Photography Quotes - Page 65

Photography has almost no reality; it is almost a hundred per cent picture. And painting always has reality: you can touch the paint; it has presence; but it always yields a picture - no matter whether good or bad. That's all the theory. It's no good. I once took some small photographs and then smeared them with paint. That partly resolved the problem, and it's really good - better than anything I could ever say on the subject.

The photo is a thing in itself. And that's what still photography is all about.

I think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued.

Photography is more than a window for me. Photography is more like a space that tries to capture situations.

The problem of direct colour photography has been facing us since the turn of the last century.

The coherent way of investigating any field is to examine its possible relatedness to other things.

We work for that part of our vision which is uncompleted.

[Photography is] in some ways false just because it is so exact.

I'm not very eloquent about things like this, but I think that writing and photography go together. I don't mean that they are related arts, because they're not. But the person doing it, I think, learns from both things about accuracy of the eye, about observation, and about sympathy toward what is in front of you... It's about honesty, or truth telling, and a way to find it in yourself, how to need it and learn from it.

The best zoom lens is your legs.

Photography is a bridge between science and art. It brings to science what it needs most, the artistic sense, and to art the proof that nothing can be imagined which cannot be matched in the counterpoints of nature.

You become things, you become an atmosphere, and if you become it, which means you incorporate it within you, you can also give it back. You can put this feeling into a picture. A painter can do it. And a musician can do it and I think a photographer can do that too and that I would call the dreaming with open eyes.

As a good picture would come, I would never know exactly what I had done. When you did see it, it would strike you as a great surprise - who did that? How did it happen? Being surprised by your own work makes you both less serious and have serious reverence.

Photography is such an important instrument in the education of our feelings and perception because of its duality. Photography represents the world we know, and suggests a world beyond what we can see. Creativity is the gap between perception and knowledge.

Now very often events are set up for photographers... The weddings are orchestrated about the photographers taking the picture, because if it hasn't been photographed it doesn't really exist.

Something catches your eye, or your interest. You attack it in some way or observe it in some way, and try to put it in some kind of form and take a picture. It's as simple as that.

The work I care about is terribly simple. I observe. I try to entertain. But above all I want my pictures to be emotional. Little else interests me in photography.

It's about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception. You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organising them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy.

Be sure to take the lens cap off before photographing.

Don't get me wrong-painting's all right. But now that we have photography, what's the point?

Every photograph that is made whether by one who considers himself a professional, or by the tourist who points his snapshot camera and pushes a button, is a response to the exterior world, to something perceived outside himself by the person who operates the camera.

Fifty years after we undertook to make the first synthetic polarizers we find them the essential layer in digital liquid-crystal. And thirty four years after we undertook to make the first instant camera and film, our kind of photography has become ubiquitous.

To make good photographs, to express something, to contribute something to the world he lives in, and to contribute something to the art of photography besides imitations of the best photographers on the market today, that is basic training, the understanding of self.

Has one hostage from Lebanon come back with a photograph of his abductors? Has any hostage ever come back with a photograph of his abductors smiling? I mean, this was so incredible!

Photography is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do-while an audience of people you can't see watches you.