QuoteLog

”...we had met when he came up to me to talk about gear (it’s the equivalent amongst photographers of dogs sniffing butts).”

“No one expected the democratization of media to be pretty, but the attendant lens abuse is enough to break this cinematographer’s heart.”

“If you don’t read the instruction manual on your new pro camera and ask a stupid basic question in front of the world, you deserve to get ridiculed. Yes, you do. Take it like a man.”

“I knew that I had every right to critique this overtly consumerist and impossible beauty myth. What I didn’t know was how much money it would take to prove it. Federal court is a boxing ring for the rich.”

“Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.”

“A camera gives you a reason to stare”

“Normally we can draw some comfort in looking at distressing photographs because, as viewer, we are receiving the message communicated by the photographer - that what he or she is witnessing is unacceptable and upsetting ... The pictures from Abu Ghraib are fundamentally different.”

“A picture used to be worth a thousand words. With the inflation of global electronic media, it’s now worth about 100 million words.”

“We’re at a tipping point. The digital print is becoming the look of our time, and it makes the C-print start to look like a tintype.”

“When I was shooting Karl Rove, I said to him, ‘Mr. Rove, I’m just a guy from England trying to make it in America. Can you give me any advice?’ and he said to me, ‘Sonny, if you’re shooting me, you’ve already made it.’”

“If by chance someone is looking at some picture that seems to be a ‘found photograph,’ it makes no difference that he understand what I was trying to do, because I was not trying to do anything.”

“I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost -- that is important.”

“Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography”

“I’ve never made any picture, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.”

“I do not think I can change the world with my photographs, but I do firmly believe that a bad picture can make it worse.”

“...no medicine I’ve ever taken has done half as much for me as getting behind the lens and finding all the moments in the world around me to capture and make my own.”

“You can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in.”

“It’s all too easy to think that an interesting picture is a picture of an interesting thing—this is the power of photojournalism, some snapshots, certain forms of portraiture, and so on. But the truth is trickier: The quality of a photograph lies not in its subject matter but in the irreducible entanglement of photographer, apparatus, and image. The most interesting fact to contemplate is that someone had the will and the opportunity to take it at all. You’re looking at the specific and fleeting relationship among those three things — artist, camera, world.”

“Light is life.”

“I do this because the need to create is woven into the fabric of who I am. I have expressed myself artistically in some form or another since I was five. Today, with computers and digital technology available, I feel like a kid with their first box of crayons and a freshly painted wall. The combinations of what I can create seem endless.”

“As the tragedy unfolded over the span of 18 minutes that separated the two crashes, and over the following 47 minutes before the first tower collapsed, who knows how many scores of cameras--professional and amateur alike--were trained on the unbelievable sight? Relative to our technologically sophisticated world of instant communications, the terrorist assault took an eternity. Untold numbers of images were made while millions of television viewers watched in real time. Dozens of first-rate photographs of exactly the same subject were published almost simultaneously.”

“All of a sudden there were people screaming. I saw people jumping out of the building. Their arms were flailing. I stopped taking pictures and started crying.”

“My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera’s eye may entirely change my idea.”

“There were dozens of lakes, many of them not on the map. For identification purposes we gave them names. The bright sparkling lakes we named after people we admired… to the swampy ones, all messed up with moose tracks, we gave the names of the critics who disparaged us.”

“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.”

“Pictures of roads can be great metaphors for life’s journey. We don’t remember where it started. We can’t see where it ends. We can only look and enjoy what is around us.”

“It’s just seeing - at least the photography I care about. You either see, or you don’t see. The rest is academic. Anyone can learn how to develop. It’s how you organize what you see into a picture.”

“Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance. Always, I am on the threshold.”

“Anything more than 500 yards from the car just isn’t photogenic.”

“I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important. If they are art objects at the same time, that’s fine with me.”

“Negatives are the notebooks, the jottings, the false starts, the whims, the poor drafts, and the good draft but never the completed version of the work. The completed version, a print, should be sufficient and fair return for a magazine’s investment, for it is the means of fulfilling the magazine’s purpose. The print and a proper one is the only completed photograph, whether it is specifically shaded for reproduction, or for a museum wall. Negatives are private, as is my bedroom.”

“It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.”

“I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do -- that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.”

“The camera is an instrument of detection. We photograph not only what we know, but what we don’t know.”

“Some pictures are tentative forays without your even knowing it. They become methods. It’s important to take bad pictures. It’s the bad ones that have to do with what you’ve never done before. They can make you recognize something you hadn’t seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again.”

“The professional, however, has all his energies directed to make things pay. He has too much at stake to speculate. He chooses the safest way. He is the true conservative, and when he gets hold of anything that works passable well, changes with reluctance. If an amateur experiments with a new toning bath on a batch of perhaps half-a-dozen prints, and fails, well the loss is not great, and he gains in knowledge and experience. But the professional has his batch of perhaps six hundred, and if he fail, the loss is something considerable...”

“The advance of photography is something like the progress of an army. The main body keeps in safe marching order, while the more daring and adventurous are the pioneers who lead the army - rushing here, feeling their way there; always skirmishing, often retiring, but eventually succeeding in finding new tracks and safe paths for the main body to securely pass along.”

“Your photography is a record of your living - for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people’s ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzche meant when he said, ‘I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him.’ He knew how insidious other people’s ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own personal vision.”

“I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.”