David Hockney Quotes about Photography

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

The video camera dominates art. It's a bore, it makes everything look a bit the same. If you look at things with a pencil and paper in your hand, you are going to see far more.

I think photography has made us see the landscape in a very dull way - that's one of its effects. It's not spatial.

Modernism in a way, early modernism, for instance, in pictures, was turning against perspective and Europe. And all early modernism is actually from out of Europe, when you think of cubism is African, is looking at Africa, Matisse is looking at the arabesque, Oceania. Europe was the optical projection that had become photography, that had become film, that became television and it conquered the world.

...all along I've had an ambivalent relationship to photography - but as to whether I thought it an art form, or a craft, or a technique, well, I've always been taken with Henry Geldzahler's answer to that question when he said, I thought it was a hobby.

Photography hankers after the condition of the neutral observer. But there can be no such things as a neutral observer. For something to be seen, it must be looked at by somebody, and any true and real depiction must be an account of the experience of that looking.

But slowly I began to use cameras and then think about what it was that was going on. It took me a long time, I mean I actually played with cameras and photography for about 20 years.

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!

The history of photography needs clearing out. It needs something else now. Because photography always acknowledged there were cameras before photography.

Photography sees surfaces, it doesn't see space. We see space but the camera doesn't.

I've finally figured out what's wrong with photography. It's a one-eyed man looking through a little 'ole. Now, how much reality can there be in that?

I think probably something big can be done with cameras, I'm not saying, er, I'm saying chemical photography's finished, that means you can't have a Cartier Bresson again, you need never believe pictures.

I was always interested in photography because it makes a picture.

All painters are interested in photography to a certain extent.

You had to be aware that I saw that photography was a mere episode in the history of the optical projection and when the chemicals ended, meaning the picture was fixed by chemicals, we were in a new era.

People criticized me for my photography. They said it's not art.

I thought using three cameras was a lot better than one, because you could see where you were going, where you'd been, and all kinds of things - more like life. I think photography has colored our vision. We're now in an area where it might break something. I think this is a time. I feel it. I don't know whether I'll be here long enough to experience it. I've no plans to leave yet.

Because I'm interested in depiction, representation, therefore you're interested in photography. You don't ignore it.

I think we seem to remember things in still pictures. I never gave up on painting. When they said painting was dead, I just thought, Well, that's all about photography, and photography's not that interesting, and it's changing anyway.