Photography Quotes - Page 47

Some of my pictures are poem-like in the sense that they are very condensed, haiku-lik. There are others that, if they were poetry, would be more like Ezra Pound. There is a lot of information in most of my pictures, but not the kind of information you see in documentary photography. There is emotional information in my photographs.

If you can't make the image bigger or more important than what you see, then don't push the button

Light is my inspiration. My photographic images search for dimensions that words cannot touch- the result of intense responses to personal experiences. I do not wish to "record," but rather to touch upon the illusive meanings which I perceive and try to comprehend in this limitless universe.

A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony.

[Photography] tells you that every second in time is different from every other second. You want people to understand that the image in front of them has something to do with the truth, and it can never be repeated.

The very best gift... is that anyone can experience those unexpected twinkles of joy that make a magical moment. At these moments, you feel true, deep joy because of a great new insight, a beautiful prospect, or a glimpse into the radiance of another soul. They are the magic moments when life seems better than you ever realized.

The first picture of his I ever saw was during a lecture at the Rhyl camera club. I was 16 and the speaker was Emrys Jones. He projected the picture upside down. Deliberately, to disregard the subject matter to reveal the composition. It's a lesson I've never forgotten.

In 1990 I did a story with Helena Christensen about a woman who lives in a trailer in the middle of the desert and finds a little crushed UFO with a martian who has survived the crash. She takes him home, and they fall in love. Later he has to meet with his fellow martians who have arrived to rescue him. It's a sad ending. This was my first truly narrative story and apparently the first narrative story in fashion photography.

A photo is like a map, a way of giving me a foot into a kind of reality I want... I'm not trying to make paintings look like photos. I want to make paintings using photos as a reference, the way painters did when photography was first invented.

Photography is a form of time travel.

The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.

I find that when one has worked long enough, technical know-how becomes almost irrelevant. In photography, it's not difficult to reach a technical level where you don't need to think about the technique any more. I think there is far too much literature and far too much emphasis upon the techniques of photography. The make of camera and type of film we happen to use has little bearing on the results.

The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.

The idea of photography as evidence is pure bullshit. A photo is no more proof of any reality than what you may hear being said by someone in a bus. We only record details, small fragments of the world.

Photography is a great adventure in thinking and looking, a wonderful magic toy that miraculously manages to combine our adult awareness with the fairy-tale world of childhood, a never-ending journey through great and small, through variations and the realm of illusions and appearances, a labyrinthine and specular place of multitudes and simulation.

Photojournalism is neither photography or journalism. It has its function but it's not where I see myself: the press is for me just a means for photographing, for material – not for telling the truth.

The digital image annihilates photography while solidifying, glorifying and immortalizing the photographic.

When I photograph, I am always relating things to one another. Photography shows the connection between things, how they relate.

If one really knew what one was doing, why do it? It seems to me if you had the answer why ask the question? The thing is there are so many questions.

The world makes up my pictures, not me.

Photography is there to construct the idea of us as a great family and we go on vacations and take these pictures and then we look at them later and we say, 'Isn't this a great family?' So photography is instrumental in creating family not only as a memento, a souvenir, but also a kind of mythology.

Let the pictures do the talking!

I'm fond of implied narratives, oblique angles, and leaving a little room for the viewer to finish a picture.

And I was very successful at baby photography... Strange isn't it? Because some of my portraits of babies were - I used dramatic lighting, shadow lighting, and I didn't use flash. We didn't have flash in those days, we just had floodlights, and I was photographing babies as I would an object - an inanimate object, for that matter.

Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.