Photography Quotes - Page 15

Try to go out empty and let your images fill you up.

For me, the strength of photography lies in its ability to evoke humanity. If war is an attempt to negate humanity, then photography can be perceived as the opposite of war.

As I progressed further with my project, it became obvious that it was really unimportant where I chose to photograph. The particular place simply provided an excuse to produce work... you can only see what you are ready to see - what mirrors your mind at that particular time.

A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.

Photography - the new, rapid, concrete reflector of the world - should surely undertake to show the world from all vantage points, and to develop people's capacity to see from all sides. (1928)

I'm not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it's not an object, I work in history, I'm a storyteller.

Most photographers go and photograph something that they see, that exists, and that somebody else has created - they document it. But fashion photographers have to create what they're going to photograph. We have to go into the thought and build it up, get a girl, get a guy, get a situation, get the house, get the decor. It's the meaning of the word photography: "writing with light."

As photographers, we live through things so swiftly. All our experience and training is focused toward snatching off the highlights... That all significant perfect moment, so essential to capture, is often highly perishable. There may be little opportunity to probe deeper.

I just get the will to do it. I don’t plan a photograph in advance… I work by impulse. No philosophy. No ideas. Not by the head but by the eyes. Eventually inspiration comes-instinct is the same as inspiration, and eventually it comes.

As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace.

What I find interesting is working in a society with certain taboos and fashion photography is about that kind of society. To have taboos, then to get around them that is interesting.

The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don't know what to do with it.

Maybe to try to understand not just that we are living in a certain building or in a certain location, but to become aware that we are living on a planet that is going at enormous speed through the universe.

[Photojournalism] really is the only branch of photography that's a credit to our profession. We see, we understand; we see more, we understand more.

No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen.

A photograph isn't necessarily a lie, but nor is it the truth. It's more of a fleeting, subjective impression. What I most like about photography is the moment that you can't anticipate: you have to be constantly watching for it, ready to welcome the unexpected.

She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.

In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.

I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.

I am not interested in rules or conventions. Photography is not a sport.

I always say that photography's closest cousin is poetry because of the way it sparks your imagination and leaves gaps for the viewer to fill in.

We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see.

Photography cannot change the world, but it can show the world, especially when it changes.

In portrait photography there is something more profound that we seek inside a person, while being painfully aware that a limitation of our medium is that the inside is recordable only insofar as it is apparent on the outside...Very often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.