Photography Quotes - Page 48

It never seemed important to me that my photos be published. It's important that I take them. There were periods where I didn't have money, and I would imagine that someone would come to me and say: 'Here is money, you can go do your photography, but you must not show it.' I would have accepted right away. On the other hand, if someone had come to me saying: 'Here is money to do your photography, but after your death it must be destroyed,' I would have refused.

What's happening is that people are making a billion photographs a year of their cats, frequently with the cats wearing costumes. Do you think I should be doing shows of cat photography?

Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.

A photographer needs to be a good editor of negatives and prints! In fact, most of the prints I make are for my eyes only, and they are no good. I find the single most valuable tool in the darkroom is my trash can - that's where most of my prints end up.

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

To my father, art had no restrictions. He was a true 'American Primitive.' He greatly enjoyed sketching and photography, carrying a camera with him whenever he could.

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.

John Loengard, the picture editor at Life, always used to tell me, ”If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.

IT'S a pitfall to have a definition of photography.

Never say you're going back - SHOOT IT NOW!

You always end up with too many pictures to edit and too few that you feel 'got it'.

Don't overthink things in front of you. I fit moves you, shoot it. If it's fun, shoot it. If you've never seen it before, shoot it.

I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one badass flower, captured in time-lapse photography, going from bud to wild radiant blossom in ten seconds flat.

It is very hard to say where you're going until you get there. That kind of thing is based very much on instinct. As a photographer, one of the most important lessons I have learnt is that you have to learn to listen to and trust your own instinct. It has helped to guide me - this far at least.

I want my pictures to cut through political abstractions... and make a connection on a human level.

I think what it was with the war photography was the concerned eye, the desire to document these situations to show the world the horrors of war. It inspired me to document prostitution; inspired me to document homelessness in America. We are the richest country in the world, yet we have people suffering, so it helped me to look at things in that manner.

Photography and writing are marvelous distractions from painting. I might even have found movies more interesting than photography. I tried it a bit, but not enough.

Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.

I am neither an economist nor a photographer of monuments, and I am not much of a journalist either. What I am trying to do more than anything else is to observe life.

Actually, I'm not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks.

In the end, photography for me is just an excuse to get to know the world.

The photographer begins to feel big and bloated and so big he can't walk through one of these doors because he gets a good byline; he gets notices all over the world and so forth; but they're really - the important people are the people he photographs.

The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source.

Unlike the photography and prints, I never catalogued, kept track of or exhibited the sketches. I sold some occasionally, but never saw myself as a graphic artist. They became more important to me thanks to the exhibition, however, and I realized that these drawings were quite interesting after all.

But I would like to reach the point where I could cut up an illustrated magazine at random and see to it that the parts would each become a painting. I cannot properly explain it right now. Already now I am searching for the most boring and irrelevant photo material that I can find. And I would like to get to the point soon where this determined irrelevance could be retained, in favor of something that would be covered up otherwise by artifice.