Best 2475 quotes in «photography quotes» category

Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph

See, I think our whole society is much too problem-solving oriented. It is far more interesting to participate in 'problem creation'... You know, ask yourself an interesting enough question and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you'll find yourself all by your lonesome - which I think is a more interesting place to be.

See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realise that film. There's really nothing to be afraid of.

Seeing is more than a physiological phenomenon... We see not only with our eyes but with all that we are and all that our culture is. The artist is a professional see-er.

Seeing lesbian photography is just the tip of my radicalized clitoris. I have modeled for, commissioned, published, and fought for these pictures, and answered threats against them. I've seen the feminist movement bring these pictures to life, and I've seen that same movement try to suppress the liberating results.

Sharpness is overrated.

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept

She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy I said 'Be careful his bowtie is really a camera'

Since I'm inarticulate, I express myself with images.

Since the background is as important as the subject, you mustn't let it default by chance. You must control not only vertical and horizontal, you must be aware of the depth of field (or lack of it) that you want in the background.

Since the photographic medium has been digitized, a fixed definition of the term photography has become impossible.

So-called "realist" photography does not capture the "what is." Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.

So far as photography satisfied a wish, it satisfied a wish not confined to painters, but a human wish, intensifying since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation - a wish for power to reach this world, having for so long tried, at last hopelessly, to manifest fidelity to another... Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, one which does not so much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism, by removing the human agent from the act of reproduction.

So many times I've photographed stories that show the degradation of the planet. I had one idea to go and photograph the factories that were polluting, and to see all the deposits of garbage. But, in the end, I thought the only way to give us an incentive, to bring hope, is to show the pictures of the pristine planet - to see the innocence.

Somebody said recently that the best thing a student could do was to get in some shows and publish a book; but nothing about becoming a human being, nothing about having important feelings or concepts of humanity. That's the sort of thing that is bad education. I'd say be a human being first and if you happen to wind up using photography, that's good for photography.

Some have said that if you take a great picture in color and take away the color, you'll have a great black-and-white picture. But if you're shooting something about color and you take away the color, you'll have nothing.

Some objects and events may be photographed, others, if one is to render their true quality, should be painted or set to music, since their essence is more faithfully reproduced through imagination than by the journalistic report.

Some day there may be... machinery that needs but to be wound up and sent roaming o'er hill and dale, through fields and meadows, by babbling brooks and shady woods - in short, a machine that will discriminately select its subject and, by means of a skillful arrangement of springs and screws, compose its motif, expose the plate, develop, print, and even mount and frame the result of its excursion, so that there will be nothing for us to do but to send it to the Royal Photographic Society's exhibition and gratefully to receive the 'Royal Medal'.

Some of my pictures are poem-like in the sense that they are very condensed, haiku-lik. There are others that, if they were poetry, would be more like Ezra Pound. There is a lot of information in most of my pictures, but not the kind of information you see in documentary photography. There is emotional information in my photographs.

Somehow Photoshop and the ease with which one can produce an image has degraded the quality of photography in general.

Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already.

Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They're quick things and there's a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting.

Some people`s photography is an art. Mine is not. If they happen to be exhibited in a gallery or a museum, that`s fine. But that`s not why I do them. I`m a gun for hire.

Something catches your eye, or your interest. You attack it in some way or observe it in some way, and try to put it in some kind of form and take a picture. It's as simple as that.

Something about photography is tied to a very specific relationship with the material world. It doesn't have to be, but the way I practice it, it is. So there's an act of observation, but it's not an act of objective recording. It's about framing something and seeing it and understanding that it's relational.

Some speak of a return to nature, I wonder where they could have been?

Sometimes in news photography and so on, the pictures are a little bit dry, and put on the page and just set in a journalistic way in front of you.

Sometimes as you work, you find that you are learning things about your own perceptions and motivations that are way below you consciousness. If you get lucky, you recognize what you are doing, but all too often we don't find the connection between our work and our own motivations.

Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don't get a photograph that I want to work from.

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is...the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.

Sometimes I photograph without looking through the viewfinder. I have mastered that well enough, it is almost as if I were looking through it.

Sometimes it’s not how much light you use to get an effect, it’s how little you use and still make it work. There are a lot of rules to be broken in photography, and you’ve got to have courage.

Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject.

Sometimes they are a matter of luck; the photographer could not expect or hope for them. Sometimes they are a matter of patience, waiting for an effect to be repeated that he has seen and lost or for one that he anticipates.

Sometimes without shooting a picture germinates in your head. Other times, you keep taking pictures of the same thing and watch the images mature and grow.

Sometimes the simplest pictures are the hardest to get.

Somewhere in our search for reality we have passed something by, something important that we no longer find amid the bits and pieces of disassembled matter-something vital that we cannot build out of these parts. There is surely something else, some piece of divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and that owes no homage to the sun.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

So when I became interested in photography and further being inspired by the work that I saw of Ansel and others, it was a natural extension to go back to these places that I knew as a kid and explore them with my camera.

Speed, the fundamental condition of the activities of our day is the power of photography, indeed the modern art of today, the art of the split second.

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.

Street photography is art and if art is a crime, please God, forgive me.

Straight photography, following the medium, is intoxicating - trying to wrestle it into the form of a poem.

Street Photography is like fishing. Catching the fish is more exciting than eating it.

Surprise quality can be achieved in many ways. It may be produced by a certain stimulating geometrical relationship between elements in the picture or through the human interest of the situation photographed or by calling our attention to some commonplace but fascinating thing we have never noticed before or it can be achieved by looking at an everyday thing in a new interesting way.

Students were taught by doing.

Sven Schumann did an interview with photographer Wolfgang Tillmans in Berlin addressing the question: What is photography today when everyone is a photographer? These kinds of questions and answers you find in a magazine, on paper and not on Instagram. For me this is the essence of a magazine - it's questioning what's going on today and celebrating true creativity without compromise.

Taking photographs is generally an act of 'looking at the object, whereas 'being seen' or 'showing' is what is most interest to one who does a self-portrait...self-portraits deny not only photography itself but the 20th century as an era as well...an inevitable phenomenon at the end of the 20th century.

That portion of reality that can be composed within a frame can be understood.

That celebrated marriage of science and art, photography, seemed at the time to join together how we look at the world, art, with how we were coming to know it, science.