Quotes on Photograph

The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.

A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels...

If all your life means to you is water running over rocks, then photograph it, but I want to create something that would not have existed without me.

A photograph is not an accident - is a concept. It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative.

In a photograph, if I am able to evoke not alone a feeling of the reality of the surface physical world but also a feeling of the reality of existence that lies mysteriously and invisibly beneath its surface, I feel I have succeeded. At their best, photographs as symbols not only serve to help illuminate some of the darkness of the unknown, they also serve to lessen the fears that too often accompany the journeys from the known to the unknown.

A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.

It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.

To the vast majority of people a photograph is an image of something within their direct experience: a more-or-less factual reality. It is difficult for them to realize that the photograph can be the source of experience, as well as the reflection of spiritual awareness of the world and of self.

This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.

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

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.

While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.

Photography is the easiest thing in the world if one is willing to accept pictures that are flaccid, limp, bland, banal, indiscriminately informative, and pointless. But if one insists in a photograph that is both complex and vigorous it is almost impossible

If you want to photograph a man spinning, give some thought to why he spins. Understanding for a photographer is as important as the equipment he uses.

As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace.

The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each to himself. And that is the most complicated thing on earth.

I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.

When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it.

What difference does it make whether you're looking at a photograph or looking at a still life in front of you? You still have to look.

The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.