Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Photographers - Page 12

When we are angry or depressed in our creativity, we have misplaced our power. We have allowed someone else to determine our worth, and then we are angry at being undervalued.

We don't understand what photography is doing. We don't understand the power of its rhetoric. We don't understand why the Provoke photographers showed Tokyo city as a ghastly and alien city when it was really going through this period of mega-capitalist growth. It's a very, very, very powerful force, the photograph. People ask me why it has such an ability to captivate us. And I just don't know.

The wandering photographer sees the same show that everyone else sees. He, however, stops to watch it.

Never take a picture of anything you are not passionately interested in.

When I worked with wildlife a lot in the Eighties and Nineties, I learnt the meaning of patience. And when I worked with trees, I learned the meaning of humility.

I believe in a visual language that should be as strong as the written word.

I am obsessed with beauty. I want everything to be perfect, and of course it isn't. And that's a tough place to be because you're never satisfied.

We are only beginning to learn what to say in a photograph. The world we live in is a succession of fleeting moments, any one of which might say something significant.

In the same way, photography, for me, has fragmented. You do have people doing bodies of work - often with found photographs - that are quite hard to understand unless you got a very sophisticated visual history behind you. But there are different camps.

I went into photography because it seemed like the perfect vehicle for commenting on the madness of today's existence.

Great photography comes about at the right time but it also needs the right cut that enhances that precise moment. Photography must feed on both contents and form, if it gives up the one for the other it is not going to last.

At the end of the '90s, I was very bored with the usual models, so I discovered a new generation that impressed me with their fresh look. I still keep working with models like Gisele Bundchen and Kate Moss, and I am still looking for new, interesting faces. Life is about discovery, and you should never stop searching.

I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That's the curse of being a photographer.

At the end of the day, photography is ninety-nine percent business, connections, and politics and one percent creativity.

To me photography functions as a fossilization of time.

I don't give a damn about the money. I earn my living well enough.

For me, the subtlety of black and white inspires the imagination of the individual viewer to complete the picture in the mind's eye. It doesn't attempt to compete with the outside world. I believe it is calmer and gentler than colour, and persists longer in our visual memory.

I'm happy to help Crest Whitestrips on their mission to inspire photographers everywhere to capture smile moments and would encourage aspiring photographers to express themselves through their photos.

For me it is essential to understand that everyone is alone. Not in the sense of loneliness, but rather in the sense that no one can completely understand someone else. I know very well what Diane Arbus means when she says that one cannot crawl into someone else's skin, but there is always an urge to do so anyway. I want to awaken definite sympathies for the person I have photographed.

Photography is one of the most authentic and integral modes of expression possible in this world in which we live.

Sometimes I feel like . . . the world is a place I bought a ticket to. It’s a big show for me, as if it wouldn’t happen if I wasn’t there with a camera.

I had gone to nursing school at Northampton Community College in my hometown of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. And nursing didn't feel quite right, and an old boyfriend gave me a 35-millimeter camera just to play with. So, I took a darkroom class.

My emotions, instincts, and interests are all with nature.

When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.

We see in colour all the time. Everything around us is in colour. Black and white is therefore immediately an interpretation of the world, rather than a copy.

Digital technology has thrown a closed shop wide open, and there are more people out there snapping away than ever before. Some of the pictures are bad, some of them are good, and many of them need some seasoning and direction.

I suffered evils, but without allowing them to rob me of the freedom to expand.

Work is something you can count on, a trusted, lifelong friend who never deserts you.

Sometimes the picture is more interesting than what is going on. Sometimes the picture is suggestive of greater things in society or the history of what might be connected to the theme in the pictures and those are worth exploring.

Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.

Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry.

Everything is a subject. Every subject has a rhythm. To feel it is the raison detre. The photograph is a fixed moment of such a raison detre, which lives on in itself.

I'm really interested in older women, to be honest, because they have lived a life that I've not yet lived. So I really want to learn from them, and I think culturally we tend to dispose of women once they get to a certain age and they don't look a certain way.

If you surround yourself with talented people and you give them the freedom to achieve, then the work will never fail.

Photography cannot change the world, but it can show the world, especially when it changes.

For me, making a photograph is mostly an intellectual process of understanding people or cities and their historical and phenomenological connections. At that point the photo is almost made, and all that remains is the mechanical process.

It's about finding meaning through light. I'm always interested in tensions. A primary one is the collision between the familiar and the strange.

A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.

There's nothing worth photographing more than 100 yards from the car

I'm a photographer, period. I love photography, the immediacy of it. I like the craft, the idea of saying 'I'm a photographer.'

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.

I'm looking for the unexpected. I'm looking for things I've never seen before.

In photography one should surely proceed from essence of the object and attempt to represent it with photographic terms alone.

I'm trying to grow more as a journalist and understand the story I'm photographing in order to communicate it in a better way.

The images are compositions of photos superimposed over painted backgrounds, then finished off with digital alterations.

I always knew my death would be a possible consequence of the work I do. But for me it was a price I was willing to pay because this is what I believed in.

It's insane, the Internet. Totally craziness. Like a little cancer. People can just do whatever they want, say whatever they want, be totally anonymous. It's totally out of control.

Much earnest philosphical thought is born of the life which springs from close association with nature.

To be more creative is to get closer to childhood.

All I wanted was to connect my moods with those of Paris. Beauty paints and when it painted most, I shot.

Photography is humbling, it really is, and it really allows for me to atone for some of the missteps I've made throughout the course of my life.

I don't want to be an artist that gets stuck doing one thing. I don't want to be an artist who people look back at and say, 'His early work was really great.'

I can go into the wilderness and not see anyone for days and experience a kind of space that hasn't changed for tens of thousands of years. Having that experience was necessary to my perception of how photography can look at the changes humanity has brought about in the landscape. My work does become a kind of lament.

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda.

For me, the most important thing I learned was just honing my eye. I think I had a good eye.

A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there - even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.

Life is a force in its own right. It is a new element. And it has altered the Earth. It covers Earth like a skin.

Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere.

In every form of art, you really want the experience of the images to transcend the medium, for the medium to disappear into the greater experience of viewing the work. So that you forget you are looking at a painting, or a photograph.