Photographer Quotes

For a photographer, it's a necessity that you can shoot stuff magically. Accidents are necessary, but after I take the photograph, it's not over. I work on it more.

In making portraits, I refuse to photograph myself as do so many photographers. My style is the style of the people I photograph.

A photographer without imagination is not a good photographer.

We photographers say that we take a picture, and in a certain sense, that is true. We take something from people's lives, but in doing so we tell their story.

Photography should be redefined. It's largely technical... Photography is just unbelievably limiting. I always think of David Bailey and all the fashion photographers - they overlap, you can't always tell who did it. I don't really even like photography all that much. I just think it's so overdone.

Photographers, it is true, do not work but they do do something: They create, process, and store symbols.

The present challenge to the photographer is to express inner significance through outward form.

Photography starts with the projection of the photographer, his understanding of life and himself into the picture.

I didn't want to be a woman photographer. That would limit me. I wanted to be a photographer who was a woman, with all the world open to my camera.

There is a myth that the portrait photographer is supposed to make the subject relax, and that's the real person. But I'm interested in whatever is going on. And I'm not that comfortable myself.

Photographers aren't artists, for goodness sake.

The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.

A true photographer is as rare as a true poet or a true painter.

We don't have enough words for photography. Can you imagine writers having only one word for writing?

Nowadays, photographers start out with ideas, and their photos become the expression of an idea. To my way of thinking, a photo should not depend on ideas, should go beyond ideas.

It's marvelous, marvelous! Nothing will ever be as much fun. I'm going to photograph everything, everything!

The first time, I usually skim off the outer layer and end up with photographs that are fairly obvious. The second time, I have to look a little deeper. The images get more interesting. The third time it is even more challenging and on each subsequent occasion, the images should get stronger, but it takes more effort to get them.

Parks and gardens are the quintessential intimate landscapes. People use them all the time, leaving their energy and memories behind. It's what's left behind that I like to photograph.

The act of photography is like going on a hunt in which photographer and camera merge into one indivisible function. This is a hunt for new states of things, situations never seen before, for the improbable, for information.

I think most serious photographers understand that there's this large gap between the world and how the world looks through a photograph.

I became wary of simple interpretations that assumed fixed and final meanings.

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.

A few words about the question of whether photography is art or not: I never understood the question.

When I teach and meet a class for the first time, you realize that there are people there that have exceptional abilities or have the potential to do exceptional things and you never know who those people are. My job is to provide the best information I can.

The best plans evolve.

I had a background in theater as an actor, and then a photographer, and then as an experimental filmmaker and editor.

My visual quest is driven by a desire to create a universe capable of supporting feelings and ideas.

I used to have this notion when I was a kid that the minute you said anything, it was no longer true. Of course it would have driven me crazy very rapidly if I hadn't dropped it, but there's something similar in what I'm trying to say. That once it's been done, you want to go someplace else. There's just some sense of straining.

I believe that... my first successes in my out-of-focus pictures were a fluke. That is to say, that when focusing and coming to something which, to my eye, was very beautiful, I stopped there instead of screwing on the lens to the more definite focus which all other photographers insist upon.

[The small camera] taught me energy and decisiveness and immediacy ... The large camera taught me reverence, patience, and meditation.

Even though fixed in time, a photograph evokes as much feeling as that which comes from music or dance. Whatever the mode - from the snapshot to the decisive moment to multi-media montage - the intent and purpose of photography is to render in visual terms feelings and experiences that often elude the ability of words to describe. In any case, the eyes have it, and the imagination will always soar farther than was expected.

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.

Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

It was amazing to watch him in the darkroom at an advanced age, still get excited when the results were pleasing. He still struggled like we all do in the darkroom and he struggled behind the camera, and when he had a success he was beaming.

I'm not against digital photography. It's great for newspapers. And there are photographers doing great work digitally. When they use Photoshop as a darkroom tool, that's fine, too. But at this point of my life, after so many years, I don't really want to change, and I still love film.

A photographer needs to be a good editor of negatives and prints! In fact, most of the prints I make are for my eyes only, and they are no good. I find the single most valuable tool in the darkroom is my trash can - that's where most of my prints end up.

I am an expressionist and by that I mean that I'm not a photographer or a writer or a painter or a tap dancer, but rather someone who expresses himself according to his needs.

When a photographer masters the tools and processes of the art, then the quality of the work is only limited by his creative vision.

At 42, I decided to become a photographer because it offered a means of creative thought and action. I didn't rationalize this, I just felt it intuitively and followed my intuition, which I have never regretted.

New images surround us everywhere. They are invisible only because of sterile routine convention and fear. To find these images is to dare to see, to be aware of what there is and how it is. The photographer not only gets information, he gives information about life.

When a photographer chooses a subject, he or she is making a claim on the interest and attention of future viewers, a prediction about what will be thought to have been important.

When the novice photographer starts taking pictures, he carries his camera about and shoots everything that interests him. There comes a time when he must crystallize his ideas and set off in an particular direction. He must learn that shooting for the sake of shooting is dull and unprofitable.

People who are close to me know, they so know that there were days when I was so tired that I would fall asleep anywhere. The onset photographer has pictures of me falling asleep everywhere. Like on chairs, on the floor, in the middle of a set, all curled up. There were times when crew members didn't know where to find me, but they knew I'd be curled up in a ball somewhere.

The camera has always been a guide, and it's allowed me to see things and focus on things that maybe an average person wouldn't even notice.

In common with other artists the photographer wants his finished print to convey to others his own response to his subject. In the fulfillment of this aim, his greatest asset is the directness of the process he employs. But this advantage can only be retained if he simplifies his equipment and technic to the minimum necessary, and keeps his approach from from all formula, art-dogma, rules and taboos. Only then can he be free to put his photographic sight to use in discovering and revealing the nature of the world he lives in.

During my lifetime I have met dozens of writers and photographers in dozens of different countries. But I have encountered no one who could both write and photograph with the artistry of Robert Vavra.

What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.

Now, to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravity before going for a walk.

The job of the color photographer is to provide some level of abstraction that can take the image out of the daily.

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.