Hot Quotes - Page 29

All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object.

To see life. To see the world. To watch the faces of the poor, and the gestures of the proud. To see strange things. Machines, armies, multitudes, and shadows in the jungle. To see, and to take pleasure in seeing. To see and be instructed. To see and be amazed. (Describing the powers of photography; written for the launch of LIFE Magazine, 1936.)

Think about the photo before and after, never during. The secret is to take your time. You mustn't go too fast. The subject must forget about you. Then, however, you must be very quick.

Of course it's all luck.

A golfer rarely needs to hit a spectacular shot until the one that preceded it was pretty bad.

All the technique in the world doesn't compensate for the inability to notice.

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.

Photography doesn't teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.

Landscapes, heads and naked women are called artistic photography, while photographs of current events are called press photography.

It should be the aim of every photographer to make a single exposure that shows everything about the subject. I have been told that my portrait of Churchill is an example of this.

Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can.

With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don't think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.

The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.

A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there-even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.

I think all art is about control, the encounter between control and uncontrollable.

Photography itself is most frequently nothing but the reproduction of the image that a group produces of its own integration.

In black and white you suggest, in color you state.

Golf is not about the quality of your good shots, it is about the quality of your bad shots.

The light's hot, everything’s hot, I’m hot.

The first bowl of chocolate pudding was too hot, but Goldilocks ate it all anyway because, hey, it's chocolate pudding, right?

I'm just like my country, I'm young, scrappy and hungry, and I'm not throwing away my shot.

Photography was the first available demonstration that light could indeed exert an action sufficient to cause changes in material bodies.

I thought men like that shot themselves.

Griddle cakes, pancakes, hot cakes, flapjacks: why are there four names for grilled batter and only one word for love?

I get totally out of myself. It's the closest I come to not existing, I think, which is the best - which is to me attractive.