The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.
The immortal photographers will be straightforward photographers, those who do not rely on tricks or special techniques.
The head of the photographer is more important than his camera
You have to make shots. That's the bottom line.
Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn it into painting. And for that you need as bad a camera as possible! If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you're doing worse than anyone else in the whole world.
I just think it's important to be direct and honest with people about why you're photographing them and what you're doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul.
Photograph the world as it is. Nothing's more interesting than reality.
And no one drank just one shot of tequila.
Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience.
These elites, preferring to work in private, are rarely found posed for photographers, and their influence upon events has therefore to be deduced from what is known of the agencies they employ.
The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.
I lowered the gun but didn’t holster it. Not just yet. She could turn out to be psychotic. Or a door-to-door salesperson.
...candid still photography had taken over... What was interesting was that the photographs came without any intention of instructing you... You're like a cat looking out the window. You don't have to even know what you're watching, but you're watching it, and you're watching it very accurately.
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.
I think that emotional content is an image's most important element, regardless of the photographic technique. Much of the work I see these days lacks the emotional impact to draw a reaction from viewers, or remain in their hearts.
It was the era of photography. This may have influenced us, and played a part in our reaction against anything resembling a snapshot of life. (On the year 1905)
You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.
Photography is no longer a love affair with the beauty of reality.
The context in which a photograph is seen affects the meaning the viewer draws from it.
Max Kozloff said to me one day, ‘You’re not really a photographer. You do photography, but you do it for your own purposes – your purposes are not the same as others’. I’m not quite sure what he meant, but I like that. I like the way he put it.
The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing.
What makes [photography] obscene is its terrible cruelty. Happiness may be fleeting, but it's the reason we go on living. Photography is the joy that precedes pain, the moment of life just before death.
All photographs are self-portraits.
One does not photograph something simply for 'what it is', but 'for what else it is.
