Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Photographers - Page 11

The way that light hits objects in life, three-dimensional objects before you photograph them, is really the story of photography.

To me, you’re either an activist or an inactivist.

The idea of photography as evidence is pure bullshit. A photo is no more proof of any reality than what you may hear being said by someone in a bus. We only record details, small fragments of the world.

The purpose of art is to raise people to a higher level of awareness than they would otherwise attain on their own.

Let me give you a hint, young ones, what it is you will become as you grow. What things make you cry, what things bring you pain, what things hurt you now, what things threaten your peace; what things you fear, what things bring you rage. It will be the opposite of these that you will become if you chose to accept your weakness, embrace the Son and simply grow.

You cannot see me from where I look at myself

Our best pictures happen by grace.

If you are truly successful in capturing the pulse of life, then you can speak of a good photograph.

One thing that's consistent in all of my work is that these aren't accidents; they're all conscious landscapes. They're all things that we're doing and that we have done through our legal and social systems and structures of capitalism.

There are never any absolutes in the fashion business: one day you may like black, and the next day you like colour. I think it's a good lesson that we should never believe too much in any one thing - because the next day it's out, and if we're stuck to it, we're out, too.

You do your work as a photographer and everything becomes past. Words are more like thoughts; the photographer's picture is always surrounded by a kind of romantic glamor - no matter what you do, and how you twist it.

Tactility was rejected in conceptual photography. I embrace the possibilities of my medium. Surface, texture, and tactility is something analog photography can do well, or it is something I can do well in analog photography. It can be hard to know what or who is in control.

The big question that everyone is asking themselves, or what they should be asking themselves right now, is what role has the media played in not just missing a certain part of American society that wanted to vote for, say, Donald Trump, but what role has the media played in dehumanizing other people and helping create these conditions that people are so afraid of, say, Muslims and extremism?

I don't think at that time I realized how important it was and how important it was for me to be here and carry on that legacy in our family of being a photographer.

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.

I want there to be hints of narrative everywhere in the image so that people can make up their own stories about them. But I don't want to have my own narrative and force it on to them.

What’s so incredibly amusing with photography is that while seemingly an art of the surface, it catches things I haven’t even noticed. And it pains me not to have seen things in all their depth.

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

My friends love this idea of me as half man, half camera.

Photography to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasurable it my be.

Making any statement of your feelings is risky. It's just like making pictures.

The camera basically is a license to explore.

I don't talk about success. I don't know what it is. Wait until I'm dead.

What is elegance? Soap and water!

Almost inevitably there are tensions in the picture, tensions between the outside world and the inside world. For me, a successful picture resolves these tensions without eliminating them.

Photojournalist? With a few exceptions, those of us working as photojournalists might now more appropriately call ourselves illustrators. For, unlike real reporters, whose job it is to document what's going down, most of us go out in the world expecting to give form to the magazine, or to newspaper editor's ideas, using what's become over the years a pretty standardized visual language. So we search for what is instantly recognizable, supportive of the text, easiest to digest, or most marketable - more mundane realities be damned.

The majority of photographers still seek artistic effects, imitating other mediums of graphic expression. The result is a hybrid product that does not succeed in giving their work the most valuable characteristic it should have, - photographic quality.

Many photographers get involved with the people whom they take pictures of; others prefer being observers, keeping a certain distance.

I'm not a great believer in the power of the moving image. A still image has greater lasting power.

Photography is a medium, a language, through which I might come to experience directly, live more closely with, the interaction between myself and nature.

I think most serious photographers understand that there's this large gap between the world and how the world looks through a photograph.

Wherever there is light, one can photograph.

To understand another human being you must gain some insight into the conditions which made him what he is.

You've got to push yourself harder. You've got to start looking for pictures nobody else could take. You've got to take the tools you have and probe deeper.

I have never sought out the extraordinary or the scoop. I looked at what complemented my life. The beauty of the ordinary was always the source of my greatest emotions.

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.

It's amazing how if you turn up at a studio without an idea, a picture will take itself from momentum, and you quickly can lose control.

When I look at the women, it's from a male gaze of being fascinated, because beyond my mother, I've been around notorious women all of my life, and then, secondly, when I look at women and try and create fictional stories around them.

... any dodge, or trick, or conjuration of any kind is open to the photographer's use so that it belongs to his art and is not false to nature. If the dodges, tricks, etc., lead the photographer astray, so much the worse for him; if they do not assist him to represent nature, he is not fit to use them. It is not the fault of the dodges, it is the fault of the bungler.

It is still important that every project I do I do something real, that feels true to me.

I have taken some hits here and there, but I've been most damaged carrying my little terrier to bed, and I broke my hip turning off the lamp. I've been nicked a few times, but he put me out of business. So life is a very strange adventure.

I don't need to know anything about the people I photograph, but it's important that I recognize something about myself in them.

All photographs are about light. The great majority of photographs record light as a way of describing objects in space. A few photographs are less about objects and more about the space that contains them. Still fewer photographs are about light itself.

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.

We all experience it. Those moments when we gasp and say, Oh, look at that. Maybe it's nothing more than the way a shadow glides across a face, but in that split second, when you realize something truly remarkable is happening and disappearing right in front of you, if you can pass a camera before your eye, you'll tear a piece of time out of the whole, and in a breath, rescue it and give it new meaning.

The most important thing I gave the Beatles was my friendship. They trusted me: there was no fear in being photographed.

War is the greatest failure of mankind.

Using simple equipment and daylight alone is for me a pleasure and a replenishment.

Then at one point I did not need to translate the notes; they went directly to my hands

The pictures are there, and you just take them.

I don't at least for me I don't ever really look for trends. I'm looking for just what captures my attention at that time and rarely do I ever look back and try and put together trends or say this kind of trend is important. For me it's about the individual expression and if you go back and look through the archives you might find certain things become trends, but it's just not something that particularly interests me.

You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo. No individual photo explains anything. That's what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium.

My inspiration has always been photography's ability to stop time and reveal what the naked eye cannot see.

I suspect it is for one’s self-interest that one looks at one’s surroundings and one’s self. This search is personally born and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs. The camera is not merely a reflecting pool and the photographs are not exactly the mirror, mirror on the wall that speaks with a twisted tongue. Witness is borne and puzzles come together at the photographic moment which is very simple and complete. The mind-finger presses the release on the silly machine and it stops time and holds what its jaws can encompass and what the light will stain.

When I work, and in my art, I hold hands with God.

The smoke and the fire and the speed, the action and the sound, and everything that goes together, [the steam engine] is the most beautiful machine that we ever made, there's just nothing like it.

A photograph has edges the world does not.

I never do pictures that I've done before - but I really try not to. Whenever I get an assignment I try to think how to shoot this person for this story in this magazine at this point in time.

I think the ordinary is a very under-exploited aspect of our lives because it is so familiar.

No one can say how long the process of human extinction might take, but as it proceeds, the same global order will prevail that always prevails: rich nations will find ways to protect themselves and make themselves comfortable, while the poor nations and the poor people of the planet will suffer.