Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free.
To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.
All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
It's not hard being great occasionally. It's difficult to be good consistently.
My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.
And if a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it's as though I've neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up. I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.
I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense... symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller - to find out how they are.
A portrait isn't a fact but an opinion - an occasion rather than a truth.
Anything is an art if you do it at the level of an art.
If each photograph steals a bit of the soul, isn't it possible that I give up pieces of mine every time I take a picture?
I hate cameras. They interfere, they're always in the way. I wish: if I could work with my eyes alone.
Real people move, they bear with them the element of time. It is this fourth dimension of people that I try to capture in a photograph.
I've worked out of a series of no's. No to exquisite light, no to apparent compositions, no to the seduction of poses or narrative. And all these no's force me to the yes. I have a white background. I have the person I'm interested in and the thing that happens between us.
Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me.
For hours she danced and sang and flirted and did this thing that's-she did Marilyn Monroe. And then there was the inevitable drop. And when the night was over and the white wine was over and the dancing was over, she sat in the corner like a child, with everything gone. I saw her sitting quietly without expression on her face, and I walked towards her but I wouldn't photograph her without her knowledge of it. And as I came with the camera, I saw that she was not saying no.
I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.
I believe that you've got to love your work so much that it is all you want to do.
The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.
I think all art is about control, the encounter between control and uncontrollable.
The way someone who's being photographed presents himself to the camera, and the effect of the photographer's response on that presence, is what the making of a portrait is all about.
The pictures have a reality for me that the people don't. It is through the photographs that I know them.
There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone's person.
One man's fantasy is another man's job.
Camera lies all the time. It’s all it does is lie, because when you choose this moment instead of this moment, when you… the moment you’ve made a choice, you’re lying about something larger. Lying is an ugly word. I don’t mean lying. But any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.
