Photography Quotes - Page 4

Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?

Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it's not an art. The main thing about directing is: photograph the people's eyes.

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.

The pictures are there, and you just take them.

Photography today is accomplishing a lofty mission in which every German should collaborate by buying a camera. The German people is ahead of every other in the technical domain and, thanks to its exceptional qualities, the small camera has conquered the whole world... Much is at stake here from the point of view of popular consumer goods and, furthermore, photography has a particularly important political role to play. (Addressing the Berlin Photography Fair, 1933)

Photography is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It's a way of life.

There are two dirty words in photography, one is art, the other is good taste

A good photograph is like a good hound dog, dumb, but eloquent.

Anything that is worth pursuing is going to require us to suffer, just a little bit.

Music is the doorway that has led me to drawing, photography, and writing.

You have a 45mm automatic pistol on your lap, and I have a 35mm camera on my lap, and my weapon is just as powerful as yours. (To Black Panther militant Eldridge Cleaver)

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

I drifted into photography like one drifts into prostitution. First I did it to please myself, then I did it to please my friends, and eventually I did it for the money.

I was in the right place at the right time.

Only powerfully conceived images have the ability to penetrate the memory, to stay there, in short to become unforgettable.

Never stop looking, no matter where you are, everywhere there are good photographs

Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness.

If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough.

Anything more than 500 yards from the car just isn't photogenic.

I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term - meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching - there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.

The picture is not made by the photographer, the picture is more good or less good in function of the relationship that you have with the people you photograph.