything to say in any picture. But you do, from your experience, surmise something. You do give a photograph symbolic content, narrative content… But it’s nothing to worry about!
To photograph is to confer importance.
A photograph is a photograph. When I am making a picture I am just interested in making a very interesting photograph. I don’t care where it’s going to go.
Still photographs often differ from life more by their silence than by the immobility of their subjects. Landscape pictures tend to converge with life, however, on summer nights, when the sounds outside, after we call in children and close garage doors, are small – the whir of moths, the snap of a stick.
I would warn very sincerely against the pitfalls of copying photographs. A frozen, split-second bears little relationship to the continuing process of living reality. It is better to look, look again, and keep on looking.
I have always tried to keep truth in my photographs. My work, whether realistic or abstract, has always dealt with a form of religion or imagination.
Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.
They were … pure and unadulterated photographs, and sometimes they hinted at the existence of visual truths that had escaped all other systems of detection.
Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.
I like taking photographs, because I like life. And I like photographing people best of all, because most of all I love humanity.
Photographs also show the way that the camera sees. It’s not just me or you or anybody else. The camera does something that is different from our own setting.
I don’t know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs.
You get a lot of people requesting photographs but I tend to keep myself to myself, pull my cap down.
Landscapes, heads and naked women are called artistic photography, while photographs of current events are called press photography.
The thing that makes writing so difficult is you don’t have the element of serendipity. At least with a photograph, you can set up the camera, and something might happen. You might be a lousy photographer, but you can get a good picture if you just take enough of them.
I always take photographs when I attend a funeral. Most people there know who I am and expect me to be there with my camera.
When I looked at things for what they are I was fool enough to persist in my folly and found that each photograph was a mirror of my Self.
Photographs need to demand the viewer’s attention, often implicitly, posing questions as to the nature of what is being depicted. Photographs are not there to show us the world, but to show us a version of what may be happening.
Photorealism’s goal is to reproduce a photograph. The best photorealism can’t beat a printer, and I have a really nice printer.
Northern Ireland is part of Ireland, not Britain, as can clearly be seen from aerial photographs.
There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. I photograph to see what something will look like photographed.
I’ve never liked the word ‘celebrity.’ I like to photograph people who are good at what they do.
A good photograph is one that can’t be repeated.
I had already done a lot of research for Rough Riders, keeping notebooks and old photographs. Some of the books were antiques for that time period, with the covers falling off.
I try and photograph people as they are. I do not want to hide anything. I want to bring across a personality, a humanity. It is not a case of model A or model B against a white background. I am interested in the person.
We know that photographs inform people. We also know that photographs move people. The photograph that does both is the one we want to see and make.
A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.
It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.
I can’t be anonymous by reason of your confounded photographs. (To Julia Margaret Cameron)
For me, every photograph is a portrait; the clothes are just a vehicle for what I want to say. You’re photographing a relationship with the person you’re shooting; there’s an exchange, and that’s what that picture is.
Now in the 1980s, I happened to notice that if you look at an aerial photograph of an African village, you see fractals. And I thought, ‘This is fabulous! I wonder why?’ And of course I had to go to Africa and ask folks why.
Photography is only intuition, a perpetual interrogation – everything except a stage set.
She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.
The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.
With a photograph, you are left with the same modes of interpretation as you are with a book. You ask: ‘What do we know about the author and their background? What do I know about the subject?’
The photograph is a coarse fraud, and seems to delight only in taking the whole beauty out of the picture.
Photographs should celebrate the contingent, the spontaneous, the incomplete, the fortuitous. Direct, unblinking vision should be coupled with deliberate indifference as to subject. The ironic goal is a scrupulous recording of whatever chance brings to hand.
That [photographs] disturb readers is exactly as it should be: that’s why photojournalism is often more powerful than written journalism.
I think you can photograph a certain sliver of human presence in its absence… images taken in the empty rooms, the marks left on the walls, disappearing shadows, etc.
You know, you get into the business of commercial photography, and that’s all you do is photograph what you know. That’s what you’re hired for.
Black and white is abstract; color is not. Looking at a black and white photograph, you are already looking at a strange world.
Swedes are a really humble and shy people in many ways, but I think it’s pretty much the same as in the U.S. Little girls want to take photographs with me at lunch.
Never stop looking, no matter where you are, everywhere there are good photographs
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
If I want to make people moved or cry in a film, I figure out what the room looks like, what the people are wearing, what time of day it is, what the light is, how to photograph it, where to put the camera. It involves optics and costume design and set design and architecture.
To me, photographs are like words and I generally will place many photographs together or print them one inside the other in order to construct a free-floating sentence that speaks about the world I witness.
There are numerous daytime and night time photographs and videotapes of clearly non-human spacecraft from all over the world; these films and videotapes have been evaluated and deemed authentic by competent experts in optical physics and related fields.
The camera photographs what’s there.
Some guys can run fast, some guys can sing, I found I could take photographs that people were interested in.
Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.
There is a big difference between The Merchant of Venice and a photograph of two males of different races in an erotic pose on a marble table top.
If you think you’re going to create an unposed photograph, think again. There is no such thing.
The transactions between me and the people that I photograph are very, very collaborative.
Photography is the most transparent of the art mediums devised or discovered by man. It is probably for this reason that it proves so difficult to make the photograph transcend its almost inevitable function as document and act as a work of art as well.
What matters is not what you photograph, but why and how you photograph it. Even the most controversial subject, if depicted by a sensitive photographer with honesty, sympathy, and understanding, can be transformed into an emotionally rewarding experience.
Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality. My purpose in taking photographs over the past forty years has ultimately been about defining myself. It has been fundamentally a psychological and existential journey.
I started shooting for ‘Photograph’ right after ‘Dangal’ so, it’s really special for me.
My dream concept is that I have a camera and I am trying to photograph what is essentially invisible. And every once in a while I get a glimpse of her and I grab that picture.
One of my challenges was to try to photograph the Great Wall of China. And I did actually take some photos, but it was hard to discern the wall with the naked eye.
I had a nice, pert nose but a plain round face and a mop of curly brown hair. That was not the photograph of a successful model.
[He] didn’t like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.
The viewer is yet another eye that is part of the compact that makes a photograph what it is.
Arrange photographs of nature scenes, animals and expressions of joy and love in your environment and let their energy radiate into your heart and provide you with their higher frequency.
The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.
Portraits are the most intimate photographs. The image will survive the subject.
Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumes as such, publicly.
I enjoy nothing more than spending time with my loved ones, young and old, and at least once a year we get together for a formal family photograph.
The locomotives are black. The coal is black. The tracks are black. The night is black. So what am I going to do with color?
There are three things to leave behind; your photographs, your library, and your personal journals. These things are certainly going to be more valuable to future generations than your furniture!
A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they’ll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won’t do a thing for you if you don’t have anything in your head or in your heart.
We feel more emotion… before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history.
I don’t like my work. I didn’t like my work in ‘Dangal,’ and then in ‘Photograph,’ I was cribbing.
Many pictures turn out to be limp translations of the known world instead of vital objects which create an intrinsic world of their own. There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.
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.
People in motion are wonderful to photograph. It means catching the right moment… when one thing changes into something else.
To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that cold be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame.
‘Changes in Latitudes’ began when I was looking at a photograph of a sea turtle swimming underwater. I had such a strong feeling for the beauty of this ancient creature, at home in the sea. On the spot, I wanted to swim with that turtle. I began to imagine a character who would do just that.
I have been exploring [Mexico City’s] La Merced, [a public market famous for prostitution,] on and off for the last 23 years. The prostitutes and their world have been the main subjects of my photographs.
I did like Robert Vavra’s book not only for its so very good photographs but for the text as well. He’s no ordinary fellow, obviously.
I’m very interested in making the photographs look real, but a lot of them are highly synthetic. They’re hybrids, located somewhere between the found and the constructed.
I feel it is the heart, not the eye, that should determine the content of the photograph. What the eye sees is its own. What the heart can perceive is a very different matter.
I like to be fascinated by the people I photograph. Sometimes I don’t admire them but I’m interested in them.
Photographs are never records of the way things are; they’re records of the way things were.
My goal is to make all my paintings clear and realistic, even more understandable than a photograph.
