Quotes on Cameras

I make the woman look at the camera as a symbol of all the eyes that will see the picture I am making.

In a jump, the subject, in a sudden burst of energy, overcomes gravity. He cannot simultaneously control his expressions, his facial and his limb muscles. The mask falls. The real self becomes visible. One only has to snap it with the camera.

What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.

The way someone who's being photographed presents himself to the camera, and the effect of the photographer's response on that presence, is what the making of a portrait is all about.

The photographer's most important and likewise most difficult task is not learning to manage his camera, or to develop, or to print. It is learning to see photographically — that is, learning to see his subject matter in terms of the capacities of his tools and processes, so that he can instantaneously translate the elements and values in a scene before him into the photograph he wants to make.

I had to get my camera to register things that were more important than how poor they were--their pride, their strength, their spirit.

One time a guy handed me a picture. He said, 'Here's a picture of me when I was younger.' Every picture is of you when you were younger. 'Here's a picture of me when I'm older.' 'You son of bit, how'd you pull that off Let me see that camera. What's it look like'

Either the camera will dance, or I will.

I hate crowds and making speeches. I hate facing cameras and having to answer to a crossfire of questions. Why popular fancy should seize upon me, a scientist, dealing in abstract things and happy if left alone, is a manifestation of mass psychology that is beyond me.

"Utter truth is essential, and that is what stirs me when I look through the camera."

Let the subject generate its own photographs. Become a camera.

"Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie: basically it is an honest medium: so the photographer is much more likely to approach nature in a spirit of inquiry, of communion, instead of with the saucy swagger of self-dubbed "artists"."

Very often people looking at my pictures say, 'You must have had to wait a long time to get that cloud just right (or that shadow, or the light).' As a matter of fact, I almost never wait, that is, unless I can see that the thing will be right in a few minutes. But if I must wait an hour for the shadow to move, or the light to change, or the cow to graze in the other direction, then I put up my camera and go on, knowing that I am likely to find three subjects just as good in the same hour.

There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart and head.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.

The important thing is not the camera but the eye.

My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.

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!

Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.

No matter how much you rehearse on that stage, once you add 30,000 screaming people with flashing cameras into the equation, it's pretty intense.