Photography Quotes - Page 60

The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter - 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites.

Get yourself in trouble. If you get yourself in trouble, you don't have the answers. And if you don't have the answers, your solution will more likely be personal because no one else's solutions will seem appropriate. You'll have to come up with your own.

You don't have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today you will do what you did yesterday, and tomorrow you will do what you did today. Eventually you will get somewhere.

Photography is 90% sheer, brutal drudgery! The other 10% is inspiration!!

I am not very interested in extraordinary angles. They can be effective on certain occasions, but I do not feel the necessity for them in my own work. Indeed, I feel the simplest approach can often be most effective. A subject placed squarely in the center of the frame, if attention is not distracted from it by fussy surroundings, has a simple dignity which makes it all the more impressive.

I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph.

Over the years, photography has been to me what a journal is to a writer - a record of things seen and experienced, moments in the flow of time, documents of significance to me, experiments in seeing.

I got five kids, and my oldest is a documentary film maker and camera man, and still photographer.

T.V. has made going to the theatre seem pointless, photography has pretty much killed painting but graffiti has remained gloriously unspoilt by progress.

With photography, you are lucky if you get people to look at your pictures at some point. There's no formal way to show them.

I tried to keep both arts alive, but the camera won. I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!

This profession [photography] is deserving of attention and respect equal to that accorded painting, literature, music and architecture.

A photograph is not an accident - is a concept. It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative.

Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.

Image quality is not the product of a machine, but of the person who directs the machine, and there are no limits to imagination and expression.

For me, pointing and clicking my phone is absolutely fine. People say that isn't the art of photography but I don't agree.

No one can do inspired work without genuine interest in his subject and understanding of its characteristics.

The essential factor in the transition of the baroque to photography is not the perfecting of a physical process... rather does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays not part. The solution is not to be found in the result achieved, but in the way of achieving it.

My aim in photography is always to convey a mood and not to impart local information. This is not an easy matter, for the camera if left to its own devices will simply impart local information to the exclusiveness of everything else.

I am suspicious and disillusioned about the uses and misuses of photography in the art world, the press, and the world of entertainment. And to make things more complicated, I don't think that the general public is well educated regarding images. Generally we are taught how to read, but we are not taught how to look.

I always prefer photographing in available light – or Rembrandt-light I like to call it – so you get the natural modulations of the face. It makes a more alive, real, and flattering portrait.

We are only beginning to learn what to say in a photograph. The world we live in is a succession of fleeting moments, any one of which might say something significant.

With photography, everything is in the eye and these days I feel young photographers are missing the point a bit. People always ask about cameras but it doesn't matter what camera you have. You can have the most modern camera in the world but if you don't have an eye, the camera is worthless. Young people know more about modern cameras and lighting than I do. When I started out in photography I didn't own an exposure meter - I couldn't , they didn't exist! I had to guess.

When the novice photographer starts taking pictures, he carries his camera about and shoots everything that interests him. There comes a time when he must crystallize his ideas and set off in an particular direction. He must learn that shooting for the sake of shooting is dull and unprofitable.

Photographers should make three or four prints from one negative and then crop them differently. When I was art director at Harper's Bazaar and at several agencies as a consultant, young photographers would bring me their portfolios and all the prints would be in the same standard proportions, either for the Leica or the Rolleiflex. Many times, by limiting themselves in this way, they missed the true potentialities of their photographs.