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Quotes by Photographer
"There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept."
56
"There must be a reason why photographers are not very good at verbal communication. I think we get lazy."
56
"If I am at a party, I want to be at the party. Too many photographers use the camera to avoid participating in things. They become professional observers."
56
"Lennon was very helpful. What he taught me seems completely obvious: he expected people to treat each other well."
56
"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."
56
"Washington, D.C. in 1942 was not the easiest place in the world for a Negro to get along."
56
"Coming tight was boring to me, just the face... it didn't have enough information."
56
"Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation."
56
"There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough - there has to be vision, and the two together can make a good photograph."
56
"On close inspection, this device turned out to be a funereal juke box - the result of mixing Lloyd's of London with the principle of the chewing gum dispenser."
56
"I began taking pictures in the natural world to be able to show people what I was experiencing when I climbed and explored in Yosemite in the High Sierra."
55
"I found myself serving a sentence of public denial from the very second the raid on my apartment happened."
55
"Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space."
55
"Passion is in all great searches and is necessary to all creative endeavors."
55
"People have to find ways of explaining the work."
55
"That's the new way - with computers, computers, computers. That's the way we can have the cell survive and get some new information in high resolution. We started about five years ago and, today, I think we have reached the target."
55
"I have many times thought I did the wrong thing, but the reason was not to be a medical doctor - it was just to have the information. But then, maybe I was wrong, I don't know."
55
"It's a heavy weight, the camera. Now we have modern and lightweight, small plastic cameras, but in the '70s they were heavy metal."
55
"It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment."
55
"The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art."
54
"Beauty and the devil are the same thing."
54
"I remember when an editor at the National Geographic promised to run about a dozen of my landscape pictures from a story on the John Muir trail as an essay, but when the group of editors got together, someone said that my pictures looked like postcards."
54
"Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness."
54
"For me, the most important thing I learned was just honing my eye. I think I had a good eye."
54
"I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing."
54
"I don't think there is anything wrong with white space. I don't think it's a problem to have a blank wall."
54
"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."
54
"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."
54
"The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality."
54
"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,
54
"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."
53
"When I started working for Rolling Stone, I became very interested in journalism and thought maybe that's what I was doing, but it wasn't."
53
"Photography suits the temper of this age - of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately."
53
"A positive attitude can really make dreams come true - it did for me."
53
"A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy."
53
"These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me."
53
"What I mean by photographing as a participant rather than observer is that I'm not only involved directly with some of the activities that I photograph, such as mountain climbing, but even when I'm not I have the philosophy that my mind and body are part of the natural world."
53
"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."
53
"Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself."
53
"Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera."
53
"I'm always mentally photographing everything as practice."
53
"I am selfish, but that's an attribute that all artists possess."
53
"Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is... the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own."
53
"I'd like to think that the actions we take today will allow others in the future to discover the wonders of landscapes we helped protect but never had the chance to enjoy ourselves."
52
"Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes."
52
"In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration."
52
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