Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Photographers - Page 7

Everything that I see must become personal; otherwise, it is dead and mechanical. Our only chance to escape the blight of mechanization, of acting and thinking alike, of the huge machine which society is becoming, is to restore life to all things through the saving and beneficent power of the human imagination.

With photography a new language has been created. Now for the first time it is possible to express reality by reality. We can look at an impression as long as we wish, we can delve into it and, so to speak, renew past experiences at will.

Art is life seen through man's inner craving for perfection and beauty-- his escape from the sordid realities of life into a world of his imagining. Art accounts for at least a third of our civilization, and it is one of the artist's principal duties to do more than merely record life or nature. To the artist is given the privilege of pointing the way and inspiring towards a better life.

The hardest thing in photography is to create a simple image.

[Photography] is always like a state of grace, like the appearance of something that I hadn't foreseen, that surprises me and stops me. If I only did what I had in mind, there would be no emotion. It would be like keeping one's eyes shut rather than open, like theorizing rather than seeing.

I was making a film on Muhammad Ali in 1964, and I went to Miami to film everything around the fight for the world championship with Sonny Liston. I had the good luck of flying down to Miami, and there was one empty seat, and the guy sitting next to this empty seat was Malcolm X.

I was invited to photograph Hollywood. They asked me what I would like to photograph. I said, Ugly men.

I am inspired by the professionalism of others. I believe there is an obligation to strive for excellence in what one is asked to do. No pains are too great, no revisions too tedious no matter how small the result. But I also believe that while humility should not be overdone, excellence should never be taken for granted, otherwise we stop reaching for it.

I love to photograph people in their own environment. It offers clues to what's important in their lives.

While making my picture window photographs, I came to think that every room was like a gigantic camera forever pointed at the same view.

Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph. It is inevitable. A photograph without structure is like a sentence without grammar-it is incomprehensible, even inconceivable.

I was next to Bobby [Kennedy] when he was shot. It was hideous. Part of me wanted to crawl away. I couldn't... I still wake up in the night and think about it. I even remember the f-stop. It was 1.4.

Many people send me letters in England saying, 'I want to be a war photographer,' and I say, go out into the community that you live in. There's wars going on out there; you don't have to go halfway around the world on an airplane where there are bombs and shells. There are social wars that are worthwhile.

Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts.

This fascination with the human face has never left me... Every face I see seems to hide and sometimes, fleetingly, to reveal the mystery of another human being... Capturing this revelation became the goal and passion of my life.

Everyone takes pictures, so you need to have your own opinion.

Nothing is more hateful to me than photography coated with gimmicks, poses and false effects. Therefore let me speak the truth in all honesty about our age and the people of our age

I'm deeply interested in the photograph as a record of an encounter and enjoy putting myself in a timeline of image-makers, alongside other travelers, such as anthropologists, colonists, missionaries, even tourists. I do that to emphasize subjectivity, rather than privilege any single perspective - I see myself as only one of many storytellers.

I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present. I want to gather them, like somebody's grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.

I got rejected from journalism school!

I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life.

To get rich, you have to be making money while you're asleep.

This is unexposed film of Greenwich Village because nothing ever happens there.

Now, I recognize that there are certain postures and angles that make people see red, which are evidence of original sin or something, and I avoid that. I don't shoot that any more.

I always wanted to be a photographer. I was fascinated with the materials, but I never dreamed I would be having this much fun. I imagined something much less elusive, much more mundane.

So many people are exploiting the name Picasso - and, in a way, even the estate is doing it.

Make the most of what you have and enjoy being female; enjoy being YOU.

When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears.

A photograph permits a first viewing, and then an individual reflection. It solicits participation, and encourages individuality in interpretation. Television is an autarchy, a dictatorship.

Some people strive for perfection, but I often find perfection boring.

Somehow Photoshop and the ease with which one can produce an image has degraded the quality of photography in general.

Photographing a cake can be art.

You want to make the photograph work in every way possible. Doesn't matter where it is in the world.

Coney Island is and always will be 'the people's playground.' It's a place where people of all backgrounds come to have a good time.

I have never taken a photograph without one thought in my head to amuse myself.

I would say my sex drive is weaker than most. However, my lens has a permanent erection.

The Canon AE1 - a fully manual camera. [My mother] had a 50mm, which is a standard lens, and then I got a 28mm. Then I started a little punk magazine, a zine, when I was 14 or 15 years old. I was shooting my friends skateboarding and it was the beginning of the Macintosh. We wouldn't do layouts on the computer; we would pick the font and then type up a paragraph and then print it out and cut it up and put it in a little mock-up and Xerox it.

A very receptive state of mind... not unlike a sheet of film itself - seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second's exposure conceives a life in it.

We don't take pictures with cameras, we take them with our hearts and minds.

What counts is putting the intensity that you yourself have experienced into the picture. Otherwise it is just a document.

It is part of the photographer's job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveler who enters a strange country.

Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.

You do not have to imagine things; reality gives you all you need.

Some people consider utopia to be derived from nature. For some people, utopia is the city.

The fact that I have a little ten-megapixel camera with me all the time, is way better than having the greatest camera in the world sitting at home on a desk instead of on my shoulder.

Real things don't frighten me just the ones in my mind do.

Nature, after all, is not so poor that she requires constant improvement

Well when you're young, you're just in love and every day is so new and so fresh and so beautiful. You just don't think of the future.

I have a dark room, and I still process film, but digital photography can be a totally lying kind of experience; you can move anything you want... the whole thing can't be trusted, really.

To me a photograph is a page from life, and that being the case, it must be real.

I started spending time at stables with my daughter while she was riding. I was reminded of my love for the form and different aspects of the horse. Then I thought about the bit, halter, and bridle in terms of how we harness and ride this animal. There were a lot of interesting elements to explore.

You can never get two members of the family to agree on anything.

I am not interested in shooting new things - I am interested to see things new.

Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can.

I always feel I had a very lucky life. For example, I sure didn't want to go in the army: when I was drafted in the Korean War, I wanted to go as a photographer. But luckily, they put me in the infantry - luckily because the official photographer was photographing the medal awarding and all the official situations.

To me extreme things are like miracles. There is nothing as boring as a person who is just okay. But I could easily live in a world populated with these disjunctive, bizarre things... I operate out of confusion, towards clarity.

I'm not a politically radical person. In fact, I'm much more interested in being radical aesthetically.

When you look at my father's works, he systematically dated everything. He also wanted to document what he knew would be the work of the century.

I always thought if I photographed anyone or anything enough, I would never lose the person, I would never lose the memory, I would never lose the place. But the pictures show me how much I've lost.

Do not settle for easy. Do not settle for that first image. Craft it, work it, and make something more out of it. And finally, don't forget that the biggest joy in photography is making pictures of those things in your own life.