Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Photographers - Page 13

Photography was so perfectly suited to my sensibility and situation, it gave me a voice, a kind of crazy, out-of-whack voice, at the beginning, but a voice. I could finally put into images bottled up feelings of absurdity and alienation - and also joy and delight.

Childhood has been idealised as a lost garden paradise to which we can never return. We are excluded from this world of carelessness, innocence and unity. But the imaginary kingdom is nothing more than a projection of adult ideas and concerns onto the image, an expression of our own yearnings. By photographing children alone, divorced from any social setting, I allow them to exist on their own...I am exploring the equivocal connection between self and world.

Searching is everything - going beyond what you know. And the test of the search is really in the things themselves, the things you seek to understand. What is important is not what you think about them, but how they enlarge you.

My only agenda is to bring attention to otherwise ignored and shunned lives.

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.

Consider the bloody history of Europe: there was a great aspiration for high culture, yet this very same culture was shaped by brutality and barbarism.

A fine image is geometry, modulated by the heart

Being called a dance photographer makes me bristle. You might say that dance is my landscape. The root of my interest is movement or, rather, how movement can be interpreted photographically, and dance provides a perfect opportunity for this.

People know what authentic communication feels like, so having someone else handle your social media/commenting doesn't feel honest to me.

It is never a good idea to not be comfortable.

I don't like directing a lot of people. So trying to keep things really simple and elegant is my preferred way of working.

Making a definitive declaration of intent or meaning kills the photograph.

The gallery is generating work for the masses.

I like the Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas more than the actual one.

I wanted to change history and preserve humanity. But in the process I changed myself and preserved my own.

No one moment is most important. Any moment can be something.

I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied.

People are under the illusion that it's easy...Technically, it is complex. You have a million options with equipment to distract you. I tell my students to simplify their equipment.

Things looked funny because my pictures depend on an emotional state... I know this is true and I thought about this for a long time. Somehow it made me feel very, very good.

The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.

I like the aesthetics of the Church.

A photographer who wants to see....must recognize the value of the familiar. Your ability to see is not increased by the distance you put between yourself and your home. If you do not see what is all around you every day, what will you see when you go to Tangiers?....Good seeing doesn't ensure good photographs, but good photographic expression is impossible without it.

Photography for me has been tremendously good, because I'm not a very sociable person. I'm happy reading or sitting in the library or going for walks. So photography has brought me in contact with people and made me understand people in a way that I probably wouldn't have done if I hadn't been a photographer. And so I'm grateful for that, really.

They all wanted to model for me because they knew I wouldn’t take advantage of them.

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.

It was a fortunate moment in history that I happened to be in. There was a confluence of the internet and all this other stuff that I was able to capitalize on.

Never blog just to put something out there. I would post only things that excite me.

Creativity is the new literacy

Shoot from the gut, edit with the brain

I photograph different people all the time. I like to shoot all kinds of people.

To me, a painter, if not the most useful, is the least harmful member of our society.

I was obsessed from the moment I took my first photograph. I wanted to make photography my career.

For the animals, they came from the University in Uppsala and all different kinds of clinics here.

The picture I was hoping for is never the picture I get, but yeah, I think they fail all the time. Fortunately my clients don't think they do, so I can continue to have a career. But I just look at them and think.

I wanted my photographs to be as powerful as the last thing a person sees or remembers before death.

To me, the work I do is a means of interpreting unsettling truths, of bearing witness, and of sounding an alarm. The beauty of formal representation both carries an affirmation of life and subversively brings us face to face with news from our besieged world.

You should be constantly asking yourself: What do I want to say next? What do I believe in? Who am I? What is my image? To be a successful photographer, you have to have a unique point of view otherwise you'll get lost in the mix.

I'm known for fashion photographs, but fashion photographs were mostly a joke for me. In 'Vogue,' girls were playing at being duchesses, but they were actually from Flatbush, Brooklyn. They would play duchesses, and I would play Cecil Beaton.

In black and white there are more colors than color photography, because you are not blocked by any colors so you can use your experiences, your knowledge, and your fantasy, to put colors into black and white.

An aspect of the work has to do with altering the literal/cultural meaning of existing public images by making minimal changes and additions. Using superimposition, juxtaposition and other contextual changes, I am functioning as a visual guerrilla.

Beautiful dreams - if the world were more beautiful they would come true - But the world is relentless & cruel - people are - they must be, I suppose, or they could not live.

I love all women. Women are sublime beings. I love all of it: their eyes, their noses, their bodies.

I think a lot of times, especially for certain stories, photographers travel together for safety reasons, and they also invariably cross paths. But you could have 10 photographers shooting together in the same spot but capturing different images.

A photograph is a moment - when you press the button, it will never come back.

Specificity of time and place drop away and one starts to think about the picture, as much as what it is of.

What is it about a secret love that makes everything they do shine, everything they say sound like a sonnet and every expression they make perfect, when to everyone else you speak to they're quite ordinary. It's a cruel sort of thing.

I remember growing up and hearing the word "ugly" a lot. "I'm ugly." "She ugly." "He ugly." I hated it then, and I hate it now. I go past physical beauty; I tell people they have a beautiful spirit and that is something different.

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 cliché - already seen and expected.

If a picture is good, it tells many different stories.

Chance is the one thing you can't buy. You have to pay for it and you have to pay for it with your life, spending a lot of time, you pay for it with time, not the wasting of time but the spending of time.

Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.

I keep trying to find ways to shift the viewer's attention away from the object they are looking at and toward their own perceptual process in relation to that object. The question for me always is: how can I make you aware of your own activity of looking, instead of losing your attention to thoughts about what it is that you are looking at?

I want to do the most subversive thing I couldn't do as a child: I want to take back the planet's future.

My first exhibition oriented towards raising awareness was in 2008 in Paris. That was the first time I felt like I actually did something related to wildlife protection, and ever since that time, I haven't stopped.

I think of the nudes as seed pods, like flowers or grasses. They are universal bodies.

I don't believe in marriage. I think at worst it's a hostile political act, a way for small-minded men to keep women in the house and out of the way, wrapped up in the guise of tradition and conservative religious nonsense. At best, it's a happy delusion - these two people who truly love each other and have no idea how truly miserable they're about to make each other. But, but, when two people know that, and they decide with eyes wide open to face each other and get married anyway, then I don't think it's conservative or delusional. I think it's radical and courageous and very romantic.

Photography is about being exquisitely present.

I'm just interested in people on the edges. I feel an affinity for people who haven't had the best breaks in society. I'm always on their side. I find them more human, maybe. What I want to do more than anything is acknowledge their existence.

Pure photography allows us to create portraits which render their subjects with absolute truth, truth both physical and psychological. That is the principal which provided my starting point, once I had said to myself that if we can create portraits of subjects that are true, we thereby in effect create a mirror of the times in which those subjects live.

For me, Africa is a land of light and contrast. Black and white is the best way to express the solitary emotion and vitality of wildlife.