Quotes on Photography

In my photography, I always lean towards the underprivileged because that's where I came from. When I went to the wars, I attempted to go and stand by those who were being trodden on. By that, I mean people like the Palestinians. When I go to India, I see really the poorest people, and I tend to be drawn to them.

Photography is the truth if it’s being handled by a truthful person.

The most important part of fashion photography, for me, is not the models; it's not the clothes. It's that you are responsible for defining what a woman today is. That, I think, is my job.

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.

Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should?

I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.

They ... asked me: 'How do you make your pictures?' I was puzzled ... I said, I don't know, it's not important.

There is no closed figure in nature. Every shape participates with another. No one thing is independent of another, and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape.

...it is seldom indeed that a composition which was poor when the picture was taken can be improved by reshaping it in the dark room.

What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values.

I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme.

My way of photographing is my way of life. I photograph from my experience, my way of seeing things.

There's an idea that it's hard to be a woman artist. People assume that women have fewer opportunities, less power. But it's not any harder to be a woman artist than to be a male artist. We all take what we are given and use the parts of ourselves that feed the work. We make our way. Photographers, men and women, are particularly lucky. Photography lets you find yourself. It is a passport to people and places and to possibilities.

As you get older, you have different tools, and you learn to use photography differently.

I think you reveal yourself by what you choose to photograph, but I prefer photographs that tell more about the subject. There's nothing much interesting to tell about me; what's interesting is the person I'm photographing, and that's what I try to show. [...] I think each photographer has a point of view and a way of looking at the world... that has to do with your subject matter and how you choose to present it. What's interesting is letting people tell you about themselves in the picture.

It is not merely the likeness which is precious... but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing... the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think - and it is not at all monstrous in me to say that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist's work ever produced.

When photographers get beyond copying the achievements of others, or just repeating their own accidental first successes, they learn that they do not know where in the world they will find pictures. Nobody does. Each photograph that works is a revelation to its supposed creator.

It's up to us as photographers to give voice to the natural world.

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.

Most photographers seem to operate with a pane of glass between themselves and their subjects. They just can't get inside and know the subject.