I’m much more about the emotion that a photograph provokes out of you and less about how technically brilliant it is.
I have a list of ideas that I want to do for my art series, but I’m always trying to figure out what’s going to work. Ever since I was in art school, I would read and get ideas. Sometimes the photograph sparks an idea in me, and I continue in that direction.
In the 70s and 80s, Dad was ‘the most hated politician in Britain’. When I started at Holland Park school, the papers turned up and there was a photograph of me published – skinny me in white shorts lining up with lots of other kids for PE. And I was 10.
The Carrie Mae Weems photograph ‘Blue Black Boy,’ I thought, was fantastic.
I made a photograph of a garden in Kyoto, the Zen garden, which is a rectangle. But a photograph taken from any one point will not show, well it shows a rectangle, but not with ninety degree angles.
One person can take papers, photograph them without getting excited, return them, and give them away without any scruples; while someone else has to overcome an enormous obstacle.
While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.
Sometimes you feel uncomfortable taking a photograph, but that’s all part of the job.
I’ll see a photograph of a character and try to copy them on to my face. I think I’m really observant, and thinking how a person is put together, seeing them on the street and noticing subtle things about them that make them who they are.
When you use film, you use accidents, but there aren’t any accidents with digital photography. I don’t mind that it’s easy. But I do mind that there is a sort of consensus with the camera and the subject and the light, and you look at something, and you photograph it, and you get what you see.
I almost never set out to photograph a landscape, nor do I think of my camera as a means of recording a mountain or an animal unless I absolutely need a ‘record shot’. My first thought is always of light.
Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness.
I always give a print to everybody I photograph, and some of my subjects have told me they have a hard time hanging them up at home.
Black and white is abstract; color is not. Looking at a black and white photograph, you are already looking at a strange world.
I don’t photograph any two people who are remotely the same.
At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.
I really miss my youth. I’m not being ungrateful, but there was an Atif who used to roam the streets, who didn’t care whether his photograph was taken or not, who used to hang out without people staring at him. I miss that carefree life and would give anything for it, even if it only lasts a few moments.
I’ve always worked from images that already exist in our culture, and I just tweak them – I photograph my vision/interpretation of things that already exist, and I take it to the extreme. And then I make paintings or videos.
‘Harry Potter’ is very nice because it’s very easy to make children happy. All you have to do is have your photograph taken with them.
‘Lucky Us’ ends with a description of a photograph of the novel’s fictional family. I could never get enough of my own family photo albums.
You must photograph where you are involved; where you are overwhelmed by what you see before you; where you hold your breath while releasing the shutter, not because you are afraid of jarring the camera, but because you are seeing with your guts wide open to the sweet pain of an image that is part of your life.
In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.
I thought it would be good not to hide the fact that you’re taking a photograph, and have people react and come in close and also make a commentary on what’s being photographed: ‘This is a photo, this is my point of view.’
The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart – so I’m about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.
I met Clinton at a benefit for teachers, which was a very good charity, but I met him for about 90 seconds, and I thought it was important to meet the leader of the free world. So I stood next to him for a photograph, and then apparently that’s all it takes.
Not all paintings are abstract; they’re not all Jackson Pollock. There’s value in a photograph of a man alone on a boat at sea, and there is value in painting of a man alone on a boat at sea. In the painting, the painting has more freedom to express an idea, more latitude in being able to elicit certain emotion.
I’ve always felt like an artistic person. I can’t draw or paint or sculpt. I never really had technical skills, but I’ve always felt like I appreciate really beautiful things, and part of taking a good photograph is being able to recognize beauty.
I love doing commercials! Usually, they have enough money that they can take time and photograph it well.
I feel unbelievably blessed that I have had the opportunity to photograph Malala in her classroom in Birmingham.
People don’t believe they’ve experienced the event unless they’ve taken a photograph.
With a documentary, you can cut away, you can do jump cuts, cut to a photograph at any point to bridge two scenes.
I have been criticized a lot for not looking perfect in every photograph. I’m not embarrassed about it. I’m proud of it. If I took perfect pictures all the time, the people standing in the room with me, or on the carpet, would think, ‘What an actress! What a faker!’
The photograph of the Queen sitting stiffly across the table from Glasgow resident Susan McCarron is so natural and expressive that it looks utterly fake. It looks like an artist’s portrait, complete with symbolism, humour and poignancy. No wonder the palace and the press have interpreted it in such different ways.
Being someone who people want to photograph, you have to open yourself up to the positive and negative. It is what it is.
Becoming a mother hasn’t necessarily changed how I shoot, but it certainly has made me more sensitive, and it certainly makes it much harder for me to photograph dying children.
There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. I photograph to see what something will look like photographed.
Everything is a subject. Every subject has a rhythm. To feel it is the raison detre. The photograph is a fixed moment of such a raison detre, which lives on in itself.
I was invited to photograph Hollywood. They asked me what I would like to photograph. I said, Ugly men.
When you can use forged photograph of Manoj Tiwari then all your claims are false. The whole party and their thinking is fake.
Art work is inconclusive. It opens your mind up. At least, that’s what I hope it does. And advertising, using exactly the same photograph, closes things down. It makes it conclusive. It sells a product, and that is its primary function.
The Queen is frequently on her own, walking the dogs, riding her horses, playing patience, completing a jigsaw, sorting her photograph albums, watching television, phoning friends, doing the Telegraph crossword. Is she neglected? Is she suffering? Or does she simply understand her man?
I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present. I want to gather them, like somebody’s grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.
I don’t have lights, I don’t have assistants, I just go and meet somebody and take a photograph. That’s really basic, and that’s how I used to work when I was 17 or 18 in Holland.
I write in order to express what the photo itself cannot say. A photograph of my father doesn’t tell me what I thought of him, which for me is much more important than what the man looked like.
If I went to somewhere busy, I wouldn’t last very long. I can’t go to a museum – I’ll last 10 or 15 minutes in a museum. The problem is that when one person asks for a photograph, then someone sees a flash goes off, then everyone else sort of… it’s sort of like a domino effect.
From creating a new sovereign to affairs of the heart, majestic moments to everyday life, when monarchy wants to send a message it uses a photograph.
Why in the world would anyone want to photograph an old woman like me?
My dream concept is that I have a camera and I am trying to photograph what is essentially invisible. And every once in a while I get a glimpse of her and I grab that picture.
I want to photograph what I see and put it in a dramatic context. I’m an actor and a writer, and I want to tell these stories and present these shapes, colors and movements as I see them, as I see them serve a narrative. As I see that narrative serve an audience. That’s what I want to do.
I remember when the photograph was taken. The famous one, I mean. The one of me being rushed from the Boston Marathon bombing without my legs.
When it comes to partnership, some humans can make their lives alone – it’s possible. But creatively, it’s more like painting: you can’t just use the same colours in every painting. It’s just not an option. You can’t take the same photograph every time and live with art forms with no differences.
