Quotes About Photography

When we lived in Minneapolis, you weren't begging to do photo shoots with strange people. Just because we live in LA now doesn't mean you need to be different. It also doesn't mean you're suddenly famous.

It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.

A photographer kept shooting me every time I swung. I was very flattered until I found out he was from Field and Stream.

I don't consider [my] photographs fashion photographs. The photographs were for fashion, but at the same time they had an ulterior motive, something more to do with the world in general.

Taking photographs is not something that happens only in a moment I press the button. It is a full-time occupation. For me there is difference between leisure and work.

Real people move, they bear with them the element of time. It is this fourth dimension of people that I try to capture in a photograph.

With the daguerreotype, everyone will be able to have their portrait taken . . . and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same.

In photography, you always have both the medium and the depicted subject at the same time.

I don't want to be myself, ever. I'm terrible at a snapshot. Terrible. I blink all the time. I've got facial Tourette's. Unless I'm working and in that zone, I'm not very good at pictures, really.

The raw materials of photography are light and time and memory.

Like a ventriloquist who laughs at his dummy's jokes, I keep trying to make photographs that seduce me into believing in the image - all the time knowing better, but believing anyway.

It takes a while for a photograph to mature. That sounds really pretentious, but it takes a time for it to go from here to there.

I miss Bettie Page. I've been missing her since the last time I photographed her in 1954.

All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.

Most passport pictures are good likenesses, and it is time we faced it.

Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both.

Photography is a powerful medium of persuasion and propaganda. It has that ring of truth when all the time, in artful hands, it can make any statement the manipulator chooses.

You know, you have to be an optimist, a pessimist, sarcastic and pleasant all at the same time to be a photographer.

It was 1966 by the time I started taking pictures seriously and books, newspapers and magazines of the time were full of great pictures that helped to inspire me.

I never do pictures that I've done before - but I really try not to. Whenever I get an assignment I try to think how to shoot this person for this story in this magazine at this point in time.

It's pre-photography, a fossilization of time, Americans have done the Zen garden to death. I wanted to do something different.

People don't have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography.

I always give a print to everybody I photograph, and some of my subjects have told me they have a hard time hanging them up at home.

The aesthetic discussion of photography is dominated by the concept of time. Photographs appear as devices stopping time and preserving fragments of the past, like flies in amber.