Photography Quotes - Page 14

I think life is too short not to be doing something which you really believe in. Whether you're photographing for yourself, for your job, whether you photograph on the weekends or everyday or once in a while, the main point is having fun and to be exercising your curiosity and to be really in love with what you are doing.

The function of the photographer is to help people understand the world around them.

The photographic image... is a message without a code.

If I am at a party, I want to be at the party. Too many photographers use the camera to avoid participating in things. They become professional observers.

Photography is like making cheese. It takes a hell of a lot of milk to make a small amount of cheese just like it takes a hell of a lot of photos to get a good one.

Eventually I discovered for myself the utterly simple prescription for creativity; be intensely yourself. Don't try to be outstanding; don't try to be a success;don't try to do pictures for others to look at- just please yourself.

With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society's natural prejudice and giving this a twist.

I was making photographs of the world long before I was a photographer.

Too many photographers try too hard. They try to lift photography into the realm of Art, because they have an inferiority complex about their craft. You and I would see more interesting photography if they would stop worrying, and instead, apply horse-sense to the problem of recording the look and feel of their own era.

Life as it unfolds in front of the camera is full of so much complexity, wonder and surprise that I find it unnecessary to create new realities. There is more pleasure, for me, in things as-they-are.

If the artist only reproduces superficial features as photography does, if he copies the lineaments of a face exactly, without reference to character, he deserves no admiration. The resemblance which he ought to obtain is that of the soul.

The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous.

When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.

I fell in love with the process of taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a document of that performance.

There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes.

Patience is the essence of clicking great Photographs!!

Has it led you to the conclusion that photography is an art ? Or it is simply a means of recording ? "I'm glad you asked that. I've been wanting to say this for years. Is cooking an art ? Is talking an art ? Is even painting an art ? It is artfulness that makes art, not the medium itself. Of course photography is an art - when it is in the hands of artists."

The world just does not fit conveniently into the format of a 35mm camera.

If it doesn’t have ambiguity, don’t bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography - the mendacity of photography. It’s got to have some kind of peculiarity in it, or it’s not interesting to me.

Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference.

The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda.

I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life.

My photos are my diary. Every photo is no more than the representation of a single day. And each day contains the past and the projection into the future. That's why I feel compelled to indicate the date on every picture I take.

The enemy of photography is the convention, the fixed rules of 'how to do'. The salvation of photography comes from the experiment.

Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.