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Photography Quotes
"Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph, is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk."
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"Videos are more like photography. It's not as much about trying to tell a story as it is creating images."
"My surprises come usually once I start rolling and photographing."
"Wanting to take a light camera with me when I climb or do mountain runs has kept me using exclusively 35 mm."
"For me the printing process is part of the magic of photography. It's that magic that can be exciting, disappointing, rewarding and frustrating all in the same few moments in the darkroom."
"When you go to take someone's picture, the first thing they say is, what you want me to do? Everyone is very awkward."
"It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators."
"At my Rolling Stones' tour, the camera was a protection. I used it in a Zen way."
"Today my passion is still black and white. Today if I have an array of cameras in front of me the one I would reach for that I would feel most comfortable with would be a 4 X 5 View camera. I was once working in a sort of soft light situation."
"The problem of direct colour photography has been facing us since the turn of the last century."
"When that shutter clicks, anything else that can be done afterward is not worth consideration."
"I was an artistic dilettante for a while, in photography and collage and the visual arts."
"A woman said to me when she first sat down, You're photographing the wrong side of my face. I said, Oh, is there one?"
"Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true."
"My lifestyle is bizarre, but the only thing you need to know is where the darkroom is."
"Actually, when I first started dabbling in photography, I was still working for my parents as a salesman."
"I think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued."
"Most of the stories I have covered in 45 years have been gray stories."
"I think that cognitive scientists would support the view that our visual system does not directly represent what is out there in the world and that our brain constructs a lot of the imagery that we believe we are seeing."
"There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are."
"I am very much aware of the visual side of things. I do a lot of photography. I often take Polaroids of things that strike me as visually interesting, just to remember them and perhaps use later."
"A taste for simplicity cannot endure for long."
"And I remember walking in there and, I must say, I was quite unnerved the closer I got to it."
"She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes."
"Wherever there is light, one can photograph."
"We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium."
"It's important to know that if you are dealing with shadows."
"George Lucas wanted this moving camera for all of the photography in Star Wars. He was willing to take a risk with the concepts that I advanced with regard to ways for doing that."
"Anyone can write one book: even politicians do it. Starting a second book reveals an intention to be a professional writer."
"Contrast is what makes photography interesting."
"In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative."
"Actually, I'm not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks."
"Writers are frequently asked why they wrote their first book. A more interesting answer might come from asking them why they wrote their second one."
"I became interested in photography when I found my own sketching was inadequate."
"Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does."
"Today, I'm very careful not to mention very specific locations when I write or give captions."
"When I'm ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I'm interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without."
"You know, the camera is not meant just to show misery."
"In the decline of the day, near Kentucky river, as we ascended the brow of a small hill, a number of Indians rushed out of a thick cane-brake upon us, and made us prisoners."
"The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much."
"I rode it once, which was up the driveway in the opening credits of the show. I didn't know how to stop it. I actually nearly killed the director of photography, and I smashed into the sound truck."
"For me, the most important thing I learned was just honing my eye. I think I had a good eye."
"When I was teaching at Harvard in the 1970s, I went to Project Incorporated in Cambridge and took photography classes. I didn't even know how to aim the camera in those days."
"I always say that I don't want to be sentimental, that the photographs shouldn't be sentimental, and yet, I am conscious of my sentimentality."
"In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated."
"I've been working with photography for many years."
"The closer the source of light is to a subject, the broader the beams are."
"I never stopped photographing. There were a couple of years when I didn't have a darkroom, but that didn't stop me from photographing."
"Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child."
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