Photography Quotes - Page 35

To know whether photography is or is not an art matters little. What is important is to distinguish between good and bad photography. By good is meant that photography which accepts all the limitations inherent in photographic technique and takes advantage of the possibilities and characteristics the medium offers. By bad photography is mean that which is done, one may say, with a kind of inferiority complex, with no appreciation of what photography itself offers: but on the contrary, recurring to all sorts of imitations.

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

There's something arbitrary about taking a picture. So I can stand at the edge of a highway and take one step forward and it can be a natural landscape untouched by man and I can take one step back and include a guardrail and change the meaning of the picture radically... I can take a picture of a person at one moment and make them look contemplative and photograph them two seconds later and make them look frivolous.

As is often said of photography, this photograph is a frozen moment. A frozen moment is not a moment at all.

There's a time when people say your work is revolutionary, but you have to keep being revolutionary. I can't keep shooting pop stars all my life. You have to keep changing, keep pushing yourself, looking for the new, the unusual.

I believe that the source of your inspiration is very important. I sometimes see this problem with photographers, even very good ones, who have drawn too much inspiration from photography and who, over time, have a problem forming their own identity.

Photography is like a moment, an instant. You need a half-second to get the photo. So it's good to capture people when they are themselves.

In every photographer there was a painter, a true artist, awaiting expression.

A photographer without a magazine behind him is like a farmer without fields.

I do have strong convictions and political opinions, but I don't think it's necessary to imbue my photographic work with them. I use photography as a vessel for visual material to flow through, to encourage conversation with the viewer. I try to present a catalyst and invite viewers to tell their own stories.

My greatest aim has been to advance the art of photography and to make it what I think I have, a great and truthful medium of history.

I accept that all photography is voyeuristic and exploitative, and obviously I live with my own guilt and conscience. It's part of the test and I don't have a problem with it.

When we take a picture, we have a negative. We put the right solution on it and, suddenly, the picture comes to life. So what do we do? We take the negative and turn it into a positive.

Photography intervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets, gates, squares of the city into illustrations of a trashy novel, draws off the banal obviousness of this ancient architecture to inject it with the most pristine intensity.

We pass the billboard and I console myself in two ways. First, I know that most photographs taken are a gamble at best. Second and more important: I remind myself to find the pleasure in this moment, a time in which the red sky passes to black, children create unanticipated rhymes, and the stars fall closer to earth.

The photogram, image formation outside the camera is the real key to photography,it embodies the essence... that allows us to capture light on light sensitive material without the use of any camera.

I'm not modest about myself. I know for a fact that I am good. But good in the sense that I can put things together. I expound vociferously to students of architecture and photography, the significance of design. A photograph is a design in which you assemble thoughts in your mind.

My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty.

Photography has a relation to intervention, but photographing is not the same as an intervening.

Photography, as an invention, was both art and science. The view it gave us of the world was in some measure acceptable because it was a product of our vision of the world; and it did so as part of the same process which seemed to impart 'truth': science.

There's no such thing as a bad photograph.

You’ve gotta taste the light, like my friend and fellow shooter Chip Maury says. And when you see light like this, trust me, it’s like a strawberry sundae with sprinkles.

Color is seductive. It changes as it interacts with other colors, it changes because of the light falling upon it, and it changes as it becomes larger in size.

Photography is a magic thing. A thing that has mysterious odors, a little strange and frightening, something one quickly grows to love.

The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.