Photographer Quotes
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I do not document anything, I give an interpretation.
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I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.
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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.
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I am a perfectionist. When I take a picture...it's gotta be good.
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The creative life of the commercial photographer is like the life of a butterfly. Very seldom do we see a photographer who is really productive for more than eight or ten years.
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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.
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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.
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If the photographer is not a discoverer, then he is not an artist.
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No one moment is most important. Any moment can be something.
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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!
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My dad was actually against me being a photographer. He thought it was a dead-end job and that you end up doing baby pictures and weddings.
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To me, pictures are like blintzes - ya gotta get 'em while they're hot.
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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.
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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.
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News photography teaches you to think fast.
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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.
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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.
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It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.
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My name is Weegee. I'm the world's greatest photographer.
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A natural-born photographer, with hypo in my blood.
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It's not the photographer who makes the picture, but the person being photographed.
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Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface.
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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.
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Great photography is always on the edge of failure.
