Best 2475 quotes in «photography quotes» category

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 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 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 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 experience light, color, and gesture in a vacuum. We experience it in contexts.

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

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 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.

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

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 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 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'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 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 really care about photography at Vanity Fair.

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.

What Bell is to the telephone—or, more aptly, what Eastman is to photography—Haloid could be to xerography.

What attracts me in photography is not so much a fine arts approach, but rather photographs as documents... All the ways in which human beings have documented the world in an attempt to order it, in an attempt to consume it or rule it or hang on to it in some sense.

Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is inevitably about photography, the container and vehicle of all its meanings.

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

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 pictures are put into the world, the balance needs to be readdressed, it needs to be observed. That's why I am also really questioning what a lot of photography has done since I began. I am not saying because of me, but I mean, photographing some friends partying and publishing the pictures meant something else in '92 than it does in 2011. And I find the younger generation is not questioning this at all today.

Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.

What I believe is really good in the so-called documentary approach to photography is the addition of lyricism.[this quality] is usually produced unconsciously and even unintentionally and accidentally by the cameraman.

What I did, anybody can do.

What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it.

What I find interesting is working in a society with certain taboos and fashion photography is about that kind of society. To have taboos, then to get around them that is interesting.

What I like so much about photography is precisely the moment that cannot be anticipated; one must be constantly on the alert, ready to acclaim the unexpected.

What inspires me still: travel, art, photography, my kids, the places I haven't been to yet.

What is creativity? Having spent my life in one creative endeavor after another, I can tell you it's not something magical or mystical. It's something very simple. To me, it's just a moment - a moment where we look at the ordinary, but we see the extraordinary. It happens all the time in my photography.

What is of value is that a particular photographer sees the subject differently than I do. A good picture must be a completely individual expression which intrigues the viewer and forces him to think.

What is right? Simply put, it is any assignment in which the photographer has a significant spiritual stake...spiritually driven work constitutes the core of a photographer's contribution to culture.

What I like best about underwater photography is giving a visual voice to the invisible. What I like least is the prospect of drowning.

What I love about photography, and it's the same thing I love about acting, really, is that it forces you, like, right into the moment, where you can't be distracted, where you can't be, like, thinking about other things or ahead of yourself or behind yourself.

What is important is that our optical awareness rids itself of classical notions of beauty and opens itself more and more to the beauty of the instant and of these surprising points of view that appear for a brief moment and never return; those are what make photography an art.