Never boss people around. It’s more important to click with people than to click the shutter.
A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.
The photograph of my brother that is in this album shows a young man, beautiful and perfect in the way of young people, for young people are always perfect and beautiful until they are not, until the moment they just are not.
The only thing I have done religiously in my life is keep a journal. I have hundreds of them, filled with feathers, flowers, photographs, and words – without locks, open on my shelves.
I never knew [Alfred Stieglitz] to make a trip anywhere to photograph. His eye was in him, and he used it on anything that was nearby. Maybe that way he was always photographing himself.
I don’t care how you photograph – use the kitchen mop if you must, but if the product is not true to the laws of photography… you have produced something that is dead. (1923)
I photograph only something that has to do with me, and I never did anything that I did not want to do. I do not do editorial and I never do advertising. No, my freedom is something I do not give away easily.
It’s very difficult to photograph an opera. And they messed up on it. It just wasn’t there. And I don’t blame the Gershwins for taking it away. Of course, if they had gotten the original company to have done it, it would have been very good.
Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don’t get a photograph that I want to work from.
The photograph as an object has a relationship to that which it represents something like the relationship the snake skin has to the snake that sheds it.
What would please me most is to make photographs as incomprehensible as life.
There are things I photograph because I’m interested in those things.
Every photograph is a fiction with pretensions to truth. Despite everything that we have been inculcated, all that we believe, photography always lies; it lies instinctively, lies because its nature does not allow it to do anything else.
The collection of photographs is a statement about the relationship of my camera and me.
Nature is a mirror in which I am reflected, because by rescuing this land from sad devastation [through recreating it in photographs], I am in fact trying to save myself from my own inner sadness.
Time it was And what a time it was, it was A time of innocence A time of confidences Long ago it must be I have a photograph Preserve your memories They’re all that’s left you
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.
It is, alas, chiefly the evil emotions that are able to leave their photographs on surrounding scenes and objects and whoever heard of a place haunted by a noble deed, or of beautiful and lovely ghosts revisiting the glimpses of the moon?
The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best.
… anybody who has spent time with cameras and photographs knows that images, like gravestone rubbings, are no more than impressions of the truth.
Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.
There is a great difference between shooting a photograph and making a photograph.
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he’s wearing or how he looks.
When you see a photograph of a football crowd at a Saturday afternoon game in August 1963, you’ve got 40,000 men in trilbies. That’s paradise, man.
Good photographs aren’t just complex. They are enigmatic. Images are beguiling. And the way they play into our psychology, into our visual cortex, is something we still don’t understand.
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.
Men die, heroically or fruitlessly, but man carries on. In Israel it is the same: the farmer must till the fields, the young must make love, and the photographer must, I suppose, be ready to photograph it all.
Photographs open doors into the past, but they also alloq a look into the future
The familiar photographs that many people carry with them always obviously belong to the order of fetishes in the ordinary sense of the word.
I don’t even know what an ‘It’ girl is. As far as I’m concerned, an ‘It’ girl is somebody who doesn’t do anything except go to parties and get her photograph taken.
I began to realize that the camera sees the world differently than the human eye and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.
There is something about the way I photograph. People often say, ‘Are you cross with me?’ My eyes can look sort of… like a wall.
The photograph is always more interesting than what the photograph is of.
If you are out there shooting, things will happen for you. If you’re not out there, you’ll only hear about it.
I’ve met a lot of artists who wanted to paint me. LeRoy Neiman was one. He did it from a photograph. He made 20,000 copies, and we sold them all.
Everything I choose to photograph, I think is beautiful.
Black and white means photography to me. It’s much easier to take a good color photograph, but you can get more drama into a black and white one.
A photograph is analogous to a plaster cast taken from life, which is always inferior to a good statue.
I was not a Southern California girl. I hated having my photograph taken. I felt shy and embarrassed around famous people.
A single photograph is a mere fragment of an experience and, simultaneously, the distillation of the entire body of one’s experience.
I don’t believe so much in the value of a single picture anymore. I don’t really photograph for the wall.
I once saw a photograph of a large herd of wild elephants in Central Africa Seeing an airplane for the first time, and all in a state of wild collective terror… As, however, there were no journalists among them, the terror died down when the airplane was out of sight.
Photography is like making cheese. It takes a hell of a lot of milk to make a small amount of cheese just like it takes a hell of a lot of photos to get a good one.
With every (informative) photograph, the photographic program becomes poorer by one possibility while the photographic universe becomes richer by one realization.
I choose colors I like and will photograph well. I don’t do color theory!
A photograph must come from imagination and not be a reflection of what is.
There must be a certain look of availability in the women I photograph. I think the woman who gives the appearance of being available is sexually much more exciting than a woman who’s completely distant. This sense of availability I find erotic.
In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.
I wanted to put reality in my photographs. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. That’s what was happening. And I was going to help make it happen. Boy, they did not want that in America.
With a documentary, you can cut away, you can do jump cuts, cut to a photograph at any point to bridge two scenes.
Why in the world would anyone want to photograph an old woman like me?
I wanted my photographs to be as powerful as the last thing a person sees or remembers before death.
If you look at photographers who say, “I hate digital photography,” they all use Photoshop, even if it’s to make the sky just a little more blue than it was. Manipulation is very discrete and because it’s so discrete nobody cares about it anymore. People accept manipulated photographs, I think.
Perishability in a photograph is important in a picture. If a photograph looks perishable we say, “Gee, I’m glad I have that moment.”
Photographs are not ideas. They give us ideas.
The more story-appeal there is in the picture or in the photograph, the more people would look at your ad
Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.
I’m completely in control of creating my photographs, and I’m not always in complete control of creating a character. It’s more of a way to express myself than acting is, by far.
When I started photographing my boyfriend of years ago, Brian, I realised I had no right to photograph other people having sex if I wasn’t prepared to take them of myself too
The photographs of one dead terrorist mastermind carry no real news or information about the nature or horror of war. They just create sensation instead of deeper understanding.
While I have devised various formal strategies for articulating [my] concerns, I think fundamentally the work is driven by a basic curiosity. I seek to find out things about people by making photographs of them.
It’s great to get insight into the era of 80’s rock-n-roll via a treasure trove
of photographs skillfully captured in front of Mark Weiss’ camera lens. This
event is the perfect time capsule for Mark’s work finally being released
upon the masses in 2012.
of photographs skillfully captured in front of Mark Weiss’ camera lens. This
event is the perfect time capsule for Mark’s work finally being released
upon the masses in 2012.
In the day, I wear mascara and tinted moisturiser – although I’ve learnt that if I’m getting my photograph taken, it’s better to apply more; otherwise, I look really, really tired.
A photograph for me does not have a sense of spiritual seduction, it does not have an essence, that this is something that permeates and which is eternal through time.
I began to realise that film sees the world differently than the human eye, and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.
Trying to find this industry’s tendency to celebrate the physical is a waste of time. So I’m happy to play the game. But I am also thirsty for input. I’m not a dunce whose only skill is knowing how to take a photograph, you know? And at the end of the day, I think it makes me slightly less replaceable.
All photographs are self-portraits.
Technically perfect, pictorially rotten. (Stieglitz’s standard comment on photographs he rejected for publication in The American Amateur Photographer.)
Above all, the photographs I use are not arty in any sense of the word. I think photography is dead as fine art; its only place is in the commercial world, for technical or information purposes.
Most photographs take their cues from advertising, where the priority is high image content for an easy Gestalt reading.
Inside the house, I turned on the kitchen light, revealing the photographs stuck every which way all over the cabinets, and then switched on the hall light. In my head, I heard Beck say to my small nine-year-old self, ‘Why do we need every light in the house on? Are you signaling to aliens?
So long as people expect paintings to be simply coloured photographs they get no individuality and, in the case of portraits, no characterisation.
For me a nude photograph should be erotic, not devoid of emotion. The body is a sensual thing, sensuality being one of its most beautiful and meaningful qualities.
I do not photograph for ulterior purposes. I photograph for the thing itself – for the photograph – without consideration of how it may be used.
Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.
There are many aspects about what and why we photograph: visual pleasure, personal empathy, intellectual stimulation, technical excellence, etc. Serious photographers and artists will try to create works that are original. Over a career period they may develop a singular identity in their images.
