Quotes About Creativity

When it comes to partnership, some humans can make their lives alone - it's possible. But creatively, it's more like painting: you can't just use the same colours in every painting. It's just not an option. You can't take the same photograph every time and live with art forms with no differences.

I would drown in objects if I didn't have the ability to photograph them.

A good daguerreotype was as perfect a kind of photograph as was ever made.

In almost every photograph I have ever made, there is something I would do to complete it. I take that to be the spirit hole or the deliberate mistake that's in a Navajo rug to not be godlike, but to be human.

I feel I'm a strange mixture of insecurity and strength. Most of us, probably most people. I'm transferring that same concept to the people I photograph.

I've hardly taken a photograph since 1967.

When I start thinking about a story, I don't start by thinking about the fashion, but about who I want to photograph and what the story should be about.

I don't like my work. I didn't like my work in 'Dangal,' and then in 'Photograph,' I was cribbing.

I always carry a Moleskine journal and a simple Parker Jotter click-pen. Journaling an experience is worth more than any photograph.

I see what sound engineers do as like painting. A good artist could paint that table so that it looks nothing like a table, or it looks like a photograph of a table. Engineers do that with sound.

In 1979, I moved to England and photographed Joy Division and Bowie and Beefheart. At that time I got images that I felt had that special, well - power is a big word to say - more like intimacy and ambition that outlasted the photo shoot. I felt that they would have a longer life.

My dad photographed a lot of beautiful dancers. My mom was a dancer.

I've always photographed beauty, but I've never been beautiful myself.

It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.

That's true, because I'm a photographer now.

I used to want to be a war photographer, and I used to want to be a ballerina and a comedian. I used to want to be a writer. I invalidated myself; it's a mistake for me.

The thing that makes writing so difficult is you don't have the element of serendipity. At least with a photograph, you can set up the camera, and something might happen. You might be a lousy photographer, but you can get a good picture if you just take enough of them.

I don't like gimmicky pictures; I've always hated them. I like pictures that are very clear and clean, whether you're a great street photographer - somebody like Friedlander or Winogrand or Cartier-Bresson - or whether you're a portraitist, like Irving Penn.

I didn't decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.

I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer.

A still photographer is a mechanic. He's not an artist, despite all you read.

Sometimes I'm amazed by how much you can do as a photographer.

A photographer must choose a palette as painters choose theirs.

A photographer without a magazine behind him is like a farmer without fields.