Photography Quotes
-
Photography was so perfectly suited to my sensibility and situation, it gave me a voice, a kind of crazy, out-of-whack voice, at the beginning, but a voice. I could finally put into images bottled up feelings of absurdity and alienation - and also joy and delight.
-
You are either born to be a photographer or not. The art of photography is not something you can learn in the classroom or by watching someone do it.
-
You've got to push yourself harder. You've got to start looking for pictures nobody else could take. You've got to take the tools you have and probe deeper.
-
All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.
-
With photography, I always think that it's not good enough.
-
Living in a time of the increasing struggle of the mechanization of man, photography has become another example of this paradoxical problem of how to humanize, how to overcome a machine on which we are thoroughly dependent... the camera.
-
...photography repeats itself unconsciously and unavoidably, producing stereotypes that then are repeated ad infinitum.
-
Something very ugly to you as a person can look beautiful through the viewfinder, but being able to find that beauty, oftentimes, means seeing the humanity within the frame. If you turn that off completely, you don't see at all.
-
I never tried to revolutionise photography; I just do what I do and keep my fingers crossed that people will like it.
-
But slowly I began to use cameras and then think about what it was that was going on. It took me a long time, I mean I actually played with cameras and photography for about 20 years.
-
One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.
-
All we did was to turn back the time to a photography of precision which is superior to the human eye.
-
My photography changed from being more documentary-like to arranging things more, and that came into being partly because I started doing music videos, and I incorporated some things from the music videos into my photography again, by arranging things more.
-
Art can no longer be merely a mirror, it must act as the organizer of the people's consciousness... No form of representation is so readily comprehensible to the masses as photography.
-
I love photography. My boyfriend's got a great camera, which I bought for his birthday.
-
I think I came alive when I started photography.
-
Cinematography was incredibly foreign to me, so I read as much as I could about it. Once I figured out that it was just photography with a set shutter speed, I got some slide film and I just went about storyboarding the script and taking snapshots. I took a ton of time doing it just to make sure I knew exactly what I was doing. By the end of it I knew what the film was going to look like - my exposure and the composition and everything. I wasn't scared of cinematography anymore.
-
When I started using the extreme short depth of field and single point of focus, I was trying to replicate my changing eyesight. We have binocular vision; one eye perceives space from the other. I don't experience a scene visually at F32. It's more like F1.4.
-
When I got to NYU, I immediately inquired about doing a double major in acting and photography.
-
Having worked with so many of the geniuses, I'd learned so much. It's the best sort of photography school, to work with people like Penn or Avedon or Meisel.
-
When I was starting out, conceptual photography had become something that had to be amateur - like, that had to be black-and-white, or photocopied, or really not an object in order to be taken seriously. It had to work against technical mastery, and so on. So I think that my work is full of obstacles in the sense that it does look highly familiar and accessible. It does look like it's already "solved at first sight." It does look like it's part of a larger industry.
-
Mysteries lie all around us, even in the most familiar things, waiting only to be perceived.
-
Photography is more than a window for me. Photography is more like a space that tries to capture situations.
-
Photography is the act of "fixing" time, not of "expressing" the world. The camera is an inadequate tool for extracting a vision of the world or of beauty.