The way that light hits objects in life, three-dimensional objects before you photograph them, is really the story of photography.
You have to bring to the photograph a prejudice about something, and I’m prejudiced against farmers who tie dead animals on fences. Therefore, I can make a meaningful photograph.
Photography today is so accurate and so good that it’s really so much easier just to take photographs and work from them.
I will look through 200 photographs of Kate Moss and there will be just one that I connect with for some reason, maybe because of the composition or something in the eye… Something touches me and I know I have to paint it, in the way a child knows it wants something.
You can carry a photograph with you on a thumb drive, and you can make it bigger or smaller – it’s a very malleable form of mass production.
Photographers who come up with power never get accused of imitating anyone else even though they photograph the same broom, same street, same portraits.
I’m interested in extrovert characters, people who are doing something. But I used to only be able to photograph people I was interested in or attracted to, either psychologically or physically. That all changed when I did the ‘Go Sees.’
If you have enough craft, you’ve done your homework and you’re practiced. You can then make the photograph you desire.
There are parts of me I only recognize from photographs.
There is no special way a photograph should look.
You come to the photograph as an aesthetic object with no context… Then you step in and read the text and then out again to revisit the image in a completely different way. I’m interested in that space between text and image. The piece becomes the negative space between the two.
All seeing, I think, is painful. Every photograph is a little sting, a hurt inflicted in its subject, but even more: every glance hurts in some way, freezing and condensing what’s seen into something that it is not.
It’s too presumptuous and naГЇve to think you can change society by a photograph or anything else… I equate that with propaganda; I think that’s a lower rank of purpose.
There are certain restaurants where you should photograph the food rather than eat it. These are great places to bring a narcissistic boyfriend before you break up.
I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.
I want my photos to be fresh and urgent. A good photograph should be a call to arms.
When I’m ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.
People believe that photographs are true and therefore cannot be art.
A good nude photograph can be erotic, but certainly not sentimental or pornographic.
Many of the critics today get airline tickets, hotel accommodation, bags, beautiful photographs, gifts and other expenses paid by the distributors, and then are supposed to write serious articles about the movie.
In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The ‘anything whatever’ then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.
Patience is the essence of clicking great Photographs!!
Life is a movie; death is a photograph.
To make a photograph is already the first artificial act.
Only photograph what you love.
I don’t like a tormented photograph. Something attracts you in them, but the attraction isn’t because she has a pot on her head or tonnes of make-up and weird clothes and weird everything.
Different assignments, different places, require different approaches. Sometimes I take minutes in a location, at other times days. There are many places that I have returned to over several years. When I photograph, I look for some sort of resonance, connection, spark of recognition.
Stieglitz conceived, though he never carried out, a series of photographs of the heads of stallions and mares, of bulls and cows, in the act of mating, hoping to catch in the brute an essential quality that would symbolize the probably unattainable photograph of a passionate human mating.
The important thing is not the camera but the eye.
A review of summit day photographs will show that I was clothed in the latest, highest quality, high altitude gear, comparable, if not better, than that worn by the other members of our expedition.
When you photograph someone, you have to make them feel good, and you know that they want to look good. It’s the same relationship that you have when you apply makeup on somebody. We’re almost like shrinks.
There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.
However much [photographs] may lie, they do so with the raw materials of truth.
As a professional photographer I take photographs for other people to see – but I want them to see what I see. So I never assume that only a few people will appreciate what I do. At all times, the public should be able to understand what I’ve done, even if they don’t understand how I’ve done it.
However spontaneous I hope a photograph will look, I always put a lot of thought into how I can make it happen. The very best pictures are the most relaxed, so a lot of fussing around technically can completely break the spell, and everyone freezes up with nerves.
Perhaps most intriguing of all is that it is possible to photograph what is impossible for the human eye to see – cumulative time.
Photography is like an open book to the world.
I always think photographs abominable, and I don’t like to have them around, particularly not those of persons I know and love. Those photographic portraits wither much sooner than we ourselves do, whereas the painted portrait is a thing which is felt, done with love.
I’ve always said that the only thing a photograph is good at capturing faithfully is another flat surface.
A photograph is not necessarily a lie, but it isn’t the truth either. It’s more like a fleeting, subjective impression.
They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.
I have always loved the amateur side of photography, automatic photographs, accidental photographs with uncentered compositions, heads cut off, whatever. I incite people to make their self-portraits. I see myself as their walking photo booth.
In almost every photograph I have ever made, there is something I would do to complete it. I take that to be the spirit hole or the deliberate mistake that’s in a Navajo rug to not be godlike, but to be human.
I do photograph things for people to look at 100 years from now. But we’re such a mediated society that things become historical the next day.
I was getting money for showing one man killing another. Two lives were destroyed and I was getting paid for it. (On his 1968 photograph of the summary street corner execution of prisoner Nguyen Van Lem by South Vietnam’s police chief, Lt. Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan.)
I was making photographs of the world long before I was a photographer.
A good photograph is like a good hound dog, dumb, but eloquent.
The best photographs are made by the best people.
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.
So I went to Chicago in 1940, I think, ’41, and the photographs that I made there, aside from fashion, were things that I was trying to express in a social conscious way.
He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.
I just think of everything I do and how happy it will make me to do it. I don’t like having my photograph taken, for instance, so I don’t do that often.
I look back at photographs and I remember at the time I thought I was not very attractive.
I know what I like to use myself. I use Leicas, but when I look at the photograph, I don’t ask the photograph questions. Mine or anybody else’s. The only time I’ve ever dealt with that kind of thing is when I’m teaching.
It’s not enough that [the photograph] is beautiful. If it doesn’t move my heart, it won’t move anyone else’s heart.
Why write [about my art]? Why not just show the photographs?
I never really made any money and it certainly cost me more to take photographs than I got for them.
…to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.
Like a ventriloquist who laughs at his dummy’s jokes, I keep trying to make photographs that seduce me into believing in the image – all the time knowing better, but believing anyway.
It’s certainly important to include text beside documentary photographs. Furthermore, it’s important to include text in a way that’s useful and accessible.
Mostly the subject of the photograph, which can be anyone really, coming down the street – someone that has no idea. “Heroism” in photography, just like in a novel, is for everyone.
You have to kind of be invisible when you photograph children, so you use a longer lens.
Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies.
I collect rare photographs… I have two… One of Houdini locking his keys in his car… the other is a rare picture of Norman Rockwell beating up a child.
How do you photograph a gadget in a new, and not boring, way? You have to get away from people sitting in front of a computer. You have to get a look at the digital signature.
It takes a while for a photograph to mature. That sounds really pretentious, but it takes a time for it to go from here to there.
When it comes to partnership, some humans can make their lives alone – it’s possible. But creatively, it’s more like painting: you can’t just use the same colours in every painting. It’s just not an option. You can’t take the same photograph every time and live with art forms with no differences.
The photograph of the Queen sitting stiffly across the table from Glasgow resident Susan McCarron is so natural and expressive that it looks utterly fake. It looks like an artist’s portrait, complete with symbolism, humour and poignancy. No wonder the palace and the press have interpreted it in such different ways.
When I decided to become an actor, I realised that every role that we play on screen requires a different kind of prep. I learnt wrestling for ‘Dangal,’ went through an emotional grind for ‘Photograph’ and stepped out of my comfort zone and shed too many inhibitions for ‘Pataakha.’
I’m still very sensitive and wary of people recognising me The only thing that really annoys me is people trying to surreptitiously take a photo on their phone without asking. I feel it’s cowardly and a bit pathetic. Just ask me if you really want me to have a photograph with you.
Sometimes, photographs live in our hearts as unborn ghosts and we survive not because their shadows find permanence there, but because that thing that is larger than us, larger than the things we can point to, remember and claim, escorts us from dark into light.
When we were kids, growing up in the sixties, the only images we had of ourselves were either still photographs or 8mm movies…. Now we have video, digital cameras, MP3s, and a million other ways to document ourselves. But the still photograph continues to hold a sense of mystery and awe to me.
I look like that in the morning: my hair’s all greasy – it’s not, ‘Hey, look at the babe of the band!’ I hate that kind of thing, the way women are always pushed forward as beauties… it’s very easy: you can make the ugliest pig look lovely in a photograph.
