Photography Quotes - Page 31

Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.

In the beginning I was really, really lean. For the longest time I did it all. I played every hat. I was in the factory, doing the graphic design, the photography, the selling - literally everything. I saved money doing what I could myself. It was hard but I learned. I learned that nobody's better than you to get your business off the ground. The experience you get is priceless.

I believed it was necessary to investigate photography, dismantle it, jettison all the non-essential components, and begin again with a stripped down but more powerful idea of what is, or could be photographic.

One of my challenges was to try to photograph the Great Wall of China. And I did actually take some photos, but it was hard to discern the wall with the naked eye.

For me there are no rules. I think I learned that from artists-from painters and sculptors. It took photography a while to catch up to them.

I like small things, I like small moments that are almost elliptical, that are not necessarily linear; they're natural things that happen in the world, but if you look at them from a slight angle there's more than meets the eye.

I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both.

What I love about photography, and it's the same thing I love about acting, really, is that it forces you, like, right into the moment, where you can't be distracted, where you can't be, like, thinking about other things or ahead of yourself or behind yourself.

You are responsible for every part of your image, even the parts you’re not interested in.

If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up.

The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.

I want the stark beauty that a lens can so exactly render presented without interference of artistic effect.

F8 And Be There! For years, this was the cry of the photojournalist. It meant that 90% of a great photo was being in the right place at the right time. True, it was simplistic, but in the Age of Photoshop, this maxim is too often forgotten. No matter how much you play with the bits and bytes, the best images always start out with a great vision, clearly and cleanly seen.

I am just a middle-class farm boy from Dodge City and my grandparents were wheat farmers. I thought painting, acting, directing and photography were all part of being an artist. I have made my money that way. And I have had some fun. It's not been a bad life.

Photography hankers after the condition of the neutral observer. But there can be no such things as a neutral observer. For something to be seen, it must be looked at by somebody, and any true and real depiction must be an account of the experience of that looking.

...all along I've had an ambivalent relationship to photography - but as to whether I thought it an art form, or a craft, or a technique, well, I've always been taken with Henry Geldzahler's answer to that question when he said, I thought it was a hobby.

The video camera dominates art. It's a bore, it makes everything look a bit the same. If you look at things with a pencil and paper in your hand, you are going to see far more.

Photography has the capacity to provide images of man and his environment that are both works of art and moments in history.

Photography in our time leaves us with a grave responsibility. While we are playing in our studios with broken flowerpots, oranges, nude studies and still lifes, one day we know that we will be brought to account: life is passing before our eyes without our ever having seen a thing.

No amount of toying with shades of print or with printing papers will transform a commonplace photograph into anything other than a commonplace photograph.

Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times - the pulse of today.

I think that the exactitude of the photograph has a sort of compelling nature based in its power to duplicate life. But to me the real power of photography is based in death: the fact that somehow it can enliven that which is not there in a kind of stultifying frightened way, because it seems to me that part of one's life is made up of a constant confrontation with one's own death.

We do not make photographs with our cameras. We make them with our minds, with our hearts, with our ideas.

I knew my destiny when I first experienced Yosemite.

Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.