Quotes on Photography

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

The craft of photography is the key to good images.

A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.

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.

When subject matter is forced to fit into preconceived patterns, there can be no freshness of vision. Following rules of composition can only lead to a tedious repetition of pictorial cliches.

One thing that Life and I agreed right from the start was that one war photographer was enough for my family; I was to be a photographer of peace.

Well, I do think, particularly the way I work, the better images occur when you're moving to the fringes of your own understanding. That's where self-doubt and risk taking are likely to occur. It's when you trust what's happening at a non-intellectual non-conscious level that you can produce work that later resonates, often in a way that you can't articulate a response to.

The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope. This is not to say that he is unconcerned with the truth.

And if you can find out something about the laws of your own growth and vision as well as those of photography you may be able to relate the two, create an object that has a life of its own, which transcends craftsmanship. That is a long road, and because it must be your own road nobody can teach it to you or find it for you. There are no shortcuts, no rules.

Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities: geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together, as in the best work of people like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact - the affection for life.

...I felt that photography ought to start with and remain faithful to the appearance of the world, and in so doing record contradictions. The greatest pictures would then... find wholeness in the torn world.

As photographers, we live through things so swiftly. All our experience and training is focused toward snatching off the highlights... That all significant perfect moment, so essential to capture, is often highly perishable. There may be little opportunity to probe deeper.

I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing.

Arguments against photography ever being considered a fine art are: the element of chance which enters in, — finding things ready-made for a machine to record, and of course the mechanics of the medium. I say that chance enters into all branches of art.

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.

I hate good taste. It's the worst thing that can happen to a creative person.

I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us.

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.

Most of my photos are grounded in people, I look for the unguarded moment, the essential soul peeking out, experience etched on a persons face.

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.

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