Quotes About Photography

In 1979, I received a phone call from Ansel Adams asking me if I would be willing to consider coming to work for him. I was teaching photography in Southern California at that point.

Most of Tina Modotti's work that is known to the photography world was done in Mexico in the years 1923 through 1926, when she lived and worked with Edward Weston.

Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.

My work has no theme. I don't care if my photographs get published, and I have no interest in the news. But the invasion of Prague was not news, it was my life.

Like most photographers, I try to capture a moment in my work.

Lots of girls will work for five years before Mario Testino will use them, and I was not prepared to slog around doing that.

I love doing photo shoots... I mean, if I could just sign with IMG and do ad campaigns and model more, I'd do that... Because that's fun for me. That's not work.

Sometimes I work on film sets. I've done this for 40 years. I always wanted to photograph on the set of an Ingmar Bergman film. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity.

WordPress, it's a complex tool; it's like the back of a digital SLR... but that doesn't work on a phone.

Comedians are the most challenging people for me to shoot. Because you're not actually in the dialogue with them, they are performing. When I work with a comedian, I become their audience.

Of course, all my work is photographed and I also take quite a lot of photographs of work in production.

There are so many great 19th-century photographers, and it's really my favorite period, but the amateurs did such beautiful work.

With the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, I had lost my main collaborator in taking photographs. So I didn't know who to work with.

Everyone thinks it would be great to work for National Geographic. So did I.

I began to explore America in more general terms. I really started this work in 2009. I got the bulk of it done as I was easing out of Disco Night.

There are some very creative people out there who are like Steven Meisel, and that is why their work is so extraordinary.

A lot of my work is about is about events, but I also think a lot of my work is about fragmentation.... You have to break something down in order to have the parts synthesize.

I don't really use still photography very much anymore except to document my work.

I always took photographs. I photographed a lot of trees, by the way, which is another image I used often in my work, the tree image.

Edward [Weston] was the first artist - and I don't use the word lightly - to make a living doing art photography. Other photographers did commercial work, or worked for the government.

We sort of understand how painkillers work. You take one, and it reduces your headache. We don't understand how photographs work. And that, to me, is an essential problem as a practitioner.

I love photographing. I love the experience of being around all the things that surround you when you go out to do work.

If you accept the idea that photographers, or some of them, are actually artists, then you have to look at their work less as a document of something than as a personal vision of the world.

I choose to work behind the camera. And I kind of want to make the work and then run away. The presentation of myself really feels complicated for me.