Photographer Quotes
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I am at war with the obvious.
William Eggleston -
The documentary photographer aims his camera at the real world to record truthfulness. At the same time, he must strive for form, to devise effective ways of organizing and using the material. For content and form are interrelated. The problems presented by content and form must be so developed that the result is fundimentally [sic] true to the realities of life as we know it. The chief problem is to find a form that adequately represents the reality.
Paul Strand
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I am a perfectionist. When I take a picture...it's gotta be good.
Weegee -
I've thought of becoming a photographer! To save my talent as a writer.
August Strindberg -
The fundamental issue is one of emphasis: you are not a photographer because you are interested in photography...The reason is that photography is only a tool, a vehicle, for expressing or transmitting a passion in something else. It is not the end result.
David Hurn -
I had so many unsold murder pictures lying around my room...I felt as if I were renting out a wing of the City Morgue.
Weegee -
The photographer proceeds, via the intermediary of the lens, to a point where he literally takes a luminous imprint, a cast... [But] the cinema realizes the paradox of moulding itself on the time of the object and of taking the imprint of its duration as well.
Andre Bazin -
I read the other day that Minor White said it takes twenty years to become a photographer. I think that is a bit of an exaggeration. I would say, judging from myself, that it takes at least eight or nine years. But it does not take any longer than it takes to learn to play the piano or the violin. If it takes twenty years, you might as well forget about it!
Paul Strand
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It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.
Ansel Adams -
No one moment is most important. Any moment can be something.
Garry Winogrand -
News photography teaches you to think fast.
Weegee -
When I first started making photo pieces it wasn't with the idea of a commitment to the medium. I didn't think I would have to become a photographer to make my photographs. I recall that anything could be used as material for art in that era. Photography was just one more thing.
William Wegman -
To me, pictures are like blintzes - ya gotta get 'em while they're hot.
Weegee -
I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heat of the known awaits just around the corner.
Alex Webb
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The camera machine cannot evade the objects which are in front of it. When the photographer selects this movement, the light, the objects, he must be true to them. If he includes in his space a strip of grass, it must be felt as the living differentiated thing it is and so recorded. It must take its proper but no less important place as a shape and a texture in relationship to the mountain tree or what not, which are included.
Paul Strand -
My name is Weegee. I'm the world's greatest photographer.
Weegee -
If the photographer is not a discoverer, then he is not an artist.
Paul Strand -
My responsibility as a photographer, to my subjects, is to know what's going to happen with my images.
Erin Siegal McIntyre -
It should be the aim of every photographer to make a single exposure that shows everything about the subject. I have been told that my portrait of Churchill is an example of this.
Yousuf Karsh -
It's much harder to work for yourself, by yourself, than to create work for a gallery, because there are no limits and you can do anything you want. It's always easier when you have a parameter, when you have a limit. You can work within the limit and push it and walk the line, but when you're given absolutely no limits, it's harder. You must really think. It's more challenging.
David LaChapelle
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A natural-born photographer, with hypo in my blood.
Weegee -
I posed as an album-cover designer and photographer... That I today have some album covers and photographs to show for myself is a monument to the attention-to-detail of my disguise.
Eve Babitz -
Great photography is always on the edge of failure.
Garry Winogrand -
Notebook. No photographer should be without one!
Ansel Adams