Best 2475 quotes in «photography quotes» category

There is no other art with as great a democratic capacity as photography.

There is no question that photography has played a major role in the environmental movement.

There is no special way a photograph should look.

There is no such thing as a good paparazzo. A good paparazzo, that's a paparazzo who has had his camera broken. In fact, they are bandits, thieves of photography. (Statement after photographs were published showing Jackie Onassis sunbathing nude.)

There is not a big difference between life and taking pictures... You're in the middle of life, you're living, making love, eating, sleeping - and photography is part of it. And I don't say this because I'm being romantic. I say this because that's just the way it happens to be.

There is no such thing as taking too much time, because your soul is in that picture.

There is no such thing as the perfect picture. That's the challenge of photography. I was always striving for perfection, even though I knew I could never achieve it. But it kept me reaching for something.

There is nothing like a Bach fugue to remove me from a discordant moment... only Bach hold up fresh and strong after repeated playing. I can always return to Bach when the other records weary me.

There is no truth in photography. One can't reproduce an absolute truth. That said, I don't see [my photographs] as being any less truthful than any other photographs.

There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don't mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops.

There is only one optimist. He has been here since man has been on this earth, and that is man himself. If we hadn't had such a magnificent optimism to carry us through all these things, we wouldn't be here. We have survived it on our optimism.

There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough - there has to be vision, and the two together can make a good photograph.

There is something abominable about cameras, because they possess the power to invent many worlds. As an artist who has been lost in this wilderness of mechanical reproduction for many years, I do not know which world to start with. I have seen fellow artists driven to the point of frenzy by photography.

There is something beautiful about photography; it allows the self to be reunited with the world.

There is so much more to the things that we think we know from afar. The close you get the more complex it is, not the simpler it is to understand.

The relation of photography and language is a principal site of struggle for value and power in contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where images and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity.

There's an idea that it's hard to be a woman artist. People assume that women have fewer opportunities, less power. But it's not any harder to be a woman artist than to be a male artist. We all take what we are given and use the parts of ourselves that feed the work. We make our way. Photographers, men and women, are particularly lucky. Photography lets you find yourself. It is a passport to people and places and to possibilities.

There's a time when people say your work is revolutionary, but you have to keep being revolutionary. I can't keep shooting pop stars all my life. You have to keep changing, keep pushing yourself, looking for the new, the unusual.

There's no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class. I'm always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don't give a damn how it got made.

There's nothing worse than a brilliant beginning.

There's this way that photography is always about going out searching. I'm not the kind of a photographer who can photograph my home.

There's only one rule in photography - never develop colour film in chicken noodle soup.

There's this idea that photography is a kind of testimony and therefore we're forbidden to tell lies with it. I think that's nonsense. Photography isn't testimony.

There's something Zen-like about the way I work - it's like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden.

There still is some opposition to it in some museums and art schools, but I think photography has really grown into a mature art form.

There was as big a reaction after the revelations about Assad's chemical weapons. Nevertheless, that photograph did strike a singular chord. Which leads us to a larger fact: we don't understand why certain photographs create such an upheaval in one's soul. You look at them and go, "Oh my gosh." And that doesn't happen with television. It's unique to photography. Photographs are unique in that they are a frame abstracted out of reality, out of, in this case, a civil war. A single event can carry so much weight. And that is extraordinary.

There was a time in my life that I may not have been that nice, and now I'm in a position to contribute to the education of young people, and teach them to be compassionate, be more loving, more caring, to not use profanity, to not pollute the environment - these are things that I address in my photography. I

There was a time when one looked over one's shoulder with an ironical smile at the photographer and when photography as a profession seemed almost invariably a target for ridicule. That time is now over.

There was no such person as Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe was an invention of hers. A genius invention that she created, like an author creates a character. She understood photography, and she also understood what makes a great photograph. She related to it as if she were giving a performance. She gave more to the still camera than any actress-any woman- I've ever photographed.

These days it seems that physical truth can easily be rearranged, rethought, or re-created outright. Any image can be made pristine, all the warts can be removed. But returning to the source of a thing - the real source - means the photographer has to watch, dig, listen for voices, sniff the smells, and have many doubts. My life in photography has been lived as a skeptic.

These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me.

These days, you'd probably shoot it in the daylight and manipulate it in the post. That's [how] most people would do it. [I did the same thing with] with 'Diving Bell and the Butterfly'. No CGI. It's all live photography. And I like that, it's very challenging and exciting to be able to do that.

...the subject, the thing itself, is the genesis of all types of photography.

The similarity between Van Gogh, Haiku poetry, and good photography is the concern for mortality. That things are very fleeting, that there are people who are more sensitive to death than others. The threat of time is of great concern to them. And the camera is a very appropriate instrument for many.

The subject I liked best was painting, but the teachers didn't approve of my experiments and sometimes criticized me in front of the whole class. Maybe my love for photography came from that humiliation: a photo is something that you develop and print yourself, in the dark, and that remains in the dark until you decide to show it.

The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon [the] possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us.

The term accessories has come to include a host of photographic gadgets of questionable value.

The technique of 35mm photography appears simple. One is beguiled by the quick viewing and operation, and by the very questionable inclination to make many pictures with the hope that some will be good.

The thing about photography is, some people surround themselves with extremely strong subject matter. And unless you're a moron, you're going to get a really strong photograph.

The thing about photography is that every day is a new day, even if you are working on the same story, because every day you have got a chance to correct what you did the day before, and try to take it a bit further or a bit back.

The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.

The thing that was most interesting to me was getting my first prints back from the printer and realizing photography doesn't end with the click of a button, it starts there. Printing is so exciting.

The thing with my workshops is, photography is a thoughtful process. In an atmosphere of fast photography, and generally thoughtless, quick, automatic photography, I think that there is an interest in the slowed down, thoughtful approach.

The thing is that when you don't carry a camera, that's when you see pictures in particular, or at least that's when you think you see pictures in particular. When you do carry it, if you do see one on the occasion that you do, you can take it.

The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.

... the thing that's happening today vis-á-vis computer imaging, vis-á-vis alteration, is that it no longer needs to be based on the real at all. I don't want to get into jargon - let's just say that photography to me no longer pertains to the rhetoric of realism; it pertains more perhaps to the rhetoric of the unreal rather than the real or of course the hyperreal.

The thing that interests me about photography, and why it's different from all other media, is that it's the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece.

The thing that keeps you scrambling over the rocks, risking snakes, and swatting at the flies is the view. It is only your enjoyment of and commitment to what you see, not to what you rationally understand, that balances the otherwise absurd investment of labor.

The ultimate role of photography as a contemporary language of visual communication consists of its capacity to slow down our fast and chaotic way of reading images.

The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.