I always carry a Moleskine journal and a simple Parker Jotter click-pen. Journaling an experience is worth more than any photograph.
A photograph doesn’t gain weight or lose weight, or change from being happy to being sad. It’s frozen. You can use it, then recycle it.
Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.
I have just one black and white photograph left of my mother when she was younger. She was 17 when it was taken and beautiful with wispy curls and eyes that shone like dark marbles.
I am trying to capture the women I photograph at their happiest. That is when they look their most beautiful. But I do understand that you have to make somebody feel completely comfortable in order to bring that out.
Rockers are the nicest people to photograph. They have no inhibitions.
My wife sent her photograph to the lonely hearts club. They sent it back, said they weren’t that lonely.
To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.
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.
You can give some kind of spark of life to a comic that a photograph doesn’t really have. A photograph, even if it’s connecting with you, it seems very dead on the page sometimes.
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.
There are some people who become best friends with everyone they photograph. There are people that I really like and admire and respect, but in a way I think it’s better to keep a distance. I think you get better pictures of people that you don’t know very well.
I photograph different people all the time. I like to shoot all kinds of people.
I used to go out wearing any old rubbish, no make-up, nothing, but since mobile phones, that has all had to stop. People do come up to you so often and say hello, or want a photograph, and I just can’t do it anymore in what I used to wear. They don’t want to be seen hanging off a rabid old granny any more than I do.
I hate my picture being taken. A photograph by definition captures one mood. And I have a million facets to my personality; I never use just one. That’s why I like TV more.
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
In the end, the only heritage we have is our planet, and I have decided to go to the most pristine places on the planet and photograph them in the most honest way I know, with my point of view, and of course it is in black and white, because it is the only thing I know how to do.
‘Changes in Latitudes’ began when I was looking at a photograph of a sea turtle swimming underwater. I had such a strong feeling for the beauty of this ancient creature, at home in the sea. On the spot, I wanted to swim with that turtle. I began to imagine a character who would do just that.
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.
I never took a photograph. Instead, I became a good listener.
I tried to keep both arts alive, but the camera won. I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!
With the Larry Bertlemann portrait, I started with a photograph that I could use for it. I built the drawing’s identity to serve as a graphic identity. After a number of sketches, I went into my own abstract vernacular of drawn lines and shapes to create the composition for the poster design.
A good photograph is knowing where to stand.
It is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph.
War is hell. You can’t photograph a flying bullet, but you can capture genuine fear.
After completing my honours in English, I remember getting a photograph clicked at a promotional booth put up by Vaseline in a mall. I was just having some fun with my friends, but never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I will be on the cover of ‘Femina.’
I’m fascinated by Greta Garbo. My cat’s named Greta, and I have a framed photograph of her from 1949.
Most of us, when we go out with a camera in our own country, try to find exotic subject matter to photograph.
When you finish a record, I look at it like a photograph. It’s already taken. You got it the way you wanted it to be. You edit it, make sure the light and contrast are right, then you just put it away, and that’s your photograph. Then you don’t really think about it anymore.
There is a considerable amount of manipulation in the printmaking from the straight photograph to the finished print. If I do my job correctly that shouldn’t be visible at all, it should be transparent.
I think the first photograph I did was a ballplayer. It was a way of showing action or something.
We are only beginning to learn what to say in a photograph. The world we live in is a succession of fleeting moments, any one of which might say something significant.
For every moment of triumph, there is an unequal and opposite feeling of despair. Take that iconic photograph of Muhammad Ali standing triumphantly over the prostrate, semiconscious wreckage of Sonny Liston. Great photo. Now think of Liston. Do the pleasure/pain calculus.
We share a huge visual memory bank, mostly through painting and other images in history. I think when a modern photograph taps into those, sometimes very subliminally, it makes people respond.
I would never dream, for example, of going to The States to photograph your wildlife.
I photographed Alek Wek. She was amazing, and nobody knew about her then. It was a really strong photograph of her.
A Hubble Space Telescope photograph of the universe evokes far more awe for creation than light streaming through a stained glass window in a cathedral.
I hate having my photograph taken.
The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.
I’d like to take more pictures of real celebrities. It would be fabulous to photograph Brad Pitt. He’s so good-looking and just such a star.
Criticism is hypocrisy; society is hypocrisy. I’m a tourist. I’m a consumer. I do the things that I photograph and can be criticized of.
I love coffee, but I don’t photograph it. That’s not who I am. I’m a social creature, so my subject should not be the coffee. It’s about being together with friends.
Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.
My mother’s favorite photograph was one of herself at twenty-four years old, unbearably beautiful, utterly glamorous, in a black-straw cartwheel hat, dark-red lipstick, and a smart black suit, her notepad on a cocktail table. I know nothing about that woman.
They kept me in short pants as long as they could, until they were shaving the hair on my legs because it was beginning to photograph.
If you’re not going to tell something if you’re not going to expose something it’s real easy to go in and photograph from behind the camera and not expose any of your weaknesses.
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.
I don’t even know what an ‘It’ girl is. As far as I’m concerned, an ‘It’ girl is somebody who doesn’t do anything except go to parties and get her photograph taken.
In those simpler days, you could just take pictures of movie stars and show them the way they were, as normal human beings. And if I felt part of any movement at the time, it was just to do that – to be journalistic and photograph what is, rather than what is made up.
Photorealism’s goal is to reproduce a photograph. The best photorealism can’t beat a printer, and I have a really nice printer.
My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.
Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it’s not an art. The main thing about directing is: photograph the people’s eyes.
I didn’t really know what I was looking at when I first came across Man Ray’s ‘Dust Breeding,’ his photograph of a work by Marcel Duchamp called ‘Large Glass.’ It looked like an aerial photograph or a view through a microscope.
The way that light hits objects in life, three-dimensional objects before you photograph them, is really the story of photography.
I know most of the photographers in Ireland. And if I don’t want my photograph taken, they will leave me alone.
Selfies became too big. The selfie photos are not good. Fans ask me for a selfie, and I say, ‘Let’s just do a photo.’ I’m not anti-selfie, but I like a classic photograph.
A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.
Black and white means photography to me. It’s much easier to take a good color photograph, but you can get more drama into a black and white one.
Everything always looked better in black and white. Everything always looked as if it were the first time; there’s always more people in a black and white photograph. It just makes it seem that there were more people at a gig, more people at a football match, than with colour photography. Everything looks more exciting.
