Quotes on Photography

I'm a photographer, period. I love photography, the immediacy of it. I like the craft, the idea of saying 'I'm a photographer.'

Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment.

To see something spectacular and recognise it as a photographic possibility is not making a very big leap. But to see something ordinary, something you’d see every day, and recognize it as a photographic possibility - that is what I am interested in.

When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears.

George Lazenby is no one's favorite James Bond, but for me the anonymity at the center of this lavish production only serves to reveal the Bond machine firing on all cylinders: superb editing and photography, incredible score, great setpieces. The most romantic in the series, and it actually has, of all things, a tragic ending.

What, or who, led you to take up photography, and about what date ?_x000D_ George Bernard Shaw – I always wanted to draw and paint. I had no literary ambition. I aspired to be a Michelangelo, not a Shakespeare. But I could not draw well enough to satisfy myself; and the instruction I could get was worse than useless. So when dry plates and push buttons came into the market I bought a box camera and began pushing the button. It was in 1898.

There's no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class. I'm always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don't give a damn how it got made.

Images of people, cities, and landscapes from the air tell a unique story about our personal space and how we relate to one another. I've always aimed to address the bigger picture and later trends. In many ways, what a photographer does is give others a chance to step back and look at their world and gain perspective on where we stand, and what that means.

I was going to go to a four-year college and be an anthropologist or to an art school and be an illustrator when a friend convinced me to learn photography at the University of Southern California. Little did I know it was a school that taught you how to make movies! It had never occurred to me that I'd ever have any interest in filmmaking.

Never boss people around. It's more important to click with people than to click the shutter.

The essential things in life are seen, not with the eyes but with the heart.

Kodak sells film, but they don't advertise film; they advertise memories.

I like to think of photographing as a two-way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject, by describing it as it is. A photograph must be responsible to both.

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.

Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.

It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.

I began drawing as a very young child and had a grandfather who experimented with photography, so those things constituted my first exposure to art.

Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.

Photography is a very lonely medium. There’s a kind of beautiful loneliness in voyeurism. And that’s why I’m a photographer.

I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heat of the known awaits just around the corner.

Today's photographers think differently. Many can't see real light anymore. They think only in terms of strobe - sure, it all looks beautiful but it's not really seeing. If you have the eyes to see it, the nuances of light are already there on the subject's face. If your thinking is confined to strobe light sources, your palette becomes very mean - which is the reason I photograph only in available light.