Photography Quotes - Page 41

This idea of imposing an order is very interesting to me. Photography is in essence an analytic medium. … In photography, you start with the whole world and every decision you make imposes an order on it. The question is to what extent it’s an idealized order I’m imposing or is it an order that grows out of what the world looks like.

I looked through a lens and ended up abandoning everything else.

A person cannot learn to be a photographer. He can only cultivate what he already has. I try to make people aware that they have something very precious to cultivate.

If youre not interested in life, then photography has no meaning

Woman has been the target of much that is sordid and cheap, especially in photography. To raise, to elevate, to endorse with timeless reverence the image of woman, has been my mission.

A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.

We used the camera only as a means of expression and as a visual medium that offers possibilities found in no other artistic technique, possibilities that the eye cannot catch in their totality. We tried to establish a characteristic vision of photography.

People believe pictures. It's a photograph that's in your passport, not a painting. Now, George Bernard Shaw said, 'I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot.' That's what the power of photography is.

To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.

Every artist I suppose has a sense of what they think has been the importance of their work. But to ask them to define it is not really a fair question. My real answer would be, the answer is on the wall.

The photographer's problem is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium, for it is precisely here that honesty no less than intensity of vision is the pre-requisite of a living expression. The fullest realization of this is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation, through the use of straight photographic methods.

I don't even like photography at all. I'm just doing photography until I can do something better.

It's possible to think of photography as an act of editing, a matter of where you put your rectangle pull it out or take it away. Sometimes people ask me about films, cameras and development times in order to find out how to do landscape photography. The first thing I do in landscape photography is go out there and talk to the land - form a relationship, ask permission, it's not about going out there like some paparazzi with a Leica and snapping a few pictures, before running off to print them.

I guess that's what I was: a set of abs. And they lit the abs and shot the abs and sent the abs on their way. The photographer didn't look at my face once. I was humiliated.

Orson Welles was a force of nature, who just came in and wiped the slate clean. And Citizen Kane is the greatest risk-taking of all time in film. I don’t think anything had even seen anything quite like it. The photography was also unlike anything we’d seen. The odd coldness of the filmmaker towards the character reflects his own egomania and power, and yet a powerful empathy for all of them--it’s very interesting. It still holds up, and it’s still shocking. It takes storytelling and throws it up in the air.

There are two parts to the process: taking the picture and finding ways of using it.

It's not that photography recaptures the world you have been in; more that it creates a new one: photographs are like Post-It Notes reminding us of the deep architectonic forms of space and thought.

The ultimate role of photography as a contemporary language of visual communication consists of its capacity to slow down our fast and chaotic way of reading images.

I just picked up a camera without any kind of ambition to be good or bad. And especially without any ambition to make a living... My whole freedom working in photography comes because I say to myself, Let's see what is going on in this world. Let's find out. How do these people look?

I assumed from the outset that photography was already art, and that I and other people working in photography were artists. I understand now that this was a minority point of view.

Photographing is an emotional thing, a graceful thing. Photography allows me to wander with a purpose.

... photographs are so loaded with information. They're remarkable. As I said, you get both the tree and the forest.

It cannot be too plainly stated that it is quite unimportant whether photography produces 'art' or not. Its own basic laws, not the opinions of art critics, will provide the only valid measure of its future worth.

It's amazing how photography can capture just a split second of something exquisite.

There is a considerable amount of manipulation in the printmaking from the straight photograph to the finished print. If I do my job correctly that shouldn't be visible at all, it should be transparent.