Photographer Quotes - Page 15

When people call me a photographer, I always feel like something of a charlatan—at least in Japanese. The word shashin, for photograph, combines the characters sha, meaning to reflect or copy, and shin, meaning truth, hence the photographer seems to entertain grand delusions of portraying truth.

The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera.

A picture is like a prayer.

I've been a photographer all these years... I haven't been in my own darkroom for 10 years.

I've been an amateur photographer since my teens.

All important pictures embody something that we do not yet understand.

You don't study photography, you just do it.

Modern Art is being used to index me. Surely it was a source but photographers have influenced Modern Art quite as deeply as they have been influenced, maybe more. Anyway painters don't have a copyright on M. A. We were all born in the same upheaval.

The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.

The camera is a kind of license.

The camera is cruel, so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.

The adornment of the body is a human need. I don't see anything superficial about it unless your life becomes very materialistic.

These are the two basic controls at the photographer's command--positi on and timing--all others are extensions, peripheral ones, compared to them

In the spirit of Vivian Maier, who worked unaided by any publication or commercial shooting, I set up the Emerging Photographer Fund

It’s a very weird thing being a photographer.

I liked the idea of being a photographer, just that you take this one picture of this one thing that'll never happen again - it's a bit weird when you think about it.

Usually, your personality doesn't come out on the cover of Vogue. If the photographer says, "Smile," you smile. You might not be in a good mood that day, but you're smiling anyway.

It's always a pleasure to talk about someone else's work.

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.

I'm kind of a twisted social documentary photographer.

What attracts the photographer is precisely the chance to penetrate inside phenomena, to uncover forms... He pursues them into their last refuges and surprises them at their most positive, their most material and true.

Ask photographers to write and they have nothing to say; ask them to talk about their work and they won't shut up.

The art is in selecting what is worthwhile to take the trouble about.

I was always into the music. Music, in general, saved my life. But the fame part... I would look up, see what was going on around me, the reporters and photographers and all, and then I would just go back to making my music.

In conclusion, the idea of direction on the part of the photographer has its greatest value when its processes are least discernible to the spectator.