A Quote by John Paul Caponigro

A photograph is an invitation to look - and to look at looking. — © John Paul Caponigro
A photograph is an invitation to look - and to look at looking.
The model is just one element of the photograph. There's also the location, the light - all that junk. It helps if the girl is really good-looking, but a girl can be not super good-looking and it'd still be a really good photograph. I ask people to send some photos of where they live if that's where I'm shooting. I go for shabby places over too-nice places, because most of these girls are going to look better if they're not made to look rich.
Social media's currency is the single photograph. Whereas, every time I look at a photograph, I look at twenty or thirty photographs. I'm looking for a narrative. And that's a different kind of construct. If you're a poet and you put a line from your poem online, "The trees bending over gracefully," or something, you can get a tick. But that has nothing to do with your longer poem.
We have to pay attention to one another, regardless of how someone may look or act, look again. Looking at people is like looking at art. I may look at a painting and dislike it because I don't understand it but then I'll look deeper and I'll see things better.
What difference does it make whether you're looking at a photograph or looking at a still life in front of you? You still have to look.
When someone is looking down, they're saying no. When they're looking up, they're looking to their brain for memory. When they look to the left, they're looking for a lie or something they memorized. When they look to the right, they're feeling sorry - they don't want to answer.
When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
I look like that in the morning: my hair's all greasy - it's not, 'Hey, look at the babe of the band!' I hate that kind of thing, the way women are always pushed forward as beauties... it's very easy: you can make the ugliest pig look lovely in a photograph.
Most readers look at the photograph first. If you put it in the middle of the page, the reader will start by looking in the middle. Then her eye must go up to read the headline; this doesn't work, because people have a habit of scanning downwards. However, suppose a few readers do read the headline after seeing the photograph below it. After that, you require them to jump down past the photograph which they have already seen. Not bloody likely.
I think it is very important that you like yourself for who you are and not want to look like anyone else. You also have to understand, many people have had cosmetic surgeries in order to look the way they look. So why look like them when you can just look like you? And there is nothing wrong with looking like you.
I never look for a photograph. The photograph finds me and says, I'm here! and I say, Yes, I see you. I hear you.
Look at your life. Look at the ways in which you define who you are and what you’re capable of achieving. Look at your goals. Look at the pressures applied by the people around you and the culture in which you were raised. Look again. And again. Keep looking until you realize, within your own experience, that you’re so much more than who you believe you are. Keep looking until you discover the wondrous heart, the marvelous mind, that is the very basis of your being.
A photograph can look anyway. It just depends basically on what you photograph.
When you look at the startling ruins of Nuremberg, you are looking at a result of the war. When you look at the prisoners on view in the courthouse, you are looking at 22 of the causes.
Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.
If you look at a photograph, and you think, 'My isn't that a beautiful photograph,' and you go on to the next one, or 'Isn't that nice light?' so what? I mean what does it do to you or what's the real value in the long run? What do you walk away from it with? I mean, I'd much rather show you a photograph that makes demands on you, that you might become involved in on your own terms or be perplexed by.
A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of mother or father taken many years ago. You see them as you remember them. But as people live on, they change completely. That is why I think a photograph can be kind.
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