Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Photographers - Page 8

Sometimes my fashion pictures can look a little bit like documentary style pictures. So having a camera in my hand was normal.

Photography is such an important instrument in the education of our feelings and perception because of its duality. Photography represents the world we know, and suggests a world beyond what we can see. Creativity is the gap between perception and knowledge.

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.

There are certain pictures I can never take. We turn on the TV and are smothered with cruelty and suffering and I don't need to add to it. So I just photograph peaceful things. A vase of flowers, a beautiful girl. Sometimes, through a peaceful face, I can bring something important into the world.

There are many teachers who could ruin you. Before you know it you could be a pale copy of this teacher or that teacher. You have to evolve on your own.

The purpose of photography is the transmission of a visualized sector of life through the medium of the camera into a mental process that starts with the photographer's thinking about the subject he photographs and is continued in the mind of the spectator.

Bored with obvious reality, I find my fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view.

It's not always easy to stand aside and be unable to do anything except record the sufferings around one.

The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.

There is this looking at the world as shapes and patterns and colors that have meaning, and you can't deny the superficial because the superficial is what meets the eye.

There's no reason you'd shoot Mother Theresa and Newt Gingrich the same way.

For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It's a way of touching somebody - it's a caress… I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.

Our human responsibility for animal rights, plant rights, and the rights of the earth to its health and wholeness is self-evident. Whatever our beliefs about the hereafter we are the temporary custodians of the here-and-now, and if we neglect our obligations or abuse our powers then we abrogate any rights to a further share in this planet's delights.

The Japanese people have a strong connection with nature and the ocean and a huge respect for them.

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

Once the amateur's naive approach and humble willingness to learn fades away, the creative spirit of good photography dies with it. Every professional should remain always in his heart an amateur.

What intrigues me is making images that confound and confuse the viewer but that the viewer knows, or suspects, really happened.

The golden rule in the arts, as far as I am concerned, is that all rules are meant to be broken.

Communication, that's what I do. Advertising is the best way to communicate because you reach a lot of people. I still cant understand though, why people are shocked by something that obviously exists. Its like a family that avoids talking about its real problems.

The greatest tool at our command is the very thing that is photography. Light. Light is our paintbrush and it is a most willing tool in the hands of the one who studies it with a sufficient care.

There is so much more to the things that we think we know from afar. The close you get the more complex it is, not the simpler it is to understand.

...when it comes down to making work that really sings, I don't know if I can teach any of it. I don't even know if I can do any of it half the time. It's so much about failure, it's so much about making pictures that are so utterly boring and overstated, you're endlessly disappointed. And in that process you hopefully find something that draws you back and calls to you.

Photography is 90% sheer, brutal drudgery! The other 10% is inspiration!!

Don't have rules, taboos, or limits.

Photography is there to construct the idea of us as a great family and we go on vacations and take these pictures and then we look at them later and we say, 'Isn't this a great family?' So photography is instrumental in creating family not only as a memento, a souvenir, but also a kind of mythology.

I met and became close with John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art. He was incredibly supportive about me working in color.

Most whale photos you see show whales in this beautiful blue water - it's almost like space.

In Haiti, it - people seemed - in my experience in Haiti, people are so open to photographs and journalism. And there doesn't seem to be the same sort of restrictions or wariness about the press that you would experience in Washington, for instance, on many levels.

War is in the eyes.

I think the environmental movement has failed in that it's used the stick too much; it's used the apocalyptic tone too much; it hasn't sold the positive aspects of being environmentally concerned and trying to pull us out.

I think what I most admired about my father was his extraordinary courage. He had such energy to pursue whatever he wanted, and he really didn't care what others thought.

I fell in love with the process of taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a document of that performance.

Any good photograph is a successful synthesis of technique and art.

I would like to see everything, look at everything, I want to be the view itself.

My favorite thing is to go where I've never been.

The drama of light exists not only in what is in the light, but also in what is left dark. If the light is everywhere, the drama is gone.

Tourism is the biggest industry in the world.

I think a lot of the time these days people are so concerned about having the right camera and the right film and the right lenses and all the special effects that go along with it, even the computer, that they're missing the key element.

Normally if you add information to information, you have more information. In case of my art, I destroy information, I would say, because the image is disturbed by the writings. In a way, they become pure imagery. For me it's really fun because it's an idealistic approach to images, to just play around with information and see what's happening.

Work to me is a sacred thing.

I don't like memoirs. I think they're self-serving, and people use them to settle scores, and I really tried not to do that. You have to have a really interesting life to justify memoir, and my life has been pretty ho-hum.

Every artist has a central story to tell, and the difficulty, the impossible task, is trying to present that story in pictures

I always wanted to live in L.A. The other thing that always inspired me was movies; that's why I'm here. I always wanted to be a part of the movie business and make movies. That's why I went to AFI grad school for filmmaking.

I did not want to be somebody who lived off his reputation. I wanted to continue to be part of the modern music scene.

I want my photographs to say: "Look-there's this thing you haven't seen that you should see."

Initially I borrowed the word "perverse" for my works from Roland Barthes, meaning pleasure-driven and not geared to inform or promote a service or a product.

The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading.

If you are trying to sell someone your idea and you can't even define it to yourself, then that is a problem.

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

My grandfather and his wife came to America at the end of the 19th century from Hungary. Everyone started out on the Lower East Side. They became embourgeoise and would move to the Upper West Side. Then, if they'd make money, they'd move to Park Avenue. Their kids would become artists and move down to the Lower East Side and the Village.

I wanted to be a scientist. I did a thesis on lions. But I realised photography can show things writing can't. Lions were my professor of photography.

The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera.

Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

Photograph because you love doing it, because you absolutely have to do it, because the chief reward is going to be the process of doing it. Other rewards - recognition, financial remuneration - come to so few and are so fleeting...Take photography on as a passion, not a career.

Ultimately, the reward is the process - the process of photographing and discovering and trying to understand why and what am I photographing.

The distance between where you are now and the path you think you should be on is probably smaller than you think it is

All I need is my brains, my eyes and my personality, for better or for worse.

The spiritual aspect of my work has more to do with the sense that things in the world can be perceived and accepted as being in some respect alive. I try to approach everything that I photograph with this sense of wide-eyed awe.

The most important thing for me is to have my cereal. I have milk and granola and cheese. And that's it. I have a lot of cereals that I eat all day long, and I have a big appetite. All over the planet I carry my cereals!

I read the poem [In a Dark Time by Theodore Roethke] because I was intrigued and had one of those strange senses: "This poem is kind of important to me. I don't know why, but I'm going to just keep it in the back of my mind." I just kept coming back to it. As I started putting the book together and writing the stories for it, this idea of buzzing as a word kept popping up in my brain.