Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Photographers - Page 15

I don't try to be original; I just always want to do something that excites me.

You spend your whole life trapped inside your body. Everything you know about the world comes to you through your body.

What's really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer.

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.

No one would bring their horse into a studio, because they don't want to bring their prized animals into an environment where they wouldn't be comfortable or where they might panic and hurt themselves.

You should never reveal your true age.

I have worked in 60 countries, covered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and spent much of 2014 living inside West Africa's Ebola zone, a place gripped by fear and death.

My images were surreal simply in the sense that my vision brought out the fantastic dimension of reality. My only aim was to express reality, for there is nothing more surreal than reality itself. If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary.

Though some will try to deny it, I believe that every woman, at some time in her life, has had or will have the desire to pose nude.

In 1958, a year before the revolution, Magnum wanted to send me to Cuba because they had contacts with the rebels. I'd just spent six months in South America and said 'No', so I missed everything.

Mugabe had a very strange quality about him. He was dapper. He had the strangest skin - it looks very shiny, but it's not oily. It's stretched very finely over his flesh. His eyes have layers of cyan crystals in them. It was a quiet, dark moment when I took his picture.

We always point the lens both outward and inward.

I have gradually confused photography with life.

I look at my women with a Shakespearean element too - the variant of emotions they are capable of - it's not all completely dour, there is a bit of humor in there too! I actually think the whole Shakespearean world is wrapped up in every human being, from beauty to destruction and everything in between.

I don't believe there's any such thing as objective reality. It's only reality as we experience it.

It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.

I often think of my work as visual haiku. It is an attempt to evoke and suggest through as few elements as possible rather than to describe with tremendous detail.

I always go for simplicity.

I don't care about traditional photography. I want more control.

As a young person, and I know it's hard to believe that I was shy, but you could take your camera, and it would take you to places: it was like having a friend, like having someone to go out with and look at the world. I would do things with a camera I wouldn't do normally if I was just by myself.

You can show me some stick ice cream and I can tell you if it's good or not just looking at it.

Family is a major part of my life.

Our pictures are our footprints. It’s the best way to tell people we were here.

I never expected that. I didn't aim for that. All I wanted was to get some nice pictures of trains at night.

It's usually so fraught when you're taking a picture. I work with an 8-by-10 view camera and there's a, you know, hood that I put over my head, and it's tricky and complicated.

I started making photographs as if I were a child myself. This got me to look at things more closely, more slowly, and from vantage points I hadn't considered before.

You can easily take photographs at a wedding - no one would question it. But funerals are different.

War all comes down to these little tiny stories about people's lives that will never be the same.

I've had moments where I've felt like I was on another planet because I saw something beautiful. To me, taking pictures is being alive.

Counting your blessings is a better cure for insomnia than counting sheep - you can fall asleep before you get through half of them.

I like small things, I like small moments that are almost elliptical, that are not necessarily linear; they're natural things that happen in the world, but if you look at them from a slight angle there's more than meets the eye.

Photography helps people to see.

Passion is in all great searches and is necessary to all creative endeavors.

Advertising agencies don't care about a better world in the end. They are servants of their client: what the client wants is what they get. Their only problem is to not lose the budget. I think its a shame because advertising is so boring and it can be so interesting. They should ask more artists to make interesting campaigns.

Creativity is an ode to life. It is not a form of entertainment. It is a form of joy.

When you put the subjectivity of the art together with the context of the science, you have this very powerful conjunction of opposites and together they are greater than either one could ever be.

The people that I photographed allowed me to photograph them because they didn't want to be alone, and the truth is I didn't want to be alone making the pictures.

Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality. In the cookery pages, the food always looks amazing, right? Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.

...you don't need to be technically great, because if you have a strong philosophy people will be moved by your pictures regardless.

I didn't want to let women down. One of the stereotypes I see breaking is the idea of aging and older women not being beautiful.

What pedophiles and people who have sexual desires on children lose sight of to a terrible, terrible degree - a devastating degree - is that their victims are real people who will suffer forever whatever abuses are perpetrated on them.

If I were talking to someone, I'd look at their eyes, not at the blemish on the side of their face. But as soon as you open up that photo on a 30-inch monitor, you'd say, 'Oh my gosh, where did that come from?'

You’re always working at the margin of what you don’t understand, that’s the only exhilarating place to be. To just illustrate what you already know is condescending, and a waste of your time.

The same camera that photographs a murder scene can photograph a beautiful society affair at a big hotel.

I do not use the word 'genius' lightly, but if David Bowie is not a genius, then there is no such thing.

I don't need the money I generate from photography to support myself.

We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.

I see no reason for recording the obvious.

One advantage of photography is that it's visual and can transcend language.

I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important.

Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure. If man wishes to express himself photographically, he must understand, surely to a certain extent, his relationship to life.

War is death. If we are to engage in war, then we should have to stare it straight in the face and call it by its rightful name.

I would travel only by horse, if I had the choice.

In our society, most of us wear protective masks of various kinds and for various reasons. Very often the end result is that the masks grow to us, displacing our original characters with our assumed characters.

I'm firmly convinced that true beauty only springs from the acceptance of oneself, from an awareness of who we really are.

All my life I've taken photographs of people who are completely at peace being what they were in the situations I photographed them in.

I'm always mentally photographing everything as practice.

If each photograph steals a bit of the soul, isn't it possible that I give up pieces of mine every time I take a picture?

When I take a black-and-white portrait, it's not particularly meant to please you. It's meant to talk to you; it's meant to shame you. It's meant to scream out at you, and it has a message.

I enjoy nothing more than spending time with my loved ones, young and old, and at least once a year we get together for a formal family photograph.