Photograph Quotes

Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it's not an art. The main thing about directing is: photograph the people's eyes.

Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don't get a photograph that I want to work from.

Why in the world would anyone want to photograph an old woman like me?

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

But I was, and still am, an avid reader and so when I first started I chose to photograph many of the great writers in this country to try and earn a living.

What I mean by photographing as a participant rather than observer is that I'm not only involved directly with some of the activities that I photograph, such as mountain climbing, but even when I'm not I have the philosophy that my mind and body are part of the natural world.

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

Well, it was kind of an accident, because plastic is not what I meant to invent. I had just sold photograph paper to Eastman Kodak for 1 million dollars.

They kept me in short pants as long as they could, until they were shaving the hair on my legs because it was beginning to photograph.

It's marvellous, marvellous! Nothing will ever be as much fun. I'm going to photograph everything, everything!

Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

I was invited to photograph Hollywood. They asked me what I would like to photograph. I said, Ugly men.

I made a photograph of a garden in Kyoto, the Zen garden, which is a rectangle. But a photograph taken from any one point will not show, well it shows a rectangle, but not with ninety degree angles.

It's very difficult to photograph an opera. And they messed up on it. It just wasn't there. And I don't blame the Gershwins for taking it away. Of course, if they had gotten the original company to have done it, it would have been very good.

In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.

Wherever there is light, one can photograph.

The photograph, the clothes, the sets - this was about 1974, and I started hanging out with my friend Richard Sold, who was playing in a band with Patti Smith.

The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.

The viewer must bring their own view to a photograph.

There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. I photograph to see what something will look like photographed.

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

I met Clinton at a benefit for teachers, which was a very good charity, but I met him for about 90 seconds, and I thought it was important to meet the leader of the free world. So I stood next to him for a photograph, and then apparently that's all it takes.

Has one hostage from Lebanon come back with a photograph of his abductors? Has any hostage ever come back with a photograph of his abductors smiling? I mean, this was so incredible!

Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.

Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.

I'll see a photograph of a character and try to copy them on to my face. I think I'm really observant, and thinking how a person is put together, seeing them on the street and noticing subtle things about them that make them who they are.

I don't photograph any two people who are remotely the same.

Everything is a subject. Every subject has a rhythm. To feel it is the raison detre. The photograph is a fixed moment of such a raison detre, which lives on in itself.

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