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Quotes by Photographer
"A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy."
22
"I did grow up next door to Steve McQueen, who was a very famous movie star at the time, but as a kid it didn't impress me. We always had great fun with him. He would take us out on Sundays on his motorcycles, riding around in the desert; he was like a second father."
22
"You can't expect to take a definitive image in half an hour. It takes days, often years."
22
"When I have sex with someone I forget who I am. For a minute I even forget I'm human. It's the same thing when I'm behind a camera. I forget I exist."
22
"All my life I've taken photographs of people who are completely at peace being what they were in the situations I photographed them in."
22
"I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn't have a personal vision or doesn't communicate emotion fails."
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"Does not the very word 'creative' mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act - rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life - not death."
22
"I found myself serving a sentence of public denial from the very second the raid on my apartment happened."
22
"There isn't a person alive who doesn't like being caressed."
22
"I've been working with the land for most of my life; walking it and photographing it. And I love it to bits."
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"If slaughterhouses had glass walls the whole world would be vegetarian."
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"To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things."
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"I see things like they've never been seen before. Art is an accurate statement of the time in which it is made."
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"One must ease the public into it - that's an art in itself."
22
"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."
22
"I don't believe in dogmas and theologies. I just believe in being a good person."
21
"I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life."
21
"Perhaps the world's second-worst crime is boredom; the first is being a bore."
21
"I'd go down to the end of my street, to a garage that had a certain feeling about it, or a particular light; I'd take a picture of a friend who needed a head shot. That's how I learned, instead of having school assignments and learning camera techniques."
21
"I used to hate doing color. I hated transparency film. The way I did color was by not wanting to know what kind of film was in my camera."
21
"An artist is nothing without his or her obsessions, and I have mine."
21
"The photographer begins to feel big and bloated and so big he can't walk through one of these doors because he gets a good byline; he gets notices all over the world and so forth; but they're really - the important people are the people he photographs."
21
"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."
21
"The photographs that are art have to be separated from the rest - then preserved."
21
"I was extravagant in the matter of cameras - anything photographic - I had to have the best. But that was to further my work. In most things I have gone along with the plainest - or without."
Work,
21
"I hardly teach. It's more like a gathering of minds looking at one subject and learning from each other. I enjoy the process."
21
"I became kind of a drop-out in science after I came back to America. I wanted to photograph."
21
"I never cared for fashion much, amusing little seams and witty little pleats: it was the girls I liked."
21
"I suffered evils, but without allowing them to rob me of the freedom to expand."
21
"My father wants me to be like my brother, but I can't be."
21
"There is a brief moment when all there is in a man's mind and soul and spirit is reflected through his eyes, his hands, his attitude. This is the moment to record."
21
"The trouble with photographing beautiful women is that you never get into the dark room until after they've gone."
21
"My mountaineering skills are not important to my best photographs, but they do add a component to my work that is definitely a bit different than that of most photographers."
Work,
21
"If there is a single quality that is shared by all great men, it is vanity."
21
"My mind is vacant on names, but I know him as well as anything. When I need names they drop out of my head; when I don't need them they drop back."
21
"In my mind's eye, I visualize how a particular... sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice."
21
"For me, the most important thing I learned was just honing my eye. I think I had a good eye."
21
"I always say that I don't want to be sentimental, that the photographs shouldn't be sentimental, and yet, I am conscious of my sentimentality."
21
"I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing."
21
"I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable."
21
"I had been working in colour for ten years or so and looked at digital and liked the possibilities it gave me."
21
"I am obsessed with beauty. I want everything to be perfect, and of course it isn't. And that's a tough place to be because you're never satisfied."
21
"They often ask me to shoot for them. But I say no. I think an old guy like me ought not take pages away from young photographers who need the exposure."
Old,
21
"I bought my first camera in Seattle, Washington. Only paid about seven dollars and fifty cents for it."
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