Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Photographers - Page 9

My photographs are not planned or composed in advance, and I do not anticipate that the onlooker will share my viewpoint. However, I feel that if my photograph leaves an image on his mind, something has been accomplished.

Life rarely presents fully finished photographs. An image evolves, often from a single strand of visual interest - a distant horizon, a moment of light, a held expression.

Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject.

I want to show the event at the very moment it takes place.... My body must be anchored to the ground and seek the best point of view, without any visual taboos. But then, at the heart of the event, my effort is to disappear, I introduce a distance that borders on indifference.

The viewer must bring their own view to a photograph.

Part of it has to do with the discipline of being actively receptive. At the core of this receptivity is a process that might be called soft eyes. It is a physical sensation. You are not looking for something. You are open, receptive. At some point you are in front of something that you cannot ignore.

The whole thrust in my life right now is spinning my assignments around and making them work in a more personal way (...) I wanted to go back and do the original thing: one camera, one lens, one film. You really have to put yourself in a position of danger to be creative.

Technique does not need to be interpreted. It interprets itself. You have to choose the right objects and focus on them precisely and they will tell you their own stories.

The truth is, the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist is the same as the difference between a political cartoonist and an abstract painter; the only thing the two have in common is the blank page. The jobs entail different talents and different desires.

If you choose your subject selectively - intuitively - the camera can write poetry.

Nothing compares to pizza, and you discover and rediscover it when you are much too old, and you have got too much cholesterol and triglycerides...A collector is someone who is ready to devour the work of art that he wants to possess at all costs.

[A photograph] should do something to the beholder; either give a more complete appreciation of beauty, or, if nothing else, even a good mental kick in the pants.

I want to show off how beautiful my subjects are, whether its a cheetah or a live girl or two of them together.

As individuals, we have very little say about how our data is being used. I'm not worried about the privacy implications of it so much. But it seems to me that, as an individual, if I'm the one generating the data, I should have some kind of say in how it's going to be used.

It fascinates me that there is a variety of feeling about what I do. I'm not a premeditative photographer. I see a picture and I make it. If I had a chance, I'd be out shooting all the time. You don't have to go looking for pictures. The material is generous. You go out and the pictures are staring at you.

The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.

Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.

I am interested in what I term gestalts; picture circumstances which bring together disparate images or ideas so as to form new meanings and new configurations.

The world just does not fit conveniently into the format of a 35mm camera.

Over the years I always did some water colors, and I did a series of pictures of drawings. I always did it during a period of time that was slow in the photo business, but in essence it was always frustrating because I'd get started, and then it would be time to get back to work and I wouldn't get anywhere with the painting.

Photography belongs to a fraternity of its own. I was young and enthusiastic and wanted to take good pictures to show the other photographers. That, and the professional pride of convincing an editor that I was the man to go somewhere, were the most important things to me.

There is a lot of social photography being done now to point to the untruth of photography. It's getting very dull now. So, okay photography doesn't tell the truth. So what? Everyone has known this forever.

My quest, through the magic of light and shadow, is to isolate, to simplify, and to give emphasis to form with the greatest clarity.

I have a Mercedes. I wear a Rolex watch. I have no problem with the selling of things.

As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.

If I already have a vision, my work is almost done. The rest is a technical problem.

A photographer without imagination is not a good photographer.

It is easy to make a picture of someone and call it a portrait. The difficulty lies in making a picture that makes the viewer care about a stranger.

Even before the concentration camps, I felt it was my duty to my ancestors to preserve a world that might cease to exist.

To me, the magic of photography, per se, is that you can capture an instant of a second that couldn't exist before and couldn't exist after. It's almost like a cowboy that draws his gun. You draw a second before or after, you miss and you're dead - not them. To me, photography's always like that.

Most fashion photography is done by gay people finding women sexy - which is sort of not sexy at all, at least to a heterosexual man.

When you start out, you're not really aware. I didn't have a sense of photographic history.

I have never been interested in making a photograph that describes what the world I live in looks like, but I am interested in what pictures (of the world) look like.

Just advertising departments with legs and high heels.

The ideas I'm working with are ideas I'm committed to. I don't know how to soft-shoe them. I don't know how to make them more palpable. I just never knew how to be one of those girls. I wish I knew how to be that sometimes, but I don't know how to be that way.

I've never been in love with fashion, actually; trends and catwalks don't interest me. I love clothes; I love them historically and currently. They represent a spirit of the times and the zeitgeist.

Water is the key to life, but in frozen form, it is a latent force. And when it vanishes, Earth becomes Mars.

Seeing, in the finest and broadest sense, means using your senses, your intellect, and your emotions. It means encountering your subject matter with your whole being. It means looking beyond the labels of things and discovering the remarkable world around you.

Art resides even in things with no artistic intentions.

Ambiguity is really important to me. Part of the difficulty facing photographers is that almost any subject matter has accumulated a representational history, so to find a new discursive space, a space to wander around those subject matters, is a real challenge.

Everything is pointing to one's own activity of looking, to an awareness and sort of hyper-consciousness of visual perception. The only way I know how to invite this experience is by removing the other things (i.e., subject matter) for you to think about.

Like a ventriloquist who laughs at his dummy's jokes, I keep trying to make photographs that seduce me into believing in the image - all the time knowing better, but believing anyway.

I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography—that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms.

I finally managed to try to do away with myself, as neatly and concisely as possible. I would rather die young leaving various accomplishments, some work, my friendship with you, and some other artifacts intact, instead of pell-mell erasing all of these delicate things.

We're responsible for everything that's included in the frame. We're also responsible for what's not included in the frame. We're responsible for the way we frame the world.

In the early days of my child labor activities I was an investigator with a camera attachment... but the emphasis became reversed until the camera stole the whole show.

My work is not so much a direct commentary as it is an open-ended observation of the absurdities around us.

Tourism is important because it can create sustainable local economies. I'd much rather have 1,000 tourists going up the Tambopata than 1,000 gold miners.

I'm just the opposite of a lot of photographers who want everything to be really, really sharp. And they're always, you know, stopping it down to F64.

Make your work deeper and better than those before you, and eventually someone will notice. If you don't think the work is better than what you've seen, then go back until it is.

Good photography is unpretentious.

Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

To me photography must suggest, not insist or explain.

The eye is made to see and not to think.... A good photograph is a surprise. How could we plan and foresee a surprise? We just have to be ready.

When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer.

I know that my mind is so A.D.D., and I want instant gratification - and photography can provide me with that - but at some point, I want to make an independent feature.

Women are not just there to be admired, they are there to be enjoyed.

I work on stories rather than individual pictures.

There is only one point of view, that is your point of view. You are making a mistake if you see the point of view of people. There is only one and that is your livelihood.

I'm a portrait photographer that's used to shooting celebrities, and I usually need time and all kinds of lights and a studio to set up my shots.