There is no photograph more inherently photographic than another.
Long before we discovered mirrors and photographs, our mothers’ reflections provided us with the earliest glimpses of our female identity.
Black and white is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive…
Black and white is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality.
Black and white is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality.
Every now and then it feels like it’s just been a few days ago, a few weeks ago since we got started; but looking back through photographs and listening to the older albums and stuff, you can definitely feel some maturing and some distance in between the club days and where we are now
It seems to me as natural and necessary to keep notes, however brief, of one’s reading, as logs of voyages or photographs of one’s travels. For memory, in most of us, is a liar with galloping consumption.
My work is mostly about memory. It is very important to me that everybody that I have been close to in my life I make photographs of them.
I believe that the black-and-white photograph, or rather the gray zones in the black-and-white photograph, stand for this territory that is located between life and death.
Part of the mystery of any given photograph is the fact that it was taken at a certain time and in a certain place and time keeps moving on. A photograph might be a moment in time preserved, but the world continues to change around it.
When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.
For ‘The Hotel’ I spent one year to find the hotel, I spent three months going through the text and writing it, I spent three months going through the photographs and I spent one day deciding it would be this size and this frame…it’s the last thought in the process.
Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both.
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
With the Larry Bertlemann portrait, I started with a photograph that I could use for it. I built the drawing’s identity to serve as a graphic identity. After a number of sketches, I went into my own abstract vernacular of drawn lines and shapes to create the composition for the poster design.
His Holiness [the Dalai Lama] has told me, urgently and repeatedly, that he thinks my photographs are crap. His exact words were, ‘These photos are of poor quality. Why is there no sharp focus? There is no clarity!’ I said, ‘But your Holiness, it’s Goyaesque.’ And he said, ‘No! It’s out of focus!’
My urge to photograph is activated by an almost biological instinct for preservation from disorder. The camera is a mechanical apparatus that extends my natural ability and desire for meaningful organization. I need it to survive.
The photograph, after all, is just a photograph. Words will determine its meaning and status.
I find the past so fascinating. Photographs are strange, almost surreal, almost here yet gone. I slip into thinking what the past must have been like and I enjoy creating that ambience and atmosphere – 1730 to around 1870 is the most interesting period.
The people that I photographed allowed me to photograph them because they didn’t want to be alone, and the truth is I didn’t want to be alone making the pictures.
To take photographs means to recognize – simultaneously and within a fraction of a second – both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one’s head, one’s eye and one’s heart on the same axis.
The word “photography” can be interpreted as “writing with light” or “drawing with light.” Some photographers are producing beautiful photographs by drawing with light.. Some other photographers are trying to tell something with their photographs. They are writing with light.
Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.
Photographs are the most curious indicators of reality.
In a Cafe” I watched a man in a cafe fold a slice of bread as if he were folding a birth certificate or looking at the photograph of a dead lover.
There are many photographs which are full of life but
which are confusing and difficult to remember.
It is the force of an image which matters.
which are confusing and difficult to remember.
It is the force of an image which matters.
I have never taken a photograph without one thought in my head to amuse myself.
I began to realize that photographs, these still images, have a tremendous power to move your soul. They can change your life by what you choose to get out of them, and I started to collect photographs.
I’m pretty lenient with myself about time – if I feel like taking photographs of small things inside ice cubes or making animal collages, I just do it. When I want to write, I write. It’s all part of the same thing for me.
Accurate drawing, accurate colour, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality in a mirror, if it could be caught, colour and all, would not be a picture at all, no more than a photograph.
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!
The class that I teach is called “The Life of a Photograph.” It takes up the question, of the billion photographs that were taken today, how many will have a life, and why? So the new reality has made the question more pertinent, not less pertinent.
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.
In 1990, when they asked me to shoot a cover for ‘British Vogue’ to convey my personal vision of a woman, I explained that I couldn’t just photograph one single girl, because what I was looking for was a new purpose, and new feminine determination.
What I was doing for those assignments wasn’t always directly tied to what I was doing for myself, but it gave me the space to photograph. I started getting assignments that dealt with my own interests and made some pictures in that direction.
My advice to photographers is to get out there in the field and take photographs but also if they are students to finish their course, learn as many languages as possible, go to movies, read books visit museums, broaden your mind.
It’s fair to say that black folks operate under a cloud of invisibility – this too is part of the work, is indeed central to [my photographs]… This invisibility – this erasure out of the complex history of our life and time – is the greatest source of my longing.
A man who loves his wife will love her letters and her photographs because they speak to him of her. So if we love the Lord Jesus, we shall love the Bible because it speaks to us of him.
The photograph is completely abstracted from life, yet it looks like life. That is what has always excited me about photography.
Ive been criticised for pretty, smiley photographs, but at least someone is happy! In my mind, I am always giving the image to the sitter.
I’ve never understood all this fuss people make about the dawn. I’ve seen a few and they’re never as good as the photographs, which have the additional advantage of being things you can look at when you’re in the right frame of mind, which is usually around lunchtime.
Wherever there is disaster, the newsman is there. If he cannot find disaster, he searches for the odd and the peculiar, the exotic and the unfamiliar. His photographs, seen by millions, make momentary events and strange occurrences all over the world our common property.
Having photographs around the house is fine – if they’re royal and on the grand piano.
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
If you want to photograph a man spinning, give some thought to why he spins. Understanding for a photographer is as important as the equipment he uses.
As I was walking up the stairs to dad’s old room, and I was looking at the photographs, I started thinking that there was a time when these weren’t memories. That someone actually took the photograph, and the people in the photograph had just eaten lunch or something.
My way of photographing is my way of life. I photograph from my experience, my way of seeing things.
I was an amateur – I am an amateur – and I intend to stay an amateur. To me an amateur photographer is one who is in love with taking pictures, a free soul who can photograph what he likes and who likes what he photographs.
I’m more interested in photographing people who have done something, like writers or directors – even billionaires – as long as I can study them before I photograph them.
I have no interest in being famous. I just want to make famous photographs.
The first man-made satellite to orbit the earth was named Sputnik. The first living creature in space was Laika. The first rocket to the Moon carried a red flag. The first photograph of the far side of the Moon was made with a Soviet camera. If a man orbits the earth this year his name will be Ivan.
At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don’t need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.
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.
It seems to me that while it is very important to get a striking picture of a line of smoke stacks or a row of dynamos, it is becoming more and more important to reflect that life that goes on behind these photographs. (1935)
As is often said of photography, this photograph is a frozen moment. A frozen moment is not a moment at all.
The photographer’s intentions do not determine the meaning of a photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it.
My photographs are not just about the instant of movement you capture in the camera. It’s much more total, about constant movement that became static.
In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.
I was always involved in art and when I went under contract at Warner Bros. at 18, it afforded me the possibility of never having to stop painting, never having to stop taking photographs and so on, and to actually live a cultural life.
Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I’m more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph.
The people I work with, the people I photograph, become a kind of family for me.
If you meet people who have been successful in Hollywood, or look a their photographs, you see a haunted look in their eyes, you sense a trapped feeling.
Photographs are interpretations of reality; as such, it is entirely subjective. Most photos are taken with an agenda, to sell something or to make a subject look better than it really is. Think of family snapshots – everyone is smiling and happy.
Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole.
Every day someone notices me and waves to me, or stops and speaks to me, or asks me for an autograph, or photographs me.
When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it.
In a sense, photographs are highly literary, and the photographer, like the writer, has to be both a master of craft and a visionary. Patient accumulation of facts and then speculation about their meaning is the nature of authorship in both mediums.
I do still get the odd fan letter about The Good Life, clearly written by somebody aged 18, who says: Will you send a photograph? And I think: Maybe it’s kinder not to. I’m deeply into my 50s now.
You know, Im directing a documentary about the history of Abbey Road Studios at the moment, so Ive been taken back to those times. There is a photograph of me aged three months on one of the sofas in the studio, so I was there before I can remember being there.
Content to me is very important, but I like it when [the photograph] is also enigmatic. If you don’t know what it is you begin to speculate, and that is what I want.
If it is practiced by a man of taste, the photograph will have the appearance of art (but) the photographer must…intervene as little as possible, so as not to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses.
