Quotes About Photography

What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values.

Sometimes my work needs to be photographic, sometimes it needs words, sometimes it needs to have a relationship to music, sometimes it needs to have all three and become a video projection.

In whatever one does there must be a relationship between the eye and the heart.

I have a special relationship with God. And when I take the right photograph, God gives me a little bing! in the camera. And then I know I'm on the right track.

Normally, when one passes someone on the street who is in pain, one either tries to help him, or one simply looks the other way. With a photo there's no human decision; you're not there; you can't turn away; you simply gape. It's a form of voyeurism.

They may be nothing more than scraps of paper, but they capture something profound. Light and wind and air, the tenderness or joy of the photographer, the bashfulness or pleasure of the subject. You have to guard these things forever in your heart. That's why photographs are taken in the first place.

Acaso piensas que no son más que unos papelitos con una emulsión química en una de sus caras? Si es así, te equivocas. Son mucho más que eso. Atesoran parte de la vida de las personas. Reflejan la futilidad de un instante; la luz, el viento y el aire de un paisaje; la sonrisa y el azoramiento de la persona fotografiada, y el gozo y amor de quien toma la foto por aquello que fotografía. Por eso precisamente hacemos fotografías y por eso deben conservarse.

The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness

He] didn't like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.

to be some exceptional, a Cartier-Bresson, a Capa or a Brandt, would require toil, rejection & struggle

But now the train had finally begun to move, and Albie had switched the fearless truth-telling eye of his camera lens from his untied laces to the walls of the tunnels under east London, because you can never have enough pictures of dirty concrete.

And I have come to understand the truth of what Ansel Adams said that you don't make a photograph just with a camera but that you bring to the act all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard and the people you have loved.

Since the advent of the iPhone, people seem to think it is more important, and maybe more fun, to photograph and record life rather than actually live it. I see that as unfortunate for them, but it has definitely been a boon to police investigations everywhere.

I like those very realistic paintings that look like photographs, or novels that are so much like actual life that you feel understood.

Sometimes I arrive just when God's ready to have somone click the shutter.

Your mother won a special reward, " she told me, "because everyone had a head in her pictures. We all applauded.

Photographs are the reflection of untold stories, unseen beauties, unexpressed emotions, and the unheard songs of life.

I've always felt that photographers who say, "They used the wrong picture," have only themselves to blame. They gave them the "wrong" picture. I didn't worry because I only gave them pictures that worked. It's my obligation to take out all the "wrong" pictures.

So-called "realist" photography does not capture the "what is." Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.

It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image.

In the second photo I am thirty years old. My face has hardened. The jaws are accentuated. The mouth is bitter and mean. I look like a hoodlum in spite of my eyes, which have remained gentle. Their gentleness is almost indiscernible because of the fixity of gaze imposed upon me by the official photographer. By means of these two pictures I can see the violence that animated me at the time: from the age of sixteen to thirty.

All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object.

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.

Photography is truth.