Quotes on Photography

Photography is a brief complicity between foresight and luck.

My passport photo is one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever seen- no retouching, no shadows, no flattery-just stark me.

The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

There are moments that you suffer a lot, moments you won't photograph. There are some people you like better than others. But you give, you receive, you cherish, you are there. When you are really there, you know when you see the picture later what you are seeing.

You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.

With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society's natural prejudice and giving this a twist.

Making pictures is a very simple act. There is no great secret in photography...schools are a bunch of crap. You just need practice and application of what you've learned. My absolute conviction is that if you are working reasonably well the only important thing is to keep shooting...it doesn't matter whether you are making money or not. Keep working, because as you go through the process of working things begin to happen.

A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of mother or father taken many years ago. You see them as you remember them. But as people live on, they change completely. That is why I think a photograph can be kind.

My photographs are proof of what happened. When I go to Russia, sometimes I meet ex-soldiers... They say, 'We came to liberate you....' I say: 'Listen, I think it was quite different. I saw people being killed.' They say: 'No. We never... no shooting. No. No.' So I can show them my Prague 1968 photographs and say, 'Listen, these are my pictures. I was there.' And they have to believe me.

I am fooling only myself when I say that my mother exists now only in the photographs on my bulletin board or in the outline of my hand or in the armful of memories I still hold tight. She lives on beneath everything I do. Her presence influenced who I was and her absence influences who I am. Our lives are shaped as much by those who leave us as they are by those who stay. Loss is our legacy. Insight is our gift. Memory is our guide.

Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?'

For me, the creation of a photograph is experienced as a heightened emotional response, most akin to poetry and music, each image the culmination of a compelling impulse I cannot deny. Whether working with a human figure or a still life, I am deeply aware of my spiritual connection with it. In my life, as in my work, I am motivated by a great yearning for balance and harmony beyond the realm of human experience, reaching for the essence of oneness with the Universe.

I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated.

I'm not by nature a terribly intuitive person; I need to build a situation in which I will behave more intuitively, and that has really changed the life of my work - I found a way to trick myself into being intuitive.

Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.

So many times I've photographed stories that show the degradation of the planet. I had one idea to go and photograph the factories that were polluting, and to see all the deposits of garbage. But, in the end, I thought the only way to give us an incentive, to bring hope, is to show the pictures of the pristine planet - to see the innocence.

The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.

I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.

Then I thought, Whoa. If there are no photographs, then there is no history. I'm going to get in there. I'm going to make these pictures. We need a record.

The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?

The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer's understanding of his subject and mastery of his process.