Photography Quotes - Page 39

[David Lean's] images stay with me forever. But what makes them memorable isn't necessarily their beauty. That's just good photography. It's the emotion behind those images that's meant the most to me over the years. It's the way David Lean can put feeling on film. The way he shows a whole landscape of the spirit. For me, that's the real geography of David Lean country. And that's why, in a David Lean movie, there's no such thing as an empty landscape.

I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.

Despite having been awarded the dubious honor of arthood, all photography is still perceived as having one foot in the real world, a toe in the chilly waters of verisimilitude, no matter how often it is demonstrated that photographs can and do lie.

Men have dominated the field of landscape photography just as they have dominated the land itself. Thus shooting a virgin landscape has been man's work - hunting, not gardening.

Photography starts with the projection of the photographer, his understanding of life and himself into the picture.

Anything that looks like an idea is probably just something that has accumulated, like dust. It looks like I have ideas because I do books that are all on the same subject. That is just because the pictures have piled up on that subject. Finally I realize that I am really interested in it. The pictures make me realize that I am interested in something.

When the true qualities of photography are recognized, the process of representation by mechanical means will be brought to a level of perfection never before reached.

The biggest lesson in photography is that from negative we make a positive

Well, I do think, particularly the way I work, the better images occur when you're moving to the fringes of your own understanding. That's where self-doubt and risk taking are likely to occur. It's when you trust what's happening at a non-intellectual non-conscious level that you can produce work that later resonates, often in a way that you can't articulate a response to.

It's always around. You just don't see it.

But everyone cannot be there, and that is why photographers go there - to show them, to reach out and grab them and make them stop what they are doing and pay attention to what is going on - to create pictures powerful enough to overcome the diluting effects of the mass media and shake people out of their indifference - to protest and by the strength of that protest to make others protest.

It's important to let your subjects be themselves.

Photography is only intuition, a perpetual interrogation - everything except a stage set.

Photography is like fencing. You must keep your distance, wait, and then thrust.

Good films are not made by accident, nor is good photography. You can have good things happen, on occasion, by accident that can be applied at that moment in a film, but your craft isn't structured around such things, except in beer commercials.

My generation came at a time when photography was advancing by leaps and bounds, creating the impulse to experiment and seek new approaches.

I have a burning desire to see what things look like photographed by me.

There is no such thing as a good paparazzo. A good paparazzo, that's a paparazzo who has had his camera broken. In fact, they are bandits, thieves of photography. (Statement after photographs were published showing Jackie Onassis sunbathing nude.)

I'm a photographer and retoucher from Sweden. I use photography as a way of collecting material to realize the ideas in my mind.

The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer's understanding of his subject and mastery of his process.

I see no reason for recording the obvious.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.

One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.

I don't know what good composition is.... Sometimes for me composition has to do with a certain brightness or a certain coming to restness and other times it has to do with funny mistakes. There's a kind of rightness and wrongness and sometimes I like rightness and sometimes I like wrongness.

We stand on a precipice, then before a chasm, and as we wait it becomes higher, wider, deeper, but I am crazy enough to think it doesn't matter which way we leap because when we leap we will have learned to fly. Is that blasphemy or faith?