All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
In the end, maybe the correct language would be how the fact of putting four edges around a collection of information or facts transforms it. A photograph is not what was photographed, it’s something else.
You don’t take a photograph, you make it.
When I first started to take photographs in Czechoslovakia, I met this old gentleman, this old photographer, who told me a few practical things. One of the things he said was, “Josef, a photographer works on the subject, but the subject works on the photographer.”
A man goes into Boots and says: “Have you got any Viagra?” “Do you have a prescription?” asks the chemist. “No,” he replies, “But ‘I’ve got a photograph of the wife.”
My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs [rather than paintings, etchings, etc.] that unless one has eyes and sees, they won’t be seen – and still everyone will never forget having once looked at them.
What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
You open a section of ‘The New York Times,’ and there’s a review or a story on a choreographer or a dancer, and there’s an informative, clear image of a dancer. This is, in my view, not an interesting photograph.
Theres no question that photographs communicate more instantly and powerfully than words do, but if you want to communicate a complex concept clearly, you need words, too.
It comes down to risk, again and again. If you risk coming out, if you risk making pictures that aren’t good, you might discover something in a photograph that is the key. The very doorway to your own interest.
[The photographs] were there simply to indicate a radical art that had already vanished. The photograph was necessary only as a residue for communication.
Great images take you on a journey via a single photograph. The depth and layers pull your eye all over the frame, causing you to pick up interesting pieces along the way, ultimately coming to a climax.
I try to photograph things that are near to me because I work best among things I know. I’m not concerned with startling anyone or discovering new forms; formal qualities are only tools to help state my message.
The earth doesn’t care where death occurs. …It’s the artist, by coming in and writing about it or painting it or taking a photograph of it, that makes the earth powerful and creates death’s memory. Because the land will not remember by itself, but the artist will.
Even today I work with Niall O’Brien, who is far more technically astute than I am, but I still have the clearest idea of every detail I want in my photograph.
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.
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.
If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only too make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better.
Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe, having surveyed a few boxes full of letters, diaries, bank statements and photographs, that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.
In the blur of the photograph, time leaves its gleaming, snail-like track.
It is the unexpected and the surprise quality of a personal vision, rather than the emotion, which make people respond to a photograph.
It can happen anytime, anywhere. I mean, you don’t have to be in front of stuff that’s going to make a good photograph. It’s possible anywhere.
It’s marvellous, marvellous! Nothing will ever be as much fun. I’m going to photograph everything, everything!
Esquire, in a July, 1957 issue, has a photograph of me playing the French horn at the Five Spot.
I crave to be able to photograph the way a painter paints – in a loose, expressive way.
For every moment of triumph, there is an unequal and opposite feeling of despair. Take that iconic photograph of Muhammad Ali standing triumphantly over the prostrate, semiconscious wreckage of Sonny Liston. Great photo. Now think of Liston. Do the pleasure/pain calculus.
If anybody wanted to photograph my life, they’d get bored in a day. ‘Heres Matt at home learning his lines. Here’s Matt researching in aisle six of his local library’. A few hours of that and they’d go home.
Photographs are of course about their makers, and are to be read for what they disclose in that regard no less than for what they reveal of the world as their makers comprehend, invent, and describe it.
Don’t let anything sneak past you. Don’t say, ‘Well, oh, I’ll take a picture and put it in my photograph album.’ I notice it now. I love it now. And I am grateful for it now.
We used to say that inside Cecil Beaton there was another Cecil Beaton sending out lots of little Cecils into the world. One did the sets, another did the costumes. A third took the photographs. Another put the sketches in an exhibition, then into magazines, then in a book.
There’s nothing wrong with being an actor, if that’s what a man wants. But there’s everything wrong with achieving an exalted status simply because one photographs well and is able to handle dialogue”.
How do you photograph data?
If it was up to me, I would just wear jeans and t-shirts, even to red carpets, but then no one would photograph me, so that would make me very sad. So you know, I’ve gotta keep up with the rest of the female population and sometimes try a little harder.
About shadows: do we see shadows? Loads of people don’t. A camera will notice a shadow, but how many people have got a shadow in front of them when they take a picture and don’t notice it, and then they see it in the photograph because the photograph will catch the shadow.
The photograph is to a great degree evidence of the conversation I had with the person. It’s a part of my visual diary.
I think you have to have a real point of view that’s your own. You have to tell it your way. And, I think that it’s a mistake to shoot for a specific magazine’s point of view because it’s never going to be as good. You have to shoot for yourself and photograph [ the way] you believe it.
How does photography serve to legitimate and normalize existing power relationships? … How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs?
I really like the structure of my body. It moves well, it looks good, it photographs well, it understands gesture and nuance.
A photograph is not an accident – it is a concept.
Photographs will always be impressive because they show us nature, and all artists will find in them a world of sensations. The photographer must therefore intervene as little as possible, so as not to cause photography to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses, notwithstanding its defects.
In some way, a photo is like a stolen kiss. In fact a kiss is always stolen, even if the woman is consenting. With a photograph it’s the same: always stolen, and still slightly consenting.
Whether a watercolor is inferior to an oil [painting], or whether a drawing, an etching, or a photograph is not as important as either, is inconsequent. To have to despise something in order to respect something else is a sign of impotence.
there is a spirit in every home, a sort of composite spirit composed of the thoughts and feelings of the members of the family as a composite photograph is formed of the features of different individuals.
Our dreams are made of real things, like a shoebox full of photographs.
I have looked at so many photographs, I can not see them anymore.
There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.
I always give a print to everybody I photograph, and some of my subjects have told me they have a hard time hanging them up at home.
It is best to meet in a cul-de-sac, A palace of velvet With windows of mirrors. There one is safe, There are no family photographs, No rings through the nose, no cries.
You can’t see fear or lust; you can’t photograph someone’s anxieties, how disappointment feels. Photographs are approximations.
Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph. It is inevitable. A photograph without structure is like a sentence without grammar-it is incomprehensible, even inconceivable.
A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.
Now, to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravity before going for a walk.
MAC allowed me to have complete freedom on the collaborations—from the shades, the look-and-feel, to the campaign visuals. I have to admit that the visual aspect of the collection excites me most. For designers, we care about the photographs much more than a Ferrari.
Light makes photography. Embrace light.
An eyewitness account is evidence that an artist has proposed a work of art. But documentary evidence (i.e. a photograph) is more conclusive.
I am a great admirer of Robert Vavra and love his beautiful photographs and books. He is a wonderful artist, a poet.
I don’t like to reminisce much, and my walls don’t have photographs of me and the actors I was with, or any of that stuff… I try and keep that disciplined, and just work. There are so many traps you can get into, and looking back on your own work is certainly one of them.
Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.
When I first started learning how to take photographs, you had to spend the first six months figuring out what an f-stop was. Now you just go and take pictures.
I am what I photograph.
I would never dream, for example, of going to The States to photograph your wildlife.
Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.
I love coffee, but I don’t photograph it. That’s not who I am. I’m a social creature, so my subject should not be the coffee. It’s about being together with friends.
What a photograph shows us is how a particular thing could be seen, or could be made to look – at a specific moment, in a specific context, by a specific photographer employing specific tools.
I used to go out wearing any old rubbish, no make-up, nothing, but since mobile phones, that has all had to stop. People do come up to you so often and say hello, or want a photograph, and I just can’t do it anymore in what I used to wear. They don’t want to be seen hanging off a rabid old granny any more than I do.
Life is a photograph too, so thank you,for not removing yourself from the picture just yet.
My brother had fabulous children before I had children and for some reason I wanted to photograph them, and that was when I got my first camera. Children have something totally unconscious about them. That’s how I learned.
I was out there with the White House press squad, and after his helicopter took off, and the carpet rolled up…This wasn’t a photograph that others were taking, but I continued to take pictures.
Mostly, I worked so quickly, I didn’t see the details of a photograph until it was printed.
You must photograph where you are involved; where you are overwhelmed by what you see before you; where you hold your breath while releasing the shutter, not because you are afraid of jarring the camera, but because you are seeing with your guts wide open to the sweet pain of an image that is part of your life.
Unless it hurts, unless there’s some vulnerability there, I don’t think you’re going to get good photographs.
No, I do a bunch of things to entertain myself. I paint, I make music, I take photographs.
