top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Photographer
"It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter."
31
"Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true."
31
"Actually, when I first started dabbling in photography, I was still working for my parents as a salesman."
31
"I'm not faithful to one particular medium, and it's what I try to teach to people who work with me."
31
"Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation."
31
"From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour."
31
"Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual."
31
"To me, that is the essence of me as a photographer. It is those ideas, working with them, formulating them and eventually putting them down on paper, photographing them and then going on to the next step."
31
"The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance."
31
"It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators."
30
"People are so wonderful that a photographer has only to wait for that breathless moment to capture what he wants on film."
30
"San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities."
30
"Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay."
30
"Think about the photo before and after, never during. The secret is to take your time. You mustn't go too fast. The subject must forget about you. Then, however, you must be very quick."
30
"And I think that after nearly 85 years upon this planet that I have a right after working so hard at showing the desolation and the poverty, to show something beautiful for somebody as well."
30
"It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary."
29
"Lennon was very helpful. What he taught me seems completely obvious: he expected people to treat each other well."
29
"People have to find ways of explaining the work."
29
"I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen."
29
"At my Rolling Stones' tour, the camera was a protection. I used it in a Zen way."
28
"Passion is in all great searches and is necessary to all creative endeavors."
28
"Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness."
28
"Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera."
28
"Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy - your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself."
28
"I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody's face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways."
28
"I have the worst ear for criticism; even when I have created a stage set I like, I always hear the woman in the back of the dress circle who says she doesn't like blue."
27
"The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective."
27
"The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways."
27
"I've created a vocabulary of different styles. I draw from many different ways to take a picture. Sometimes I go back to reportage, to journalism."
27
"I like photographs which leave something to the imagination."
27
"When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph."
Want,
27
"Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats."
26
"As soon as you forbid something, you make it extraordinarily appealing. You also bring shame in as a phenomenon."
26
"You do your work as a photographer and everything becomes past. Words are more like thoughts; the photographer's picture is always surrounded by a kind of romantic glamor - no matter what you do, and how you twist it."
26
"I should try to get some sleep as one doesn't know what tomorrow may bring."
26
"I've been with Life now for seventeen years and I have written several articles for them and will be doing more writing and do at least two assignments a year besides my writing."
26
"I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied."
26
"I'd become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what color they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake."
26
"The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality."
26
"I want to be as honest as I can about the things I've been through - the sorrows and joys, victories and defeats - and to use those experiences as a well to draw from. Hopefully, the songs that result from that kind of writing will be songs that mean something to others."
25
"My hope is that we continue to nurture the places that we love, but that we also look outside our immediate worlds."
25
"I didn't have any interest in traditional art."
25
"It's a heavy weight, the camera. Now we have modern and lightweight, small plastic cameras, but in the '70s they were heavy metal."
25
"One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind."
25
"Never boss people around. It's more important to click with people than to click the shutter."
25
"I went into photography because it seemed like the perfect vehicle for commenting on the madness of today's existence."
25
"In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv."
24
bottom of page