Photograph Quotes
-
Well, in terms of what a camera does. Again, you go back to that original idea that what you photograph is responsible for how it [the photograph] looks. And it's not plastic, in a way. The problem is unique in photographic terms.
Garry Winogrand -
[The photograph] is the object itself... [It] shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.
Andre Bazin
-
I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities.
Saul Leiter -
It is a great honor for me to be compared to Henri Cartier-BressonBut I believe there is a very big difference in the way we put ourselves inside the stories we photograph. He always strove for the decisive moment as being the most important. I always work for a group of pictures, to tell a story. If you ask which picture in a story I like most, it is impossible for me to tell you this. I don't work for an individual picture. If I must select one individual picture for a client, it is very difficult for me.
Sebastiao Salgado -
I knew that was coming. That's another stupidity. The people who use the term don't even know the meaning. They use it to refer to photographs they believe are loosely organized, or casually made, whatever you want to call it. Whatever terms you like. The fact is, when they're talking about snapshots they're talking about the family album picture, which is one of the most precisely made photographs.
Garry Winogrand -
Most people stiffen with self-consciousness when they pose for a photograph. Lighting and fine camera equipment are useless if the photographer cannot make them drop the mask, at least for a moment, so he can capture on his film their real, undistorted personality and character.
Philippe Halsman -
The photograph should be more interesting or more beautiful than what was photographed
Garry Winogrand -
It's been a strange [summer].... I was sent by a magazine to photograph famous photographers.... Of course, I included myself.
Weegee
-
There's no way a photograph has to look... in a sense. There are no formal rules of design that can apply.
Garry Winogrand -
Dialectical thought is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion.
Leon Trotsky -
I have no interest in being famous. I just want to make famous photographs.
David LaChapelle -
Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us. A photograph of an art object is not the art object. An essay about an artist's work is not the artist's work.
Carl Andre -
I try to photograph people's spirits and thoughts. As to the soul-taking by the photographer, I don't feel I take away, but rather that the sitter and I give to each other. It becomes an act of mutual participation.
Yousuf Karsh -
Every photograph is a fake from start to finish.
Edward Steichen
-
I never take a picture of a face because a face is somebody, an arm is not recognizable as somebody. When you take a photograph of someone's face, it identifies it as somebody, but if you take just a fragment, it's everybody. It's not one person.
Annette Messager -
It's important to me to have what I photograph undergo a certain transformation - to become a thing different from what we are used to, to be another version of itself.
Abelardo Morell -
A good daguerreotype was as perfect a kind of photograph as was ever made.
Edward Steichen -
I don't have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions.
Garry Winogrand -
I had always been kind of obsessed with making a home of my own and was always drawing rooms that I wanted to live in, down to pictures on the wall and the faces that would be in the photographs.
Michelle Williams Destiny's Child -
I'm a good craftsman and I can have this particular intention: let's say, I want a photograph that's going to push a certain button in an audience, to make them laugh or love, feel warm or hate or what - I know how to do this.
Garry Winogrand
-
A photograph can look anyway. It just depends basically on what you photograph.
Garry Winogrand -
I like to think of photographing as a two-way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject, by describing it as it is. A photograph must be responsible to both.
Garry Winogrand -
A pun calls the meaning of a word into question, and it upsets us tremendously. We laugh because suddenly we find out we're not going to get killed. I think a lot of things work that way with photographs.
Garry Winogrand -
I always wanted my photographs to challenge the status quo, to contest the kinds of images that existed in popular culture.
Dawoud Bey