Photography Quotes - Page 23

Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.

Since the photographic medium has been digitized, a fixed definition of the term photography has become impossible.

All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.

It is every photographer's responsibility to discover new images and a new personal way of looking at things. If he can do this his pictures will command attention and have surprise quality.

If you see something you have seen before, don't click the shutter.

If it's a likeness, alone, it's not a success. If, through my portraits, you can come to know the subjects more meaningfully, if it synthesizes your feelings toward someone whose work has imprinted itself on your mind--if you see a photograph and say, 'Yes, this is the person,' with a little new insight--that is a beautiful experience.

The art is the challenge which you must meet every day: the technique you should learn to control with time. The science and the art of photography are really one, and not opposed to each other.

The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.

I believe that the essence of photography is black and white. Color is but a deviance.

Modern photography must do more than entertain, it must incite thought and by its clear statements of actuality, cultivate a sympathetic understanding of men and women and the life they live and create.

Polaroid, you know, goes against everything that photography is now. You can't make multiples. Only one exists. I love that. By the way, while we've been talking I've now seen a total of three people I know walking on 8th street.

The photographer is a manipulator of light; photography is a manipulation of light.

Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.

Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.

I guess I've shot about 40,000 negatives and of these I have about 800 pictures I like.

Photography, if there is photography, is already snapped, already shot, in the very interior of things and for all points of space.

Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times...I just shoot at what interests me at that moment.

Photography's a case of keeping all the pores of the skin open, as well as the eyes. A lot of photographers today think that by putting on the uniform, the fishing vest, and all the Nikons, that that makes them a photographer. But it doesn't. It's not just seeing. It's feeling.

Photography for me is not looking, it's feeling. If you can't feel what you're looking at, then you're never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.

What is creativity? Having spent my life in one creative endeavor after another, I can tell you it's not something magical or mystical. It's something very simple. To me, it's just a moment - a moment where we look at the ordinary, but we see the extraordinary. It happens all the time in my photography.

It is essential for the photographer to know the effect of his lenses. The lens is his eye, and it makes or ruins his pictures. A feeling for composition is a great asset. I think it is very much a matter of instinct. It can perhaps be developed, but I doubt if it can be learned. To achieve his best work, the young photographer must discover what really excites him visually. He must discover his own world.

To be ready is one thing, to be able to wait is another; but to seize the right moment is everything.

Photography was the only thing that mattered in my life and I gave it everything.

The reason I often say, for me, photography is analogous to poetry, for my kind of work more so than journalism, is because it's so open to interpretation. And I'm very happy having different interpretations of it.

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.