I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.
Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.
No one moment is most important. Any moment can be something.
Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.
The world isn't tidy; it's a mess. I don't try to make it neat.
You have a lifetime to learn technique. But I can teach you what is more important than technique, how to see; learn that and all you have to do afterwards is press the shutter.
Sometimes I feel like . . . the world is a place I bought a ticket to. It’s a big show for me, as if it wouldn’t happen if I wasn’t there with a camera.
I don't have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions.
The photograph should be more interesting or more beautiful than what was photographed
Great photography is always on the edge of failure.
A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera 'saw' a piece of time and space.
When I’m photographing I see life.
All things are photographable.
Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface.
I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.
There is no special way a photograph should look.
Every photograph is a battle of form versus content.
There is a transformation, you see, when you just put four edges around it. That changes it. A new world is created.
I like to think of photographing as a two-way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject, by describing it as it is. A photograph must be responsible to both.
If you didn’t take the picture, you weren’t there.
There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.
Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good
I photograph what interests me. I'm not saying anything different.
When the woman is attractive, is it an interesting picture, or is it the woman? I had a lot of headaches with that, which was why it was interesting. I don't think I always got it straight.
For me the true business of photography is to capture a bit of reality (whatever that is) on film...if, later, the reality means something to someone else, so much the better.
