Photography Quotes - Page 79

Today's photographers think differently. Many can't see real light anymore. They think only in terms of strobe - sure, it all looks beautiful but it's not really seeing. If you have the eyes to see it, the nuances of light are already there on the subject's face. If your thinking is confined to strobe light sources, your palette becomes very mean - which is the reason I photograph only in available light.

The way I would describe a pictorial is that it is a picture that makes everybody say ‘Aaaaah,’ with five vowels when they see it. It is something you would like to hang on the wall. The french word ‘photogenique’ defines it better than anything in English. It is a picture which must have quality, drama, and it must, in addition, be as good technically as you can possible make it.

I dream that someday the step between my mind and my finger will no longer be needed. And that simply by blinking my eyes, I shall make pictures. Then, I think, I shall really have become a photographer.

All photographers have to do, is find and catch the story-telling moment.

The most important thing... is not clicking the shutter... it is clicking with the subject.

Every once in a while I have this revelation like, "Wow, a hundred years ago the world wasn't black and white." It was in color. Photographed in a certain way, people look from another time. We are just not used to seeing ourselves in that context. Something that's fascinating about photography is you can isolate a moment, tear it out of its context, and see it afresh. Another realization is that, "Wow, there's a big world out there, and people are still doing all sorts of the things that they used to do." We don't just live in iPad land.

To do justice to modern technology's rigid linear structure, to the lofty gridwork of cranes and bridges, to the dynamism of machines operating at one thousand horsepower - only photography is capable of that. What those who are attached to the painterly style regard as photography's defect, the mechanical reproduction of form - is just what makes it superior to all other means of expression.

The practice of photography is no longer a means for recording reality. Instead, it has become reality itself

Producing a photographic document involves preparation in excess. There is first the examination of the idea of the project. Then the visits to the scene, the casual conversations, and more formal interviews - talking, and listening, and looking, looking. ... And finally, the pictures themselves, each one planned, talked, taken and examined in terms of the whole.

When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order (unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder).

I love photography and first editions. I have that in my genes. My father was an archivist.

Photography as a subject is a good one. Its history is only about 150 years... You only have to know about twenty-five or thirty names and that's it. All you need. In painting there are more than 1,000.

I get so confused about life photography art.

My background is in painting but in school in the sixties, like many artists of that time, I believed that painting was dead. I began to work in collaboration with other artists in the creation of performances and installation works. Soon after, I started making video and photographic works and in the process became fascinated with the media itself. Before long I was setting things up just for the camera. In l970 I got a dog and he turned out to be very interested in video and photography as well.

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

I never took it upon myself to change the world. And those contemporaries of mine who were going around falling for the idea that they were going to bring down the United States government and make a new world were just asses to me.

I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered that I didn't need to. If the thing is true, why there it is.

It's the first time that I've ever had an art show based on a film, but it's a photography collage.

The question is not whether a picture is good, in some formal, technical sense, but, does it mean what I need it to mean? Writers can edit sentences that may be well-crafted but that don't express an intended thought. But in photography, there are no revisions: A photograph is in or it's out, and the photographer must live with the consequences of his or her choices.

I was an artistic dilettante for a while, in photography and collage and the visual arts.

Simulations directly relate to the process of and complications in photography. They also overtly create layers of fantasies, myths and interventions... The simulation confuses the idea of a truth. I've always been interested in this kind of theater and illusion at the foundation of belief.

The work of the artist is not so much what you say or what you know, it's recognizing what you know. That's what life is about. That's what photography is about. You see something, or you hear someone say something, and you say That is a truth. You know, deep in you. That's when you start shooting.

Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.

Laugh, love, dream, strive, smile, feel, joy, look, try, fail, read, walk, search, share, help, work, fun, learn, retry, sweat, cry, rest, wait, fear, hope, trust, pride... when we have lived all of these, our photography might stop being a record of what our camera sees and become an expression of what we as photographers feel.

I love all of these new products that are coming out, things like headphones with cute, catchy names. There is also so much going on with the marketing of fashion. And then, I still love the classic stuff, like great dresses and wonderful photography.