A Quote by Robert Mapplethorpe

I like to look at pictures, all kinds. And all those things you absorb come out subconsciously one way or another. You'll be taking photographs and suddenly know that you have resources from having looked at a lot of them before. There is no way you can avoid this. But this kind of subconscious influence is good, and it certainly can work for one. In fact, the more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.
There's this thing that publishes pictures of people out and about. So when I go out, I do see pictures of myself. I don't know where those pictures come from - I mean, I don't see the cameras. But I guess I'm just not looking for them.
It's a lot to do with the Marvel ecosystem. It's different from the traditional studio system. Because it is, for how absurdly, incredibly successful they are, it is a family. It is a loving family. It is a group of people who only care about making things good. They don't choose directors who don't want to work with them in the way that they work. And the directors that they choose are better for having done it. Every director who comes out of that system are one kind when they come in, another when they come out. And they usually come back for more. They usually make more than one.
There are a lot of things that you see in the world ...We have a collection of gloves that have been run over by trucks that a friend named JP Williams collects. They are really beautiful. They look like sculpture. And he has a hundred pictures of them - we're making a book out of them. It's all that kind of ephemera, things that exist that no one really looks at unless it's put to them in a certain way.
Some of my pictures are poem-like in the sense that they are very condensed, haiku-lik. There are others that, if they were poetry, would be more like Ezra Pound. There is a lot of information in most of my pictures, but not the kind of information you see in documentary photography. There is emotional information in my photographs.
There is a subconscious way of taking violence as a way of expression, as a normality, and it has a lot of effects in the youth in the way they absorb education and what they hope to get out of life.
In a way, it's like the photographer always has his vision of me. The pictures that I'm known for are not really my image, they're always the photographer's vision of me. I can look a hundred different ways, but what people see of me in pictures is not really my image.
My mother said that when I was young I was constantly saying, Look at this - Look at that. I think that taking pictures must be my way of asking people to Look at this - Look at that. If my photographs make the viewer feel what I did when I first took them - Isn't this funny... terrible... moving... beautiful? - then I've accomplished my purpose.
I've always wanted to travel. My mom was a geography queen, I knew the atlas, and I looked at her pictures of all her world travels because she traveled a lot before I was born, with my brother. I was always so jealous. I kind of chose a job that would be a way I could see the world without having to pay for it. I'm not going to be a flight attendant. I'm way too busy to be that.
When I was at drama school, people weren't taking pictures of themselves every five minutes. So I didn't realise how I looked. It was only when people started taking pictures of themselves that I looked at myself and thought: 'Oh my God, I look really miserable.' Even when I'm happy I look sad.
When I go out, I kind of put a hat on and glasses, so I'm kind of just like a photographer going around taking pictures, and people hopefully don't recognize me. But sometimes they do, and then I'll do a photo for them, too.
When you work fast, what you put in your pictures is what your brought with yoiu - your own ideas and concepts. When you spend more time on a project, you learn to understand your subjects. There comes a time when it is not you who is taking the pictures. Something special happens between the photographer and the people he is photographing. He realizes that they are giving the pictures to him.
I think fame and all that madness, people taking your pictures all the time, drives me insane. It's a catch 22...the more they take pictures of you, the more upset you get by it and the more crazy you look and the more pictures they take of you. I think it's disgusting what's happened with that kind of celebrity culture right now.
It is proper to take photographs or other kinds of pictures of persons to put them before us for sight or remembrance. But it is improper to make pictures and images of God and to take his likenesses therefrom to his great distortion.
In music I still prefer the minor key, and in printing I like the light coming from the dark. I like pictures that surmount the darkness, and many of my photographs are that way. It is the way I see photographically. For practical reasons, I think it looks better in print too.
I think the way I feel when I look at Evan comes from her. In pictures taken the day she married my dad, she was reckless, laughing, spinning around in circles. She looked like her whole world was him. She looked a kind of happy I can't even imagine. I don't want that. I don't want to be like that. I don' want to feel the way she did because I know what happens when you do. You love with your whole heart, with everything, and you wake up one morning and kiss someone good-bye the way you always do except you mean it as good-bye forever.
I love a natural look in pictures. I like people with a feeling one way or another - it shows an inner life. I like to see that there’s something going on inside them.
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