Photography Quotes - Page 32

At 42, I decided to become a photographer because it offered a means of creative thought and action. I didn't rationalize this, I just felt it intuitively and followed my intuition, which I have never regretted.

Photography is not cute cats, nor nudes, motherhood or arrangements of manufactured products. Under no circumstances it is anything ever anywhere near a beach.

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt

When people talk to me about picture hunters, I very quietly laugh. I'm not a hunter of pictures, I'm a fisher of pictures.

The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.

Anthropology... has always been highly dependent upon photography... As the use of still photography - and moving pictures - has become increasingly essential as a part of anthropological methods, the need for photographers with a disciplined knowledge of anthropology and for anthropologists with training in photography has increased. We expect that in the near future sophisticated training in photography will be a requirement for all anthropologists. (1962)

We are in a privileged and sometimes happy position. We see a great deal of the world. Our obligation is to pass it on to others.

The greatest tool at our command is the very thing that is photography. Light. Light is our paintbrush and it is a most willing tool in the hands of the one who studies it with a sufficient care.

The invention of photography destroyed the canons of representational, imitative art.

Photography, when used as a representational art, is not a mere copy of nature. This is proved by the rarity of the 'good' photograph.

We look at a painting to know the painter; it's his company we are after, not his skill.

A photographer must always work with the greatest respect for his subject and in terms of his own point of view.

Pictures, regardless of how they are created and recreated, are intended to be looked at. This brings to the forefront not the technology of imaging, which of course is important, but rather what we might call the eyenology (seeing).

For half a century photography has been the "art form" of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? to the finger on the button? to the law of averages?

Often when I walked alone in the mountains, I tried to make sense out of the two halves of my life. What went on in the city during the week seemed chaotic and unrelated to the events in my mountain world.

Life itself is not the reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles.

I like to think I keep my mind open. When I walk the streets I don't look for anything in particular. I come from a philosophy that believes you shouldn't have preconceived notions - that you don't need a gimmick. That you should just photograph what you react to - what you see.

All my photographs are about meetings and about coups de foudre - love at first sight. To do that type of photography, one must wipe the canvas clean to prepare for chance encounters, be open and aware to such moments, otherwise it becomes a cliché - already seen and expected.

It's really a great asset to be willing to fail and blow it, so to speak, and to be okay with just making stuff, sharing it and getting feedback.

Nothing seemed to me more appropriate than to project an image of our time with absolute fidelity to nature by means of photography.

Because powerful images are fixed in the mind more readily than words, the photographer needs no interpreter. A photograph means the same thing all over the world and no translator is required. Photography is truly a universal language, transcending all boundaries of race, politics and nationality.

Visual ideas combined with technology combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold it's own; if it doesn't, the thing collapses.

There are no rules and regulations for perfect composition. If there were we would be able to put all the information into a computer and would come out with a masterpiece. We know that's impossible. You have to compose by the seat of your pants.

I was drawn to photography as an extension of film, and the beauty of film is that it's a sensuous, fetishistic medium.

Notebook. No photographer should be without one!