Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Photographers - Page 6

Do we choose to see possibilities? Do we really believe that they're there? Perception controls our reality, and if we don't believe it, we won't see it.

The key is to not let the camera, which depicts nature in so much detail, reveal just what the eye picks up, but what the heart picks up as well.

Making children cry for a photographer can be considered mean. But I would say that making children laugh and show off their jeans for an apparel ad is just as exploitative and less natural. Toddlers' natural state, like, 30 percent of the time, is crying, and it doesn't indicate pain or suffering.

Light enhances but its shadow deletes, thus giving the picture its depth, its third dimension and its subtractive properties... I believe that commitment and technical skill can be achieved by means of one's own will and study , while fantasy and passion are more valuable because they are innate and inescapably peculiar assets.

At first I wasn't sure that I had the talent, but I did know I had a fear of failure, and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it.

Everybody hates to edit my film. Back in the day, we called it film - now, my digital cards. But I shoot an awful lot of pictures. I don't want to hesitate, because I believe the moment is everything in a picture. So, I take the pictures.

There is something beautiful about photography; it allows the self to be reunited with the world.

As a child I had been so afraid of so many things, but as soon as I held a camera in my hand, I began to expose myself to the very things that were foreign to me and that I had always feared.

I see the Calvin Klein girl as strong, fun, and confident.

Most of my photographs were taken on the spur of the moment, very quickly, just as they occurred. All attention focuses on the specific instant, almost too good to be true, which can only vanish in the following one.

Of course I will continue photography. I love photography. But when you become old, it's too much.

If you do not see what is around you every day, what will you see when you go to Tangiers?

A lot of my friends were mostly working in black-and-white - people like Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and others. We would exchange prints with each other, and they were always very supportive of what I was doing.

What I am looking for is a certain grace.

Allow yourself the freedom to step away from perfection because it is only then that you can find success.

There's a time when people say your work is revolutionary, but you have to keep being revolutionary. I can't keep shooting pop stars all my life. You have to keep changing, keep pushing yourself, looking for the new, the unusual.

It's important to be honest enough about your work, and the areas in which you can improve. I'm still learning every day and I'm still Hungry to create more and better work, hence the name.

I'm into capturing the moment. Sometimes, I'll rip the camera out of my assistant's hands and he'll be shouting, But there's no film in the camera! and I think, Never mind! Let's go.

I am a passionate lover of the snapshot, because of all photographic images it comes closest to truth.

Creativity is the ability to look at the ordinary and see the extraordinary.

A photo is always a kind of lie. Truth is only present for a matter of a fraction of a second.

Color tends to corrupt photography and absolute color corrupts it absolutely. Consider the way color film usually renders blue sky, green foliage, lipstick red, and the kiddies' playsuit. These are four simple words which must be whispered: color photography is vulgar.

For me, the importance of photography is that you can point to something, that you can let other people see things. Ultimately, it is a matter of the specialness of the ordinary.

An image of the Earth, its landscapes, directly affects people. The beauty of the Earth creates enormous emotion, and through that emotion, you can transmit knowledge and raise consciousness.

If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time.

I think what happens is that you do the project first, then you think about what it's about. Years later, you figure out why you've done things.

The portrait of a person is one of the most difficult things to do. It means you must almost bring the presence of that person photographed to other people in such a way that they don't have to know that person personally, but that they are still confronted with a human being that they won't forget. That's a portrait.

I like Church furniture.

Photography used to be not for the faint of heart. Its rigors would weed out the not-so-committed pretty quickly. You had to crank the f-stop ring yourself!

When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.

Professionally I've evolved with what's required, but the pictures I do for pleasure haven't changed, except for the cars in the background, the clothing. I haven't changed at all.

My ambition was always to show aspects of daily life as if we were seeing them for the first time.

The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.

A photocopier is a camera in its own right. I was fortunate to grow up in the time and culture that I did. I was allowed to develop an awareness that the art that really moves me is actually based on an original image.

You learn to see by practice. It's Just like playing tennis, you get better the more you play. The more you look around at things, the more you see. The more you photograph, the more you realize what can be photographed and what can't be photographed. You just have to keep doing it.

A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they'll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won't do a thing for you if you don't have anything in your head or in your heart.

The desert ... may serve better as the backdrop for the problematic relationship between man and the environment. The human struggle, the successes ... both noble and foolish, are readily apparent in the desert. Symbols and relationships seem to arise that stand for the human condition itself.

Don't put my name on it. These are simply documents I make.

The denunciation of suffering by photography has replaced the religious justification of suffering in painting. Denunciation is a function of photojournalism, and in itself that's a step in the right direction.

I think the media is a fear-mongering operation. They love to rile their viewership up or to scare them.

I love sexy, intelligent women. Sexiness is hard to define. Of course a woman can be beautiful, but I think it's something in the eyes. It's a woman saying something secretive, something in her eyes that's almost animalistic.

The still must tease with the promise of a story the viewer of it itches to be told.

Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.

I got my first camera when I was 21 - my boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday - but at that point politics was my life, and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium.

So I tried to get my shot with a 50mm and I did it - this is when we're shooting film, not digital. The guy that hired me looked through the pictures and was like, "Oh, this is pretty good. You did a good job." And I was like, "Yeah, I'm sorry. I only had a 50mm. My girlfriend rented the wrong lens..." and he stopped looking at the pictures and he looked up at me and he said, "You shot this with a 50mm? You're hired."

It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.

In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.

I was an economics major, which I enjoyed because I had a good business sense.

Our planet is currently undergoing a mass extinction of species called the Anthropocene - the Age of Man.

The world makes up my pictures, not me.

The experience of life that you and I have is pretty much a jigsaw puzzle in the box: Day-to-day experiences of disconnected pieces that don't seem to justify the efforts we make each day.

Learning how to be persuasive has been really crucial to my life both professionally and personally.

Good photographs aren't just complex. They are enigmatic. Images are beguiling. And the way they play into our psychology, into our visual cortex, is something we still don't understand.

To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

A photographer must choose a palette as painters choose theirs.

When I take photographs, my body inevitably enters a trancelike state. Briskly weaving my way through the avenues, every cell in my body becomes as sensitive as radar, responsive to the life of the streets... If I were to give it words, I would say: "I have no choice... I have to shoot this... I can't leave this place for another's eyes... I have to shoot it... I have no choice." An endless, murmuring refrain.

The whole series is black-and-white, so when I went to shoot one of the women I only had black-and-white film with me. She had reddish hair and was a very pretty girl, a nice girl.

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.

I drifted into photography like one drifts into prostitution. First I did it to please myself, then I did it to please my friends, and eventually I did it for the money.

I love going to the runway shows. It's not so much for me a shopping trip as it is the appreciation of the craft of these design geniuses who come up with beautiful color combinations and beautiful proportion suggestions and these kind of ideas, so I look at the runway shows in very different ways, just kind of a romantic artistic interpretation of how they would like to see fashion going forward, but for me it's much more abstract. The runway shows are much more abstract than you know what ends up on people is much more real to me.