Photography Quotes - Page 87

Any photographer worth his/her salt - that is, any photographer of professional caliber, in control of the craft, regardless of imagistic bent - can make virtually anything look good. Which means, of course, that she or he can make virtually anything look bad - or look just about any way at all. After all, that is the real work of photography: making things look, deciding how a thing is to appear in the image.

Photography, like any other art, is a form of communication. The artist is not blowing bubbles for his own gratification, but is speaking a language, is telling somebody something.

[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!

If photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a natural process but because the latter is also coded.

For a time, people were getting arrested for photographing the Brooklyn Bridge. So to me, what it meant to do photography also changed. There was a new kind of politics to it - something that was very aggressive and dangerous - and a presumption that it would reveal some kind of truth or evidence.

I profoundly believe in - and teach - the proposition that photography is inherently a fiction-making process. Don't speak to me of the document; I don't really believe in it, particularly now. A picture's not the world, but a new thing.

I left film because I felt that photography was my art. It was something I could do on my own, whereas film was so collaborative. I thought as a photographer I could make something that was artistic and that was mine, and I liked that. And it wasn't until I got back into film and I have very small crews and I could do very tiny filmmaking that wasn't 100 people that I still felt that I was making something artistic as a filmmaker. So, you know, I'm an artist, and whether it's photography or film, I want my voice to be there and I think my voice is very strong in this film.

Straight photography, following the medium, is intoxicating - trying to wrestle it into the form of a poem.

By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.

A photograph is not merely a substitute for a glance. It is a sharpened vision. It is the revelation of new and important facts.

I think I'm really fortunate to be an installation artist who is heavily invested in photography: I don't have the emotional problems with the loss of work that some installation artists have. The photographs wouldn't exist without the installation... but at the same time, I think I'd kill myself if I only did installations. There's something deeply tragic about doing work that you know is temporal.

There is no art which affords less opportunity to execute expression than photography. Everything is concentrated in a few seconds, when after perhaps an hours seeking, waiting, and hesitation, the photographer sees the realization of his inward vision, and in that moment he has one advantage over most arts - his medium is swift enough to record his momentary inspiration.

Never ever say the word shoot when you are taking a picture with a camera because a camera is not a violent weapon.

Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.

Among the most compelling truths in some of the early photographs is their implication of silence.

Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is always about time.

When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.

There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone's person.

I joke around sometimes and say that the DP [director of photography] is like a shrink for the director, but there's some truth in there.

The lover of photography is fascinated both by the instant and by the past. The moment captured in the image is of near-zero duration and is located in a ever-receding then. At the same time, the spectator's now, the moment of looking at the image, has no fixed duration. It can be extended as long as fascination lasts and endlessly reiterated as long as curiosity returns.

I am a big fan of photography, more of being behind the camera - so when I get the opportunity to work with such great photographers, I always try and learn from their technique.

A photographic session is a joint, interpersonal exchange, a kind of creative encounter session at a high level of intensity. For me, photography is more a process of creating an experience than one of looking for pictures.