Quotes About Photography

One day I am at home, watching dramatic images of Iraqi Yazidis fleeing for their lives being aired nonstop on 24-hour news channels. Days later, I am there, staring at tens of thousands of displaced Iraqis and feeling a 35-millimeter frame cannot capture the scope of devastation and heartbreak before me.

A white woman with a camera in the Devadasi belt of Karnataka is not inconspicuous... it took time for these women to believe that I was not an official, carrying the threat of fine and imprisonment.

It's very intimidating to be photographed, but if I kneel down and chat with you, so you're looking down at me, it makes you feel less threatened.

Sometimes there are paparazzi that take photos and you don't know they're there. So you're laughing, kicking up your heels and doing silly things. You don't even realize it. And then there's other times where they're two feet away from your face and it's invasive and it feels threatening, so you don't want to be smiling.

There are three things in life I really don't like: Rice pudding. Social climbers - you know, hang-ons! And the photo shoot!

The way that light hits objects in life, three-dimensional objects before you photograph them, is really the story of photography.

I shoot just one moment at a time... These moments are beneath the threshold of perception.

I've never felt massively satisfied from standing there while someone takes my photograph. It's never given me a thrill.

The thrill of acting is making a character real. Modeling is the opposite of real. It's being fake in front of the camera.

I cannot draw to save my life, and I'm not a big art scholar, but I worked with many designers throughout my career - in theater, in dance, costume designers, set designers, and I have a lot of artist friends and I do photography, and I think it's kind of in my life.

There are cultures that believe having your photograph taken steals your soul. I don't think there is a stolen soul in a picture, but still - why is it so hard to throw them away?

I've always been interested in photography. I remember when I was about 14, I spent an entire summer selling lottery tickets in some little booth so I could make enough money to buy an Olympus camera.

I remember going to The Open in 1998 aged seven and snatching a picture of Tiger walking past.

Coming tight was boring to me, just the face... it didn't have enough information.

I believe that photographs actually rob all of us of our memory.

The hardest part is setting the camera on the tripod, or making the decision to bring the camera out of the car, or just raising the camera to your face, believing, by those actions, that whatever you find before you, whatever you find there, is going to be good.

Before the invention of photography, significant moments in the flow of our lives would be like rocks placed in a stream: impediments that demonstrated but didn't diminish the volume of the flow and around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can: when we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished.

When I was shooting with collodion, I wasn't just snapping a picture. I was fashioning, with fetishistic ceremony, an object whose ragged black edges gave it the appearance of having been torn from time itself.

The act of looking appraisingly at a man, studying his body and asking to photograph him, is a brazen venture for a woman; for a male photographer, these acts are commonplace, even expected.

How can a sentient person of the modern age mistake photography for reality? All perception is selection, and all photographs--no matter how objectively journalistic the photographer's intent--exclude aspects of the moment's complexity. Photographs economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time's continuum.

photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories. As I held my childhood pictures in my hands, in the tenderness of my "remembering," I also knew that with each photograph I was forgetting.

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.

Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.

As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.