Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Photographers - Page 10

There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough - there has to be vision, and the two together can make a good photograph.

While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.

What I really try to do is photograph people at rest, in a state of serenity.

The most dangerous fundamentalists aren't just waging war in Iraq; they're attacking evolution, blocking medical research and ignoring the environment.

Of the thousands of people, celebrated and unknown, who have sat before my camera, I am often asked who was the most difficult subject, or the easiest, or which picture is my favorite. This last question is like asking a mother which child she likes the most.

When you look at my photos, just look into the eyes of my subjects. The eyes say so much.

From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour.

Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.

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.

I don't love the world. I think Jupiter should have hit us.

I grew up in New York, in a rough neighborhood where our biggest concern was not getting beat up. I was always far from the center of the Big Apple.

As an amateur you have an advantage over photographers - you can do as you wish... This should make amateurs the happiest of photographers.

You know, the camera is not meant just to show misery.

I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive.

I like to show subjects inside a sealed veneer. There's a sense that you can't get in.

Autumn in my garden is when trees give their tickertape welcome to winter.

I love beautiful women. I love to show their personality, their sexuality. There's a fashion side to my erotic pictures: I love beautiful shoes and jewellery. But the erotic work I do is too daring and provocative for a fashion magazine. It's more fun, and if you have the right girl who likes it, more exciting, too. It's fashion photography, but with fewer clothes.

I've never made any picture, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.

There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work.

I had a growing feeling that most of the best art of the world in painting and sculpture had been done, and that this newest form [photography] was more related to the progress and tempo of modern science of the eye.

No matter what. I like to be different. Its not easy to work the way we want, because we have to deal with a lot of judgmental people, but we've always been in that position, so its nothing we cannot handle.

Surfaces simultaneously reveal and conceal.

The stones in your driveway may have come from the slaves who spend all day breaking rocks because it's cheaper for the company to get them from India, where the labor is free. We are all connected. And we all have human value. That's what my work is about.

If you are careful with people, they will offer you part of themselves. That is the big secret.

I saw a man walk into my camera viewfinder from the left. He took a pistol out of his holster and raised it. I had no idea he would shoot. It was common to hold a pistol to the head of prisoners during questioning. So I prepared to make that picture - the threat, the interrogation. But it didn't happen. The man just pulled a pistol out of his holster, raised it to the VC's head and shot him in the temple. I made a picture at the same time. (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.)

The subject must be thought of in terms of the 20th century, of houses he lives in and places he works, in terms of the kind of light the windows in these places let through and by which we see him every day.

Seeing is more than a physiological phenomenon... We see not only with our eyes but with all that we are and all that our culture is. The artist is a professional see-er.

When you are a photographer, you work all the time, because your eye is the first camera.

Art isn't complete until it's shared.

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.

What amazes me is that you can have 10 different photographers in the same room, and you see 10 different rooms. You realize how much of it is the person's perspective rather than the situation itself.

Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph, is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk.

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.

Reality is always extraordinary.

Photography is a very lonely medium. There’s a kind of beautiful loneliness in voyeurism. And that’s why I’m a photographer.

When you find yourself beginning to feel a bond between yourself and the people you photograph, when you laugh and cry with their laughter and tears, you will know you are on the right track.

If slaughterhouses had glass walls the whole world would be vegetarian.

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?

Fantasy isn't something I put into the pictures; I don't try and inject them with a sense of play. But it's about being an honest photographer; a photograph is as much of a mirror of the photographer as it is the subject.

Photography can light-up darkness and expose ignorance.

I want a better world, but also a realistic world. We can only create a better world by becoming realistic.

Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.

A photographer must be prepared to catch and hold on to those elements which give distinction to the subject or lend it atmosphere.

I emerged in that incredible moment in the 1980s when all kinds of social questions about subjectivity and objectivity, about who was making, who was looking.

It's extremely difficult to say what one actually means by 'sculpture' other than, in a provisional sense, it's something that goes on the floor or a pedestal, and loosely applies to a certain history of the use of that term.

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.

It's important to me to have what I photograph undergo a certain transformation - to become a thing different from what we are used to, to be another version of itself.

The aim and end of the artist is not truth exactly, much less fact; it is effect... There is no doubt he [the photographer] best gets his effect by way of truth, but he uses it as he would a servant, not a master.

If you met Faith Hill in person, you would think she's absolutely beautiful. And when you take her picture, you will see every flaw that you never saw in person. Those flaws not only become visible but magnified.

Trust that little voice in your head that says 'Wouldn't it be interesting if...'; And then do it.

I actually try and work before my mind is telling me what to do.

We see the world through our experience.

It's equally hard and labor intensive to create an image on the computer as it is in a darkroom. Believe me.

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.

All critics should be assassinated.

What use having a great depth of field, if there is not an adequate depth of feeling?

We're all products of what we want to project to the world. Even people who don't spend any time, or think they don't, on preparing themselves for the world out there - I think that ultimately they have for their whole lives groomed themselves to be a certain way, to present a face to the world.

A secret love is beautiful, sweet and sacred when it's just a light infatuation; but when that person reaches over and touches you in the heart, making it alive in a way it has never known, that secret love becomes frightening, because you can never make them love you, you would never want to make them love you...but all the same, no matter which way you view it, they don't love you...and your heart doesn't know how to beat the same.

Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.

I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx.