What matters is not what you photograph, but why and how you photograph it. Even the most controversial subject, if depicted by a sensitive photographer with honesty, sympathy, and understanding, can be transformed into an emotionally rewarding experience.
I love having the photograph in my hand. I love looking at the photograph. I love looking at a box of photographs. I just love the still photograph.
If a person's mind is controlled by forces of revenge and jealousy, it cannot express love & sympathy. And even if they show love and sympathy to others it will yield no good result. The thought will not be reflected in love but in hate.
Love a friend, love a wife, something, whatever you like, but one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more.
Those in the West who have adopted Christ as their own should remember that he was an Oriental. Love and sympathy for Jesus should be expanded into love and sympathy for all Orientals, and for all the world.
People love sympathy, people love the underdog. For me, sympathy is not part of my drag aesthetic.
How foolish of me to believe that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearance of trees and automobiles, and people with a reality itself, and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.
Any sympathy won for Aileen Wuornos based on a lie is not sympathy at all. The question is, can we have sympathy for the circumstances of someone's life? That's what I was interested in.
I gave you sympathy. *I* want sympathy!" "Are you kidding me? You have the sexiest man on the planet wanting you. You're getting laid regularly. No sympathy for you!
When you photograph people in color you photograph their clothes. When you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their soul!
I do not photograph for ulterior purposes. I photograph for the thing itself - for the photograph - without consideration of how it may be used.
I don't try to kind of go for the overly sympathetic. I don't really like sympathy; I don't like it for myself. Sometimes sympathy you feel like, you're kind of trying to victimize someone.
Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain.
What if I said that every photograph I made was set up? From the photograph, you can't prove otherwise. You don't know anything from the photograph about how it was made, really.
Someone said to me, early on in film school... if you can photograph the human face you can photograph anything, because that is the most difficult and most interesting thing to photograph.
One of the things my career as an artist might say to young artists is: The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best. And unless you photograph what you love, you are not going to make good art.