Photographs can reveal something to us, and they can also conceal things.
I hate being the subject of photographs.
I don’t really have a treasured possession, but I do love my family’s proper old photo album. We all have hundreds of photos on our phones now, but you can’t beat the old albums stuffed with black-and-white wedding photographs and 1970s Polaroids.
For my 50th birthday, my cousin Helmut gave me the most profound, beautiful, and striking present. He made books out of my dad’s slide photographs, which were stored and forgotten. Looking at those books made me cry.
I like a decent funeral, and God knows in my family we’ve seen enough of them. Looking through family photographs now is like watching an episode of ‘Dad’s Army.’
Sex is not a subject in my photographs, or would only be if it had to do with romance, sometimes vulnerability. The photographs are quite clearly about happiness, or search for happiness.
I was on holiday recently and I came home to find that one of the papers here had ‘bikini’d’ me on the beach. I was wearing a grossly unflattering costume and they had published photographs of me taken from behind. I looked dreadful. I went into our local newsagent and bought up every copy.
If I feel confident wearing something, I think it translates in photographs. It changes my demeanor and posture.
What sets ‘Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children’ apart is Riggs’s use of ‘found’ photographs as a spark of inspiration for the narrative. ‘Found’ describes art created from common objects that are not normally considered art.
It wasn’t until I realised that I could actually take nice photographs that I started to become passionate about it. I then got a few jobs working for magazines in London, and I would get terribly excited and intense about doing a job and taking photographs and looking through the lens to capture something amazing.
Photographs speak to me, and I obey.
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.
I’m lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don’t want a Picasso on my wall; it’s great art, but it’s dead art to me. I’d rather have a photograph by someone I’ve never heard of that really inspires me.
I’m really taken by the fact that my photographs live on somebody’s wall.
Typically, I spend a lot of time – mostly in the morning – kind of drifting, reading, walking down along the river, looking at photographs, or even driving around. Then, if I’m lucky, I get to work in the early afternoon, one way or another.
One of my great goals when I first started taking photographs or showing them publicly is that people might want one for over their desk. That’s my goal.
The photographs that are art have to be separated from the rest – then preserved.
I’m known for fashion photographs, but fashion photographs were mostly a joke for me. In ‘Vogue,’ girls were playing at being duchesses, but they were actually from Flatbush, Brooklyn. They would play duchesses, and I would play Cecil Beaton.
I had a whistle-stop tour of Havana in a horse and carriage and couldn’t stop taking photographs of the decaying yet enchanting buildings and people.
When I’ve had enough of words, I go out into the city for a long walk; sometimes I’ll go out walking for several miles. And I’ll just take photographs and hope for something striking or unusual to happen that I can organize into a picture frame.
Usually when painters use photographs, they enlarge and copy them and simply make a large, boring painting of a large, boring photograph.
I’m always interested in seeing how other artists work. I want to know what their working patterns are. I even like to know if they listen to music when they draw or what time of day they draw, even materials they use, what they research, if they use photographs.
I say no to photographs. When people take my picture, I feel like they’ve taken a piece of me, and I can’t get that back. It’s soul-draining.
I’ve always been interested in photographs, collecting them not systematically but randomly. They get lost, then turn up again.
I was into punk rock back when I was in high school. I used to go around to dive venues and take photographs. But now it’s been just much more about the country stuff and soulful folk.
The few people who ask to have their photographs with me, I almost always say yes, except for a few circumstances, like when my family is around.
I had always been kind of obsessed with making a home of my own and was always drawing rooms that I wanted to live in, down to pictures on the wall and the faces that would be in the photographs, and how the couches would be situated.
I know plenty of people who do, who get their holidays paid for and in return have their photographs taken on the beach, but not me.
People often expect me to be very serious, but it’s not like my record company told me not to smile in photographs, because I was like that anyway.
You just feel like you’re doing a job that you want to be doing, and then one day, somebody asks you a question like that: ‘What’s it like to be famous?’ It doesn’t really mean anything. The only difference is some people stop you and ask you for photographs.
No, I do a bunch of things to entertain myself. I paint, I make music, I take photographs.
Light is everything in photographs and has to be considered in all situations.
Photographs aren’t accounts of scrutiny. The shutter is open for a fraction of a second.
I don’t see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.
Sometimes I’ve gotten photographs back and people have literally shaven off pieces of me, and I tell them to put it back.
I’ve looked at photographs of myself during concerts and it sometimes looks as if I’m in a fencing move, with a guitar in my hands instead of a sword.
From the time I started taking photographs, I started working with plastics. I’ve always treated plastic like it was marble or gemstone or fine glass. I’ve always gotten the most out of it. I love it!
While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.
When I started working in fashion, I didn’t have money to buy photographs, so I’d Xerox pictures from magazines and put them in notebooks. When I’d start a collection, I’d sit with my old notebooks and look through them for inspiration.
If you look at satellite photographs of the Far East by night, you’ll see a large splotch curiously lacking in light. This area of darkness is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe, having surveyed a few boxes full of letters, diaries, bank statements and photographs, that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.
I’m exchanging molecules every 30 days with the natural world and in a spiritual sense I know I am a part of it and take my photographs from that emotional feeling within me, rather than from an emotional distance as a spectator.
I became an adult in an extreme way. I was recently sorting some old photographs and I found another.
In Haiti, it – people seemed – in my experience in Haiti, people are so open to photographs and journalism. And there doesn’t seem to be the same sort of restrictions or wariness about the press that you would experience in Washington, for instance, on many levels.
Looking through family photographs now is like watching an episode of ‘Dad’s Army.’ My relatives seem to drop like flies around me. Who’s next? Will it be someone I can’t stand?
I grew up with very elegant parents; their black and white photographs and style are still a huge source of inspiration in designing my collections.
Photography seduces us into thinking we can believe photographs, whereas we can’t really believe that a picture can tell us any kind of truth at all.
I feel very lucky that I was part of that whole scene in the ’60s and ’70s. I love looking at the photographs because everyone was young, and they were so gorgeous to look at.
My wife made me a book of photographs she took of our road trip across the United States. Makes for a good coffee table book.
Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.
No one could possibly look all the time like my photographs. It is dreadfully hard to live up to them. They stare at me everywhere.
I have photographs taken of me at the time I was addicted, and thought I looked good. I see them today and realize my eyes were dead.
There are photographs that I don’t take now that I previously would have taken without any thought at all as to any misinterpretations.
My great-grandfather was in the army in India, and we have photographs of my family there in full Victorian dress. They’re incredibly romantic.
I used to have a lovely wallet with lots of different compartments where I kept photographs of my grandmother, grandfather and friends. It was stolen one night when I was out in Edinburgh, and I never got it back.
There are wonderful museums with lots of photographs of 1920’s musicals.
What I’m trying to do is make photographs that are universally understood… that cross cultural lines. I want my photographs to be about the basic emotions and feelings that we all experience.
