Best 2475 quotes in «photography quotes» category

When the novice photographer starts taking pictures, he carries his camera about and shoots everything that interests him. There comes a time when he must crystallize his ideas and set off in an particular direction. He must learn that shooting for the sake of shooting is dull and unprofitable.

When the object that is produced...the photographic image...has the ability to make tears come to your eyes; to inspire you to the point where you have to catch your breath, then nothing else matters.

When the true qualities of photography are recognized, the process of representation by mechanical means will be brought to a level of perfection never before reached.

When we are given gifts, we must be quick and able to accept them.

When we concentrate on photography, we make it possible to see the walls of photographs in black homes as a critical intervention, a disruption of white control over black images.

When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears.

When you can't think of anything else, photograph graffiti, nudes, or plants.

When you live by the sea, there are definite seasons when you can see the weather coming and going, which lends itself to photography.

When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it.

When you're modeling you're actually acting for the camera and the photographer. It's more fun, too because there are no lines to memorize.

When you're shy, a camera becomes an entry into life. It was a kind of shield I could hide my shyness behind, and it allowed me to become an active observer rather than a passive one.

When you're photographing anything to do with war and conflict you're photographing something impossible. Everything you do is just clumsy and stupid and half witted. Because it is impossible to portray the full width and breadth of everything that you are up against.

When you say documentary, you have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. It should be documentary style, because documentary is police photography of a scene and a murder ... that's a real document. You see, art is really useless, and a document has use. And therefore, art is never a document, but it can adopt that style. I do it. I'm called a documentary photographer. But that presupposes a quite subtle knowledge of this distinction.

When you start photographing somebody, it's like a lustful relationship and there's all the excitement of new flesh.

When you take a picture you haven't a clue that it is going to be what it is. Maybe you have a clue but you don't really know. There are too many possibilities. Part of the game is how many balls you can juggle. It is to me. When you are 12 you can juggle two. Maybe when you are 50 you can juggle five. That is an interesting concept to me: how much I can put in and still make it pull together?

When you think of fashion photography, it's a dream. It's like we all want to be those women. We want to wear those dresses.

When you work fast, what you put in your pictures is what your brought with yoiu - your own ideas and concepts. When you spend more time on a project, you learn to understand your subjects. There comes a time when it is not you who is taking the pictures. Something special happens between the photographer and the people he is photographing. He realizes that they are giving the pictures to him.

Whether you are Minor White or Robert Frank, almost every photograph starts with an act of pure description - a window. But every now and then you catch a glimpse of the photographer's reflection. The mirror is just another function of the window.

While photography to Cartier-Bresson is constantly an intuitive process, it is never purely instinctive. It is founded on continuous intellection, on ceaseless consideration during all moments previous to, or preparatory for, the pressing. It does not only operate in the blinding flash of a moment seized; it works all the time. The snatched picture merely cuts across the vein of observable incident or accident which is always beating, whether or not the fingers actually press.

Whether it is photography, assemblage art or filmmaking, my work is to see beneath the surface.

... while in theory digital technology entails the flawless replication of data, its actual use in contemporary society is characterized by the loss of data, degradation, and noise; the noise which is even stronger than that of traditional photography.

While photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is the hardest in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision.

With a painting, you're taking basic building blocks and making something that's more complex than what you started with. It is a synthetic process. A photograph does the opposite: It takes the world, and puts an order on it, simplifies it.

Why do photographers photograph? To make unreality visible.

Wilderness, to me, is a spiritual necessity. The mysterious spiritual experience of being close to natural restored my soul [after the death of his son]. My experience reinforced by dedication to use the art of photography as an inspiration for others to work together to save nature's places of spiritual sanctuary for future generations.

Winston, I don't know what I want, but I want you to go out and get it. When I see it, I'll know if it's what I thought I wanted. (Quoting a photography client.)

With a camera like that you don't believe you're in the masterpiece business. It's enough to be able to peck at the world.

With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That's not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn't it? There will be painting again, absolutely!

White is the color of decomposition. White is also no color. White is nothing. In photography, the paper is white, next comes the light, which is also white, then the shadow is created, the apparition.

Why in the world would anyone want to photograph an old woman like me?

With a short lens I can reveal the hidden things near at hand, with a long lens the hidden things far away. The telephoto lens provides a new visual sensation for people: it widens their horizons. And, conversely, the things under our nose invariably look good when blown up really big.

Woman has been the target of much that is sordid and cheap, especially in photography. To raise, to elevate, to endorse with timeless reverence the image of woman, has been my mission.

With photography, you are lucky if you get people to look at your pictures at some point. There's no formal way to show them.

With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don't think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.

Without my photography life would be boring. Photography adds an extra dimension to my life. Somehow it confirms my place in the world

With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society's natural prejudice and giving this a twist.

With photography, you zero in; you put a lot of energy into short moments, and then you go on to the next thing.

'Woman on the Plaza,' with its distinct horizon, snow-like surfaces, wintry wall, stunning sunlight, sharp shadows, and hurrying figure, would become the most biographical of my photographs - an abstract image of the landscape and life of northern Ohio where I grew up and first practiced photography.

You can observe a lot by just watching.

Words of wisdom for every photographer: 'Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking'. So said Goethe.

[X-ray's] accidental discovery in the late 1800s fits seamlessly into modernity's fascination with, and belief in, the power of technological transparency: the desire to domesticate time (cinema), to preserve and capture the surface of the fleeting (photography), to see inside (x-ray).

Yet it seems so easy to take a photograph! One forgets that, apart from the technical aspects, photography can be a mental creation and the affirmation of a personality. What is marvelous about a photograph is that its possibilities are infinite; there aren't any subjects 'done to death'.

You are either born to be a photographer or not. The art of photography is not something you can learn in the classroom or by watching someone do it.

You are lucky if you have one or two epiphanies in your life, particularly a creative one.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.

You cannot explain the whole world in one photograph. Photography pretends. You can see everything that's in front of the camera, but there's always something beside it.

You can't teach people photography, they've got to learn how to do it the best way possible for them. They can learn from looking at pictures taken by well-known people, but they don't really get intimate with the medium until they've made a few bad shots!

Working myself into a position of total versatility, so that I can do anything I want to do at the time I want to do it. Whether I do it or not is another question.

Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.

You become things, you become an atmosphere, and if you become it, which means you incorporate it within you, you can also give it back. You can put this feeling into a picture. A painter can do it. And a musician can do it and I think a photographer can do that too and that I would call the dreaming with open eyes.