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Quotes by Photographer
"I consider it essential that the photographer should do his own printing and enlarging. The final effect of the finished print depends so much on these operations."
35
"Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will ask 'why'. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information."
34
"I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see."
34
"It's silly to keep people alive who have a terrible disease."
34
"I hardly teach. It's more like a gathering of minds looking at one subject and learning from each other. I enjoy the process."
34
"When I married Paul, we lived in St John's Wood in London. We had nice next-door neighbours, but you don't know anyone else. Everyone lives in isolation."
34
"You can't expect to take a definitive image in half an hour. It takes days, often years."
34
"And only the photographer himself knows the effect he wants. He should know by instinct, grounded in experience, what subjects are enhanced by hard or soft, light or dark treatment."
34
"When I need names they drop out of my head; when I don't need them they drop back."
34
"While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see."
34
"I was brought up on art. My father thought I had a great hand at art and sent me to art school. But he did not want me to become a photographer."
34
"I don't think at that time I realized how important it was and how important it was for me to be here and carry on that legacy in our family of being a photographer."
34
"If somebody's pointing a trembling finger at your pants and saying you shouldn't be doing that, follow that finger back, go up the arm and look at the head that's behind it, because there's almost always something fairly woolly in there."
34
"It was 1966 by the time I started taking pictures seriously and books, newspapers and magazines of the time were full of great pictures that helped to inspire me."
33
"There are photographs that I don't take now that I previously would have taken without any thought at all as to any misinterpretations."
33
"The transactions between me and the people that I photograph are very, very collaborative."
33
"That dichotomy between the public consumption of the work and my intent and practice in making it is an uneasy one for me, on occasion."
33
"It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them."
33
"But I was, and still am, an avid reader and so when I first started I chose to photograph many of the great writers in this country to try and earn a living."
33
"I never question what to do, it tells me what to do. The photographs make themselves with my help."
33
"It's that I don't like white paper backgrounds. A woman does not live in front of white paper. She lives on the street, in a motor car, in a hotel room."
33
"Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts."
33
"If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera."
33
"No two people take on the information of being admirable and being admired in the same way."
32
"My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it."
32
"This war is like an actress who is getting old. It is less and less photogenic and more and more dangerous."
32
"As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs."
32
"Any artist that's involved in their work is inevitably going to have a focus in what they do."
32
"The images I like best are parts of series that I've started, in some cases, with the pregnancies of the mothers of the children in question, and I continue that series right on through the birth of children to the child that resulted from that first pregnancy."
32
"I didn't want to tell the tree or weed what it was. I wanted it to tell me something and through me express its meaning in nature."
32
"Sometimes they are a matter of luck; the photographer could not expect or hope for them. Sometimes they are a matter of patience, waiting for an effect to be repeated that he has seen and lost or for one that he anticipates."
32
"Words and pictures can work together to communicate more powerfully than either alone."
32
"What I loathe is the multi-national conglomerates who must take responsibility for the degradation and pollution of so much of our landscape with their factory farming and greed."
32
"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."
31
"With photography a new language has been created. Now for the first time it is possible to express reality by reality. We can look at an impression as long as we wish, we can delve into it and, so to speak, renew past experiences at will."
31
"Look at lots of exhibitions and books, and don't get hung up on cameras and technical things. Photography is about images."
31
"All I wanted was to connect my moods with those of Paris. Beauty paints and when it painted most, I shot."
31
"Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be."
31
"When I started doing my work years ago, I had doubts as to whether the informed-consent question was answerable."
31
"The great thing about this thing we call art is that it has no rules."
31
"When I photograph, what I'm really doing is seeking answers to things."
31
"I have always loved reading, so was interested in the literary world, and took many literary portraits."
31
"I have mixed feelings about those sorts of things. When I see it done by interesting young people, I think it's very valid. But when established photographers, people in their forties, copy me and get a lot of money, well, I find that to be very stupid."
31
"Trust that little voice in your head that says 'Wouldn't it be interesting if...'; And then do it."
31
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