Photography Quotes
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For me photography is an excuse to be nosy about things I want to know about.
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What’s so incredibly amusing with photography is that while seemingly an art of the surface, it catches things I haven’t even noticed. And it pains me not to have seen things in all their depth.
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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.
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As a painter, taking photos is a form of shorthand - note-taking.
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My son does a little photography, but he's not involved the way I was.
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In the final analysis, photography... is ever a hireling, ever the hired gun.
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Did I express my personality? I think that's quite unimportant because it's not people's selves but what they have to say about life that's important.
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Mysteries lie all around us, even in the most familiar things, waiting only to be perceived.
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A few words about the question of whether photography is art or not: I never understood the question.
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Once you make decisions, you can't go back, but in photography, that process can continue. With film, you have to eliminate all the possibilities and make the one possibility work the best for you, so you have to become very creative with the direction you've chosen.
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Photography is about a single point of a moment. It’s like stopping time. As everything gets condensed in that forced instant. But if you keep creating these points, they form a line which reflects your life.
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All we did was to turn back the time to a photography of precision which is superior to the human eye.
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How aware were photographers in the past of other visual arts? “No photographer of any distinction at all could approach his work without some awareness of what was going on in other visual media, and for that matter neither the painter nor the draughtsman could ignore photography.
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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.
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I've never gotten a release from any person. I'm not a businessman; I'm on the side of common sense. Releases ruin the atmosphere of photography.
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I never tried to revolutionise photography; I just do what I do and keep my fingers crossed that people will like it.
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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.
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Of course, I won't be abandoning photography, because it is my life.
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The New York book was a visual diary and it was also kind of personal newspaper. I wanted it to look like the news. I didn’t relate to European photography. It was too poetic and anecdotal for me… the kinetic quality of new york, the kids, dirt, madness—I tried to find a photographic style that would come close to it. So I would be grainy and contrasted and black. Id crop, blur, play with the negatives. I didn’t see clean technique being right for New York. I could imagine my pictures lying in the gutter like the New York Daily News.
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I wish I were better at… photography. Sometimes it feels like I can’t capture everything with just a pen.
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Has it led you to the conclusion that photography is an art ? Or it is simply a means of recording ? “I’m glad you asked that. I’ve been wanting to say this for years. Is cooking an art ? Is talking an art ? Is even painting an art ? It is artfulness that makes art, not the medium itself. Of course photography is an art – when it is in the hands of artists.
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Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don’t see.
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I've always thought photography was a bit of an adventure, so to come home with the film, develop it, then look at the results has more of a sense of excitement.
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Working from photos makes you a little more analytical, a little more cerebral, because you're less connected to the intensity of life.