In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.
All my photographs seep through EMOTION , through the relationship I establish with the place I am portraying. Whenever I see something that captivates me, I start turning around it to find MY OWN frame. I work on myself and on the city at the same time.
Every photograph is the photographer’s opinion about something. It’s how they feel about something: what they think is horrible, tragic, funny.
It’s the easiest thing in the world to do that, to make successful photographs. It’s a bore.
I want to let [my photographs] be something that comes from the model in her own way. I don’t want to take the models too much out of their own skin. I realized that I wanted to create a marriage between who the person was, the nature, the beauty in the figure, and how the models sat or posed themselves.
There are more pretty photographs of women than there are photographs of pretty women.
Two factors thus emerge as requisites of success in the field of creative photography. First, the subject must be photogenic. Second, its re-creation in a photograph must be based upon technical knowledge, guided and supported by artsitic inspiration.
I really miss my youth. I’m not being ungrateful, but there was an Atif who used to roam the streets, who didn’t care whether his photograph was taken or not, who used to hang out without people staring at him. I miss that carefree life and would give anything for it, even if it only lasts a few moments.
To take photographs is putting one’s head, one’s eye, and one’s heart on the same axis
I don’t think it is even possible to define what a good photograph is, so it is difficult to instruct anybody how to make one. Beauty and aesthetics are subjective, and very much in the mind of the beholder.
Every photograph is a realization of one of the possibilities contained within the program of the camera. The number of such possibilities is large, but it is nevertheless finite. It is the sum of all those photographs that can be taken by a camera.
I’m very much against photographs being framed and treated with reverence and signed and sold as works of art. They aren’t. They should be seen in a magazine or a book and then be used to wrap up the fish and chucked away.
When I start thinking about a story, I don’t start by thinking about the fashion, but about who I want to photograph and what the story should be about.
During photography’s first decades, exposure times were quite long… So, similar to the drawings produced with the help of a camera obscura, which depicted reality as static and immobile, early photographs represented the world as stable, eternal, unshakable.
The way you present a stunt is tied in to the way you photograph it, so you’re hanging out with the cinematographer.
When I first started making photo pieces it wasn’t with the idea of a commitment to the medium. I didn’t think I would have to become a photographer to make my photographs. I recall that anything could be used as material for art in that era. Photography was just one more thing.
One person can take papers, photograph them without getting excited, return them, and give them away without any scruples; while someone else has to overcome an enormous obstacle.
A still photograph is something which you can always go back to. You can put it on your wall and look at it again and again. Because it is that frozen moment. I think it tends to burn into your psyche. It becomes ingrained in your mind. A powerful picture becomes iconic of a place or a time or a situation.
You always want to come back with an image that’s interesting visually, and you hope to get something from the person you photograph that’s different than other images you know of these people.
I don’t think that there’s anything that we shouldn’t be allowed to photograph, really, unless there’s something that’s really deeply harmful to the subject in the photograph.
[The photograph] is fabricated out of the unfabricated dross of passing life (while paradoxically still trading on the indexical heft of that dross).
You don’t make a photograph just with a camera
I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities.
I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are.
Photography is the power of observation, not the application of technology.
I have no intention of flattering people. I like wrinkles and crow’s feet and flaws, and somebody should know, if I’m going to photograph them, that’s going to show up, you know?
Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph, is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk.
I wore Armani Prive to Cannes, and that was incredible. The craftsmanship is something I never understood until I wore it: the structure, the integrity of the fabrics, the colours, how things photograph.
Photograph because you love doing it, because you absolutely have to do it, because the chief reward is going to be the process of doing it. Other rewards – recognition, financial remuneration – come to so few and are so fleeting…Take photography on as a passion, not a career.
If the photographer is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it’s already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.
I’m just interested in what makes a photograph.
This is how you can tell a real photographer: mostly, a real photographer does not say ‘I wish I had my camera on me right now’. Instead a real photographer pulls out her camera and takes the photograph.
As Estelle Jussim wrote, it is almost impossible for a single photograph to state both the problem and the solution.
The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects. So that no one would say, how did you do it, where did you find it, but they would say that such things could be.
…the logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph.
Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us. A photograph of an art object is not the art object. An essay about an artist’s work is not the artist’s work.
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.
I like to talk to people and, obviously, to photograph them.
I just get the will to do it. I don’t plan a photograph in advance… I work by impulse. No philosophy. No ideas. Not by the head but by the eyes. Eventually inspiration comes-instinct is the same as inspiration, and eventually it comes.
I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.
Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
When you approach something to photograph it, first be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence. Then don’t leave until you have captured its essence.
A photograph is a mirror; mostly it reflects the prejudices of the viewer.
I’m a good craftsman and I can have this particular intention: let’s say, I want a photograph that’s going to push a certain button in an audience, to make them laugh or love, feel warm or hate or what – I know how to do this.
Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
If you are intent on drawing or painting on your prints, you must first learn to draw and paint at least as well as you photograph.
Our conviction that we are free to choose what we make of a photograph hides the complicity to which we are recruited in the very act of looking.
What I mean by photographing as a participant rather than observer is that I’m not only involved directly with some of the activities that I photograph, such as mountain climbing, but even when I’m not I have the philosophy that my mind and body are part of the natural world
One does not photograph something simply for ‘what it is’, but ‘for what else it is.
There’s no such thing as a bad photograph.
Poetic and speculative photographs can result if one works carefully and accurately, yet letting chance relationships have full play.
A photograph can make you feel so many different things. When you look at war photographs of Vietnam, or something similar, it makes you feel anguish and sadness and pain. Then in other moments, when you look at Jackie Kennedy walking down Fifth Avenue, that makes you feel glory and richness.
I use the camera as a dumb copying device that only serves to document whatever phenomenon appears before it through the conditions set by a system. No esthetic choices are possible. Other people often make the photographs. It makes no difference.
I don’t know how much a photograph can add to a biography, the way a film or writing or narrative medium could. Because it’s a frozen image.
I’ve never been on safari because I’ve got a phobia of bugs. I just don’t want things crawling on me when I’m sleeping. It’s a shame given my passion for big cats. But I really enjoy photography, so I’d love to photograph leopards in the wild some day.
I realize that as I get more experience as I get older, my perception changes and that feeds the photograph.
People believe pictures. It’s a photograph that’s in your passport, not a painting. Now,
George Bernard Shaw said, ‘I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot.’ That’s what the power of photography is.
George Bernard Shaw said, ‘I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot.’ That’s what the power of photography is.
How useful are documentary photographs if there is no follow up, no way of knowing what happened next in the story?
One of the things my career as an artist might say to young artists is: The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best. And unless you photograph what you love, you are not going to make good art.
It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.
The reason I call myself a documentary photographer is the idea of how photographs contain and participate in history.
I’d like to take more pictures of real celebrities. It would be fabulous to photograph Brad Pitt. He’s so good-looking and just such a star.
To photograph is often compared to an act of redemption – to select from an infinite number of choices that which is to be remembered.
The photograph doesn’t claim to be a participant, or to know, or to be a club member of whatever it’s documenting – photography is more demanding when it doesn’t pretend to know.
In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.
The sense of smell can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back pictures as sharp as photographs of scenes that had left the conscious mind.
My favourite things are just wandering from place to place, going to cafГ©s, taking photographs. My favourite day is a happy accident.
It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.
Unlike the marks of a painting, the photo seems to organize its ‘opinions’ in relation to the world; even when the photographs have clearly been manipulated, the ‘opinions’ seem to have all the more force, with the suggested ‘participation of the world’ articulating that ‘opinion’ as a difference.
Criticism is hypocrisy; society is hypocrisy. I’m a tourist. I’m a consumer. I do the things that I photograph and can be criticized of.
How many people have wanted to kill themselves, and have been content with tearing up their photograph!
I do believe strongly in photography and hope by following it intuitively that when the photographs are looked at they will touch the spirit in people.
We pass the billboard and I console myself in two ways. First, I know that most photographs taken are a gamble at best. Second and more important: I remind myself to find the pleasure in this moment, a time in which the red sky passes to black, children create unanticipated rhymes, and the stars fall closer to earth.
The ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired off-hand, but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labor.
