Quotes About Photography

I bought a camera with my first ever paycheck.

Greg was very interested in cameras. He had an inexpensive automatic camera, which took okay snapshots. But he was saving his allowance in hopes of buying a really good camera with a lot of lenses. He loved looking at camera magazines, studying the different models, picking out the ones he wanted to buy.

If I knew what the photograph was going to look like, I wouldn't bother taking it. It's the voyage of discovery that fascinates me.

I really knew when I started photographing I wanted it to be a way of knowing different cultures, not just in other countries but in this country, too, and I knew I wanted to be a voyeur.

As a kid, I used to dream about airplanes before I ever flew in one. I really knew, when I started photographing, I wanted it to be a way of knowing different cultures, not just in other countries but in this country, too, and I knew I wanted to enter other lives. I knew I wanted to be a voyeur.

French photography was basically poetic, and mine was vulgar and brash and violent, except that there's never any violence in the photographs: it's only in the photographic style.

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

People are so wonderful that a photographer has only to wait for that breathless moment to capture what he wants on film.

Having people wait outside of my house sort of gives me a panic attack. I'm a believer in the concept that people should not be followed and photographed everywhere.

I don't see the point of photographing trees or rocks because they're there and anyone can photograph them if they're prepared to hang around and wait for the light.

Sometimes they are a matter of luck; the photographer could not expect or hope for them. Sometimes they are a matter of patience, waiting for an effect to be repeated that he has seen and lost or for one that he anticipates.

My first experience with film was through a still camera. I would sit, very much against my will, with my father in the game reserve, watching some elephant or rhino or whatever, through a 400 millimeter lens and wait, and waiting and waiting.

I take a few pictures a week, but the best part is waiting for my film to be developed. The suspense is exciting, and the reward is great.

I found myself at dusk in the bewitching Roman city of Jerash with H.M. Queen Rania of Jordan one year, and scrambling with hardened paparazzi to get an image of the Princess of Wales in a tiny Nepalese clinic in the foothills of the Himalayas another.

My father's rooms, as a child, were a very exciting place to be. Not only because of the beautiful models who were coming to be photographed for Vogue or The Sunday Times but also because of the very avant-garde furniture that he had made. He made designs for the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969 at Caernarfon Castle.

Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph, is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk.

I can't walk around like I used to, and there's always paparazzi waiting outside the studio.

I never hide, when I walk down the street, someone's going to take my picture, that's what I look like.

Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.

Microsoft Research has a thing called the Sense Cam that, as you walk around, it's taking photos all the time. And the software will filter and find the ones that are interesting without having to think, 'Let's get out the camera and get that shot.' You just have that, and software helps you pick what you want.

I've walked with very famous people down red carpets over to the crowd of thousands of people, and you'll reach out to shake their hand and they've got a camera in their hand. And they don't even get their hand out, because they're recording the whole time.

When I worked as a music and fashion photographer, I always had the nagging feeling that there was something missing, that I wasn't using my skills productively. I gave up photography - I walked away from it completely - and started doing care work.

In the 1930s, photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange produced images of sharecroppers and Okies, which drew attention both to the conditions in which these unfortunates found themselves and to their heroic fortitude.

The great photographers of life - like Diane Arbus and Walker Evans and Robert Frank - all must have had some special quality: a personality of nurturing and non-judgment that frees the subjects to reveal their most intimate reality. It really is what makes a great photographer, every bit as much as understanding composition and lighting.