Quotes About Photography

Photography is space, light, texture, of course, but the really important element is time - that nanosecond when the image organizes itself on the ground glass.

Photographs deceive time, freezing it on a piece of cardboard where the soul is silent.

The digital print is becoming the look of our time, and it makes the C-print start to look like a tintype.

There are situations that refuse to be photographed. But at other times nothing will stop me, because I know my pictures will not shout against anyone - only against time.

Every time I leave the house or we go anywhere, there is a paranoia. We always have to watch for specific cars and specific signs that we're being photographed.

I think this is the most exciting time in the history of photography. Technology is expanding what photographers can do, like the microscope and the telescope expanded what scientists could do.

It's the first time that I've ever had an art show based on a film, but it's a photography collage.

Alot of peo­ple think our lives are all about tak­ing pic­tures and stuff like that. But it becomes a real bother when they're tak­ing pic­tures of you all the time.

Everyone smiles for a photograph.

It's not disgusting, that little skin that hangs? The foreskin? No, it's okay. I think that generally speaking , a dick isn't really photogenic. I quite agree.

The oldest-known permanent photograph, an image of a man leading a horse, dates from 1825.

there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut.

If I didn't have my camera to remind me constantly, I am here to do this, I would eventually have slipped away, I think. I would have forgotten my reason to exist.

As a young person, and I know it's hard to believe that I was shy, but you could take your camera, and it would take you to places: it was like having a friend, like having someone to go out with and look at the world. I would do things with a camera I wouldn't do normally if I was just by myself.

There's an idea that it's hard to be a woman artist. People assume that women have fewer opportunities, less power. But it's not any harder to be a woman artist than to be a male artist. We all take what we are given and use the parts of ourselves that feed the work. We make our way. Photographers, men and women, are particularly lucky. Photography lets you find yourself. It is a passport to people and places and to possibilities.

For me, the story about the pictures is about almost losing myself, and coming back, and what it means to be deeply involved in a subject. The thing that saved me was that I had my camera by my side. It was there to remind me who I was and what I did. It separated me from them.

I don't have two lives. This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.

Things happen in front of you. That's perhaps the most wonderful and mysterious aspect of photography. It seemed like you just had to decide when and where to aim the camera. The process was linear and it never stopped. That's still true, although I've traded in my need for always taking pictures. I can't let them go by sometimes now and just be there.

We observe few objects really closely. As we walk on the earth, we observe the external events at two or three arms' lengths. If we ride a horse or drive in an automobile, we are further separated from the immediate surround. We see and photograph scenery; our vast world is inadequately described as the landscape. The most intimate object perceived daily is usually the printed page. The small and commonplace are rarely explored.

I have often said that the negative is similar to a musician's score, and the print to the performance of that score. The negative comes to life only when performed as a print.

In an inexplicable way he was quite different from anyone else....He was smallish, neat, solidly built....Possibly he was a man who at once became self-conscious before a camera. Even snapshots tend to give him an air of swagger, a kind of cockiness he did not possess at all. [On. F. Scott Fitzgerald]

spotted the playwright in a crowd of shiny-faced people, all scrambling to be photographed with him. He had plastered a smile on his face, but he looked bereft and empty. Trapped. It was the most chilling image of fame I had ever seen thus far.

A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they'll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won't do a thing for you if you don't have anything in your head or in your heart.

It adds up, but I deem it all necessary, even the camera gear. I enjoy photographing the otherworldly colors and shapes presented in the convoluted depths of slot canyons and the prehistoric artwork preserved in their alcoves.