Best 2475 quotes in «photography quotes» category

Truthfully, I don't really think of myself as a photographer. I don't have all the disciplines and knowledge of a person who's spent their life devoted to photography.

Try to go out empty and let your images fill you up.

T.V. has made going to the theatre seem pointless, photography has pretty much killed painting but graffiti has remained gloriously unspoilt by progress.

Twentieth-century art has allowed me to see things in a cryptic way. I love the butterfly's wings, which disappear when folded and when open leave this brilliant, intense pronouncement of nature, 'Here I am.'

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.

Two factors thus emerge as requisites of success in the field of creative photography. First, the subject must be photogenic. Second, its re-creation in a photograph must be based upon technical knowledge, guided and supported by artsitic inspiration.

Twitter scares me. I think it's so amazing, like the internet in general, because of the connection that it gives people. But the concept that one 140-word post can change someone's life . . . that scares me. You can literally ruin someone's life with one tweet. So I only do Instagram. I love photography . . . and interacting with the fans. I do love hearing from them. I try to answer questions if I can.

Typography can be as exciting as illustration and photography.

Ultimately photography is about who you are. It's the truth in relation to yourself. And seeking truth becomes a habit.

Ultimately success or failure in photographing people depends on the photographer's ability to understand his fellow man.

Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

Unlike the photography and prints, I never catalogued, kept track of or exhibited the sketches. I sold some occasionally, but never saw myself as a graphic artist. They became more important to me thanks to the exhibition, however, and I realized that these drawings were quite interesting after all.

Very often people looking at my pictures say, 'You must have had to wait a long time to get that cloud just right (or that shadow, or the light).' As a matter of fact, I almost never wait, that is, unless I can see that the thing will be right in a few minutes. But if I must wait an hour for the shadow to move, or the light to change, or the cow to graze in the other direction, then I put up my camera and go on, knowing that I am likely to find three subjects just as good in the same hour.

Very few people, thank God, look like the pictures of them which are published in the papers and the weekly magazines.

Virtue is not photogenic.

Visual ideas combined with technology combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold it's own; if it doesn't, the thing collapses.

We are drowning in images. Photography is used as a propaganda tool, which serves to sell products and ideas. I use the same approach to show aspects of reality.

We all start in this medium because of the magic and the challenge is to keep it going.

We are animals, born from the land with the other species. Since we've been living in cities, we've become more and more stupid, not smarter. What made us survive all these hundreds of thousands of years is our spirituality; the link to our land.

We are in a privileged and sometimes happy position. We see a great deal of the world. Our obligation is to pass it on to others.

We are not interested in the unusual, but in the usual seen unusually.

We are only beginning to learn what to say in a photograph. The world we live in is a succession of fleeting moments, any one of which might say something significant.

We are one human race, and there must be understanding among all men. For those who look at the problems of today, my big hope is that they understand. That they understand that the population is quite big enough, that they must be informed that they must have economic development, that they must have social development, and must be integrated into all parts of the world.

We don't experience light, color, and gesture in a vacuum. We experience it in contexts.

... we are there with our cameras to record reality. Once we start modifying that which exists, we are robbing photography of its most valuable attribute.

We could teach photography as a way to make a living, and best of all, somehow to get students to experience for themselves photography as a way of life.

We don't have enough words for photography. Can you imagine writers having only one word for writing?

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

We don't understand what photography is doing. We don't understand the power of its rhetoric. We don't understand why the Provoke photographers showed Tokyo city as a ghastly and alien city when it was really going through this period of mega-capitalist growth. It's a very, very, very powerful force, the photograph. People ask me why it has such an ability to captivate us. And I just don't know.

We have a few things in common - smoking, drinking, and women. Photography just gets us out of the house. (To photographer Juergen Teller)

We have always wanted to find the 'it-ness' of anything we shoot. We want to get as deep into the subject as we can.

We have a long history of snapshot photography that appeared to many to be more arbitrary and idiosyncratic than much of the work of professionals. We valued it for what it could tell us about the details of people's daily lives.

We have become a nation of Kodachrome, Nikon, Instamatic addicts. But we haven't yet developed a clear idea of the ethics of picture-taking. ... Where do we get the right to bring other people home in a canister? Where did we lose the right to control our image?

We have - through a hundred years of photography and two decades of film - been enormously enriched... We may say we see the world with entirely different eyes.

Well, it was kind of an accident, because plastic is not what I meant to invent. I had just sold photograph paper to Eastman Kodak for 1 million dollars.

Well, I liked it - that was the main thing. I liked it, but I didn't think of it in terms of a career. I didn't really know; I didn't really think about it. One thing just led to another until finally I quit my job as a salesman and found myself working as a photographer.

We live in a society where we never prepare people to be a community.

We really care about photography at Vanity Fair.

We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect... but, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs.

We pass the billboard and I console myself in two ways. First, I know that most photographs taken are a gamble at best. Second and more important: I remind myself to find the pleasure in this moment, a time in which the red sky passes to black, children create unanticipated rhymes, and the stars fall closer to earth.

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.

We rely, I think, on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know.

We think of photography as pictures. And it is. But I think of photography as ideas. And do the pictures sustain your ideas or are they just good pictures? I want to have an experience in the world that is a deepening experience, that makes me feel alive and awake and conscious.

We struggle against easel painting not because it is an aesthetic form of painting, but because it is not modern, for it does not succeed in bringing out the technical side, it is a redundant, exclusive art, and cannot be of any use to the masses. Hence we are struggling not against painting but against photography carried out as if it were an etching, a drawing, a picture in sepia or watercolor.

We used the camera only as a means of expression and as a visual medium that offers possibilities found in no other artistic technique, possibilities that the eye cannot catch in their totality. We tried to establish a characteristic vision of photography.

We've witnessed so many revolutions in our society. Think of transportation, photography, or communications. Things once unimaginable have become seemingly impossible to live without.

We work for that part of our vision which is uncompleted.

Whatever it takes to get the image to reach that level is what that photographer needs to do. And for me, I just have such a love of the tactile and sensuous quality of a black and white silver gelatin print.

Whatever it takes to get the image to reach that level is what that photographer needs to do.