Photography Quotes - Page 17

Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.

Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion... the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.

I think photography has made us see the landscape in a very dull way - that's one of its effects. It's not spatial.

Taking photographs is generally an act of 'looking at the object, whereas 'being seen' or 'showing' is what is most interest to one who does a self-portrait...self-portraits deny not only photography itself but the 20th century as an era as well...an inevitable phenomenon at the end of the 20th century.

Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.

No photographer should be blamed when, instead of capturing reality, he tries to show things he has seen only in his imagination. Photography is the youngest art form. All attempts to enlarge its frontiers are important and should be encouraged.

I used photography to distance myself from a world that I loathed and was powerless to improve.

If you want to make more interesting pictures, become a more interesting person.

Photography is thus brought within reach of every human being who desires to preserve a record of what he sees… and enables the fortunate possessor to go back by the light of his own fireside to scenes which would otherwise fade from memory and be lost.

There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.

Once the amateur's naive approach and humble willingness to learn fades away, the creative spirit of good photography dies with it. Every professional should remain always in his heart an amateur.

I try to photograph people's spirits and thoughts. As to the soul-taking by the photographer, I don't feel I take away, but rather that the sitter and I give to each other. It becomes an act of mutual participation.

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.

If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear - but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.

Photography is the truth if it’s being handled by a truthful person.

I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heat of the known awaits just around the corner.

I try with my pictures to raise a question, to provoke a debate, so that we can discuss problems together and come up with solutions.

Few photographers have ever considered the photography of wild animals, as distinctly opposed to the genre of Wildlife Photography, as an art form. The emphasis has generally been on capturing the drama of wild animals IN ACTION, on capturing that dramatic single moment, as opposed to simply animals in the state of being.

"Utter truth is essential, and that is what stirs me when I look through the camera."

The photogram, or camera-less record of forms produced by light, which embodies the unique nature of the photographic process, is the real key to photography.

Working myself into a position of total versatility, so that I can do anything I want to do at the time I want to do it. Whether I do it or not is another question.

This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock.

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

I wish that all of nature's magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.