Friendship based solely upon gratitude is like a photograph; with time it fades.
I could not do what I do without the kindness, consideration, resourcefulness and work of librarians, particularly in public libraries… What started me writing history happened because of some curiosity that I had about some photographs I’d seen in the Library of Congress.
I think the culture of the red carpet is too much like a modern-day coliseum. If you’re being photographed all the time, and you don’t like having a bad photograph taken, and if you’re super, super thin, chances are you’re never going to look fat in a picture.
I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn’t have a personal vision or doesn’t communicate emotion fails.
Photography is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one’s own originality. It’s a way of life.
The internet does not adhere to the inherent, necessary asymmetry of high-versus-low-art categorizations that we use in the cultural sector: in a banal sense, all photographs on the Web are orphans ready to be claimed.
Any child who has lost a parent probably knows every single photograph in existence of that parent.
Taking photographs is generally an act of ‘looking at the object, whereas ‘being seen’ or ‘showing’ is what is most interest to one who does a self-portrait…self-portraits deny not only photography itself but the 20th century as an era as well…an inevitable phenomenon at the end of the 20th century.
I bought my first camera to photograph my brother’s children. I learned a lot from that experience. The value of innocence and of not being focused on yourself, and I have to say that these things have remained with me to this day. I can immediately feel when someone is putting on a camera face.
People ask me questions like, “Oh, you look so theatrical in your photographs. Is that what you’re like when you walk down the street?” It’s like, “Of course not.” It’s such a silly question – it’s like being theatrical is a crime.
I never paint a portrait from a photograph, because a photograph doesn’t give enough information about what the person feels.
I abstract it in my photographs: I like large planes and spaces, areas of texture and light, like deserts or oceans or monumental places.
I would love to photograph Angelina Jolie.
I have always done the opposite of what I was trained to do… Having little technical background, I became a photographer. Adopting a machine, I do my utmost to make it malfunction. For me, to make a photograph is to make an anti-photograph.
When I look at photographs, I couldn’t care less “how.”
I have met many superstars at our place and parties also but I have never taken a photograph with anyone. Sridevi is the only actress with whom I have clicked a picture.
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.
I didn’t throw myself off my balcony only because I knew people would photograph me lying dead.
Work harder, get closer and be passionate about what you photograph.
But I did not always know just what it was I wanted to photograph. I believe it is important for a photographer to discover this, for unless he finds what it is that excites him, what it is that calls forth at once an emotional response, he is unlikely to achieve his best work.
Every photograph could be set up. If one could imagine it, one could set it up. The whole discussion is a way of not talking about photographs.
The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.
For me anyway when a photograph is interesting, it’s interesting because of the kind of photographic problem it states – which has to do with the contest between content and form.
The way that I rationalize making photographs is because you’re countering what’s offensively mass-produced with something that you just want more people to see.
If you want to be a photographer, you have to photograph.
A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person.
People aren’t really looking at the result when taking a picture on an iPhone. And they don’t print it. So to me, it’s almost not a photograph. It’s like looking in the mirror. It’s a tool I don’t relate to at all.
A completely disrespectful photographer was asked to stop taking photographs, and then said, ‘I’ve got what I want. What are you going to do about it?’ How would you feel if somebody walked up and started taking your photograph? I don’t think you’d be very happy.
I always took photographs. I photographed a lot of trees, by the way, which is another image I used often in my work, the tree image.
All my pictures are very voyeuristic, but ultimately I’m looking at what lurks in my own interior. I make photographs because I want to answer the question of what propels me to do the things that I do. But that always remains a mystery.
Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference.
In the photograph by my bed my mother is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again.
Perhaps the most important people that I should photograph are the people who don’t have a voice.
Emailing a meaningful photograph to someone who is not expecting it can change a relationship forever.
I don’t speak emotionally about my pictures. That’s for other people to do. I will say that I love my photographs. That’s what keeps me going.
Whatever it is about pictures, photographs, it’s just about impossible to follow up with words. They don’t have anything to do with each other.
Where were we?” she said. “Getting credit,” I said. “What about it?” “Well, it’s nice to get credit.” The spokes of her rear wheel spun behind the curtain of her long skirt. She looked like a photograph from a hundred years ago. She turned her wide eyes on me. “Is it?” she said.
In 3-D filmmaking, I can take images and manipulate them infinitely, as opposed to taking still photographs and laying them one after the other. I move things in all directions. It’s such a liberating experience.
The camera makes you forget you’re there. It’s not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.
A pun calls the meaning of a word into question, and it upsets us tremendously. We laugh because suddenly we find out we’re not going to get killed. I think a lot of things work that way with photographs.
photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.
A good photograph is knowing where to stand.
How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs.
A lot of the children I photograph are extremely colorfully dressed in some way. But I also find a lot of kids with outsized personalities or who happen to be doing something charming.
One of the interesting things I discovered is that in the late 19th century, painters actually had black-and-white copies made of their own paintings. They chose it even over photographs because they knew the photographic medium would distort their work.
Most people stiffen with self-consciousness when they pose for a photograph. Lighting and fine camera equipment are useless if the photographer cannot make them drop the mask, at least for a moment, so he can capture on his film their real, undistorted personality and character.
I tell you (dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well) a square inch of man’s engraving is worth all the photographs that were ever dipped in acid… Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud’s wax-work can do against sculpture. That and no more. (1865)
One of the problems with technology is that no photograph, as superb and outstanding as it may be, will ever be as satisfying as the most middle-rate painting.
The question at hand is the danger posed to truth by computer-manipulated photographic imagery. How do we approach this question in a period in which the veracity of even the straight, unmanipulated photograph has been under attack for a couple of decades.
Usually I think if there is something imperfect in a photograph it makes the picture more real. Photographs that are slick, smooth, and imperfect seem less honest to me.
I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.
My point is that meaning is always personal, changeable and subjective. There is no ‘correct’ interpretation of a photograph.
If each photograph steals a bit of the soul, isn’t it possible that I give up pieces of mine every time I take a picture?
While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.
My father has made a museum with my cuttings and photographs.
There was a time when photographers were thought to be socially secondary, and, hence, not dangerous. Lincoln was more important than Brady. It didn’t occur to anyone to worry about the manner in which a photograph was taken.
Photographs don’t lie, but liars may photograph
By being fictions and, at the same moment, returning their subjects to us with a compelling fidelity, both photographs and poems work with the same surprise… both strike us as if they were simultaneously remembrances and revelations.
Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn’t interest me.
Mostly I take photographs in times of research. Whores’ Glory was shot in 30 days, 10 days for each segment, but the research for each part lasted a couple of months.
Life rarely presents fully finished photographs. An image evolves, often from a single strand of visual interest – a distant horizon, a moment of light, a held expression.
Nothing is as deceptive as a photograph.
It’s weird: people used to want your autograph; now what they want to do is to take your photograph with an iPhone. And sometimes they’ll pop their arm around you to hold their iPhone; they’re shaking when they take it.
Well, in terms of what a camera does. Again, you go back to that original idea that what you photograph is responsible for how it [the photograph] looks. And it’s not plastic, in a way. The problem is unique in photographic terms.
I was into punk rock back when I was in high school. I used to go around to dive venues and take photographs. But now it’s been just much more about the country stuff and soulful folk.
Photoshop is useful in many ways but must NEVER be used for the altering of photographs. My assistants and my agency do whatever Photoshop work for me that may be required as it is too complicated for my brain.
One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. It’s on all the time.
I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost – that is important.
My pictures are not really about the children that I photograph. They’re more like actors in a film. I think you can always recognize the children, but they are alienated from their real appearance and become more like metaphors.
I don’t know how many millions of photographs have been taken of me.
People taking photographs of their meals are not critics; they are from the United States.
The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.
If I went to somewhere busy, I wouldn’t last very long. I can’t go to a museum – I’ll last 10 or 15 minutes in a museum. The problem is that when one person asks for a photograph, then someone sees a flash goes off, then everyone else sort of… it’s sort of like a domino effect.
I don’t have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They’re upstairs in my socks.
…a photographer must be aware of and concerned about the words that accompany a picture. These words should be considered as carefully as the lighting, exposure and composition of the photograph.
It seems to me that before the photograph can exist as art it must, by its very nature choose whether it is to be a record or a testimony.
