Photography Quotes - Page 53

If you can capture the element of surprise, you're way ahead of the game.

Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has ''cast up'' in my time or is like to -- this art by which even the ''poor'' can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn't it be acting favorably on the morality of the country?

It is a peculiar part of the good photographer's adventure to know where luck is most likely to lie in the stream, to hook it, and to bring it in without unfair play and without too much subduing it.

Photography is humbling, it really is, and it really allows for me to atone for some of the missteps I've made throughout the course of my life.

They kept me in short pants as long as they could, until they were shaving the hair on my legs because it was beginning to photograph.

I'm inviting the spirits into my photography. It's an act of God.

I was born in the '60s and grew up in the '70s - not exactly the best decade for food in British history. It was horrendous. It was a time when, as a nation, we excelled in art and music and acting and photography and fashion - all creative skills... all apart from cooking.

I suddenly understood that photography can fix eternity in a moment. It is the only photo that influenced me. There is such intensity in this image, such spontaneity, such joie de vivre, such miraculousness, that even today it still bowls me over.

We must avoid however, snapping away, shooting quickly and without thought, overloading ourselves with unnecessary images that clutter our memory and diminish the clarity of the whole.

Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.

Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important.

The thing about photography is that every day is a new day, even if you are working on the same story, because every day you have got a chance to correct what you did the day before, and try to take it a bit further or a bit back.

What the eye sees is a synthesis of who you are and all you have learned. This is what I would call the language of photography.

Photography works hand in glove with image and memory and therefore possesses their notable epidemic power.

I really try to divorce myself from any thought of possible use of this stuff. That's part of the discipline. My only purpose while I'm working is to try to make interesting photographs, and what to do with them is another act - an alter consideration. Certainly while I'm working, I want them to be as useless as possible.

My first thought is always of light.

Ideas and thoughts collide and sort themselves out in these fruitful collisions.

My photographs are not pure: they are a seething wealth of imperfection.

...photography is made essentially of time. I often think that what we show is a point in time, more than a window onto space.

Photography, too, reduces the world to strips and rectangles; photographers scrutinize the surfaces of reality in hope of unlocking the potential for significance that is latent within them.

in the smallest cells are reflections of the largest. And in photography, through an interplay of scales, a whole universe within a universe can be revealed.

Of course, this is one of the really important things about art, that you can make more than you can understand at the moment the thing is being made. But the gap between what we recognize inside ourselves - our feelings- and our ability to trust ourselves and to trust exposing ourselves to those ideas, can be great.

You must have a visual sense if you want to be a photographer. It is a very subtle thing, this visual business.

A picture should be looked at - not talked about.

I love beautiful women. I love to show their personality, their sexuality. There's a fashion side to my erotic pictures: I love beautiful shoes and jewellery. But the erotic work I do is too daring and provocative for a fashion magazine. It's more fun, and if you have the right girl who likes it, more exciting, too. It's fashion photography, but with fewer clothes.