Photography Quotes - Page 73

Pictures should never be posed. They are 'revealed' so must be accepted as they are. Left alone.

And no photographs taken with the aid of flashlight either, if only out of respect of the actual light—even when there isn't any of it.

As far as I am concerned, taking photographs is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from other means of visual expression. It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It is a way of life.

In photography, you've got to be quick, quick, quick, quick...Like an animal and a prey.

Photographier: c'est mettre sur la meme ligne de mire la tete, l'oeil et le coeur.

The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera.

The danger lies in unconventional experiments signaling for a general license to do as they please, and pass off sloppy workmanship as creative intention.

It would be mistaken to suppose that any of the best photography is come at by intellection; it is like all art, essentially the result of an intuitive process, drawing on all that the artist is rather than on anything he thinks, far less theorizes about.

Just like zillions of children, album covers educated and informed me, and certainly did I later transpose organically, rather than by intent, those principles both in fashion design and photography.

A picture is like a prayer.

A picture is like a prayer; you're offering a prayer to get something, and in a sense it's like a gift of God because you have practically no control-at least I don't.

Every time I talked about making a picture I didn't do it. I had already done it - talking about it! I quit talking.

I often think we do not take this business of photography in a sufficiently serious spirit. Issuing a photograph is like marriage: you can only undo the mischief with infinite woe.

DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)

For me a photograph is most successful when it doesn't answer all the questions and it leaves something to be desired.

We really care about photography at Vanity Fair.

I've been a photographer all these years... I haven't been in my own darkroom for 10 years.

I was always in front of the camera. My mom was really passionate about photography - I have pictures of my whole life. I've always just been in front of my mom's camera and it's always comfortable to me.

Painting is traditional but for me that doesn't mean the academy. I felt a need to paint; I love painting. It was something natural - as is listening to music or playing an instrument for some people. For this reason I searched for themes of my era and my generation. Photography offered this, so I chose it as a medium for painting.

Suddenly, I saw it in a new way, as a picture that offered me a new view, free of all the conventional criteria I had always associated with art. It had no style, no composition, no judgment. It freed me from personal experience. For the first time, there was nothing to it: it was pure picture. That's why I wanted to have it, to show it - not use it as a means to painting but use painting as a means to photography.

I don't mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed.

A work of art is itself an object, first of all, and so manipulation is unavoidable: it's a prerequisite. But I needed the greater objectivity of the photograph in order to correct my own way of seeing: for instance, if I draw an object from nature, I start to stylize and to change it in accordance with my personal vision and my training. But if I paint from a photograph, I can forget all the criteria that I get from these sources. I can paint against my will, as it were. And that, to me, felt like an enrichment.

Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.

I was going to go to a four-year college and be an anthropologist or to an art school and be an illustrator when a friend convinced me to learn photography at the University of Southern California. Little did I know it was a school that taught you how to make movies! It had never occurred to me that I'd ever have any interest in filmmaking.

Working from photos makes you a little more analytical, a little more cerebral, because you're less connected to the intensity of life.