The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer’s understanding of his subject and mastery of his process.
Here’s the beauty of a camera: you don’t have to come up with words for what you’re looking at… Maybe another angle is needed sometimes. When we’re burned out from writing, we can photograph or draw, look at the world in a different way, and photographers could try writing what they see.
I feel like I need to start wearing a T-shirt saying ‘This is not a photo opportunity’. People are so lovely but you do find that when you’re out you spend 40% of your time posing for photographs.
It’s always weird doing love scenes. And the thing is, you can’t really photograph two people kissing naturally, because then you wouldn’t be able to see anything.
A photograph isn’t necessarily a lie, but nor is it the truth. It’s more of a fleeting, subjective impression. What I most like about photography is the moment that you can’t anticipate: you have to be constantly watching for it, ready to welcome the unexpected.
My photographs don’t do me justice – they just look like me.
[With my photographs] you have a [single, forever fixed] moment and my particular angle of vision. My tyrannical condition, as it were, is that I prescribe your vision.
I’ll see a photograph of a character and try to copy them on to my face. I think I’m really observant, and thinking how a person is put together, seeing them on the street and noticing subtle things about them that make them who they are.
Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
It is the photographs that gives one the vivid realization of what actually took place. (On photographs from Abu Ghraib prison.)
Any photographed human being is always a photograph.
A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
I like to add personal touches to my decorating style, including photographs and nostalgic items that remind me of family and home.
A clown needn’t be the same out of the ring as he has to be when he’s in it. If you look at photographs of clowns when they’re just being ordinary men, they’ve got quite sad faces.
The two sensibilities, the visual and the verbal, have always been linked for me – in fact, while reading a particularly evocative passage, I will imagine what the photograph I’d take of that scene would look like, even with burning and dodging notes. Maybe everyone does this.
I don’t have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions.
Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
[The Library of Congress] is a multimedia encyclopedia. These are the tentacles of a nation.
[Referring to the diverse holdings of the library, including motion pictures, photographs, recordings, posters and other historic objects which collectively far outnumber the books]
[Referring to the diverse holdings of the library, including motion pictures, photographs, recordings, posters and other historic objects which collectively far outnumber the books]
For me, there’s something very romantic about going and looking at the stars and trying to photograph spy satellites.
I hated my part in the charade of murder and horror. My efforts were contributing to the deaths, to the burning alive of children – especially the children. The photographs of young Vietnamese children burned by napalm destroyed me.
I feel totally responsible for what I see. I feel totally responsible for what I photograph.
I was always trying to take art photographs, but the most interesting pictures were the snapshots. The artsy pictures were boring, always.
We have to tell people how images are made. And, the first step is to abandon the idea we’re looking at photographs. We’re looking at entry points to information and to the world in which the image was made.
During the winter when the weather is too poor to work outside, I do use drawings and photographs, but I change my work so it is not just a time and place study.
The poignancy of a photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred
Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.
You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.
Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good
Sometimes I’ve gotten photographs back and people have literally shaven off pieces of me, and I tell them to put it back.
A shudder runs through the viewer of old photographs. For they make visible not the knowledge of the original but the spatial configuration of a moment; what appears in the photograph is not the person but the sum of what can be subtracted from him or her.
If you reduce sculpture to the flat plane of the photograph, you’re passing on only a residue of your concerns… You’re not only reducing the sculpture to a different scale for the purposes of consumption, but you’re denying the real content of the work.
For me, one of the most important aspects of my work is to give people something to dream about, just as I used to dream all those years ago as a child looking at beautiful photographs. I still weave dreams, finding inspiration wherever I can and looking for romance in the real, not the digital, world
Research material can turn up anywhere – in a dusty old letter in an archive, a journal or some old photographs you find in a charity shop.
You can talk about a caption underneath a photograph being true or false, because there is a linguistic element. You can claim that a photograph is a picture of a horse or a cow, but it is the sentence that expresses the claim, which is true or false, not the photograph.
People often trust low-res images because they look more real. But of course they are not more real, just easier to fake. […] You never see a 10-megapixel photograph of Big Foot or the Abominable Snowman or the Loch Ness Monster.
When you can’t think of anything else, photograph graffiti, nudes, or plants.
I was trying to match my mental image of the world, rather than the world itself, and mental images of objects aren’t full of detail. If you think house, you’re going to get something very general… Dropping detail made the photographs more general, like mental images.
He made me suddenly realize that photographs could reach eternity through the moment.
If you recognize a photograph by me, I’m a failure.
Sometimes photographers mistake emotion for what makes a great street photograph.
Facts cling to photographs like dust.
A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model but despite the promptings of our critical intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith.
There’s no more film. Film is gone. We photograph digitally and electronically. We don’t really use film the same way anymore – it’s disappearing little by little. Things change. We have to change with them. There’s no point in liking or not liking it. It is what it is.
Teaching is only interesting because you struggle with trying to talk about photographs, photographs that work, you see.
Merging photographs can be more real than the isolated image because reality is so much more rich than just an isolated moment.
The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.
I know the families that I photograph extremely well and have known them for a very long time.
A good photograph will prove to the viewer how little our eyes permit us to see. Most people, really, don’t see-see only what they have always seen and what they expect to see-where a photographer, if he’s good, will see everything. And better if he sees things he doesn’t expect to see.
As authors evolve and try to trace the precedents that have shaped their work, it sometimes becomes a matter of identifying the shadowy figure in the back row of the mental photograph, or of grabbing at the tail of a memory that’s just slipping out the window into thin air.
I’veВ no doubt that those photographs i took will make people look at everything in a more interesting way – the little tear on oneВ pieceВ of paper, the shadow on another. But good painting has always done that – made you see things. And the most ordinary can be the most extraordinary.
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.
A fan once stopped me outside a theatre and gave me as a gift a signed photograph of Sir Laurence Olivier. It was strange, but nice, too.
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.
Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.
People like Jefferson, Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony and M. L. K. are larger than life to me. I find myself staring at photographs of Lincoln almost in disbelief that he was a man who walked the earth and not merely some fiction writer’s creation.
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.
Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.
No photographer is as good as the simplest camera.
I really like looking at other people’s book collections when I’m at someone’s house. I think it is an amazing cross section of a person’s brain and lifestyle. I think everyone should photograph their book spines and make a website. Seriously.
Larry Schwarm’s photographs of fire on the prairie are so compelling that I cannot imagine any later photographer trying to do better. His pictures convince us that seemingly far away events are close by, relevant to any serious person’s life.
You see in the photograph what you are.
People who take photographs during their whole vacation won’t remember their vacation. They’ll only remember what photographs they took.
I often find myself worrying about celebrities. It’s an entirely caring thing; it’s not like the people who commission those photographs with cruel arrows to go on the covers of the celebrity magazines. The photographs show botched plastic surgery, raging eczema, weight gain and horrible clothes for maximum schadenfreude.
There are some people who become best friends with everyone they photograph. There are people that I really like and admire and respect, but in a way I think it’s better to keep a distance. I think you get better pictures of people that you don’t know very well.
A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.
I have no problem with someone wanting to take a photograph with me. It is a no for selfies with touching of bodies.
I never take photographs myself. I don’t feel like a photographer, more like a recycler
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
Every photograph that is made whether by one who considers himself a professional, or by the tourist who points his snapshot camera and pushes a button, is a response to the exterior world, to something perceived outside himself by the person who operates the camera.
I try to photograph my own and society’s hypocrisy.
Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable.
Digital information, for every type of storage, is unfounded. If everything is on a hard drive and the hard drive freezes up, your whole photography collection could just go away. We can still look at printed photographs of our grandparents. We can physically hold them in our hands and look at it.
The development of fast film allowed the subjects of our photographs to be caught unawares, beyond our or their control. But they are nevertheless caught; the camera holds the last lanyard of control we would forgo.
I photograph [people] as if photographing flowers.
All photography is propaganda.
I found my first picture of Amanda Lepore online in fashion magazines. It was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen in my life. I thought nothing could trump the perfection of that photograph.
The paintings don’t exist outside themselves. There’s no lead photograph off the internet or anything like that. It all comes from my mind and it’s a bit like a little movie each time – how do I get the props, the setting, the time of day, the light, the action.
