Quotes About Photography

Photography is a way of putting distance between myself and the work which sometimes helps me to see more clearly what it is that I have made.

I think I'm predominantly known for my portraits. Obviously in my work there are landscape or stilllife elements, but mainly my work is people . . .

Photographers, it is true, do not work but they do do something: They create, process, and store symbols.

When a photographer masters the tools and processes of the art, then the quality of the work is only limited by his creative vision.

The documentation about the work isn't of real importance to me either. I've done lots of works without taking photographs.

There's always been something illicit about the way I work. I'm photographing people I don't know, when nobody else is home - there's a necessary degree of secrecy.

I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment

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.

I always take hundreds and hundreds of pictures. I used to work for National Geographic, and they gave us a lot of film.

The fact that few painter-fine-artists used photography in their work made it appealing.

Christmas morning, I'm going to open presents with my kids. I'm going to take pictures of them opening the presents. Then I'm going to come to the Staples Center and get ready to work.

I get to work with great photographers, wear lovely clothes, be part of the creative process.

Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don't get a photograph that I want to work from.

When I do work, I get so much done in such a concentrated time that once I'm through a series, I'm so drained I don't want to get near the camera.

I come from a visual background. I used to work in the camera department at Warner Bros. when I was a teenager. I grew up dusting lenses and learning about photography.

I was always painting when I was a kid. But then when I handled a camera when I was 17, that was it for me. I loved photography. I would work 4 or 5 hours a day. It was like a calling.

I'm one simple way I think I've succeeded was capturing Elsa [Dorfman]. There's something about Elsa, her personality, and her work that I believe is there.

I've always loved [Elsa Dorfman] work. I've loved her and her work is so much an expression of her. One of the reasons to make the film is to expose Elsa, hopefully, to a wider audience.

I develop my own film. And I work in spurts. I pile it up.

Aside from women, I don't know. My work doesn't function the way Robert Frank's did.

My taking pictures means I'm taking a series of pictures which become an essay and then get extended into a book. That's what's exciting, to take an idea and work it through to completion.

When I began taking photographs I thought they might work better in magazines, in a journalistic sense, rather than as art.

With Steven Meisel, I'd looked at his work from afar and always loved it, and when I started to work with him, I was blown away. He taught me so much about looking at women and looking at images.

I began after college, about 1972. I began to teach myself photography. I went to work for a local newspaper for four years as a kind of basic training.