I realized eventually that if I was really on top of what I was doing, I should be able to make photographs out of almost anything.
The photograph is always more interesting than what the photograph is of.
One of the magical things about photography is the transformation that takes place when you photograph something. Something that inherently has very little going for it in terms of the interest you take in it, can become infinitely more interesting when rendered as a photograph. It's no longer a building. It's a photograph.
My first reaction to finding Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in a book was, Wow, what a great photograph! I could not believe that someone had gone to so much trouble just to end up with a picture.
Whenever I am tired of making photographs of drawings, I make drawings of photographs.
Perhaps the first photograph ever taken, Niépce's view of the rooftops over Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, was a truly pure photograph. The second one he took, he was already comparing nature to the first photograph he had taken.
Never pose your subjects. Let them move about naturally... All great photographs today are snapshots.
Sometimes, photographs live in our hearts as unborn ghosts and we survive not because their shadows find permanence there, but because that thing that is larger than us, larger than the things we can point to, remember and claim, escorts us from dark into light.
When we were kids, growing up in the sixties, the only images we had of ourselves were either still photographs or 8mm movies.... Now we have video, digital cameras, MP3s, and a million other ways to document ourselves. But the still photograph continues to hold a sense of mystery and awe to me.
Language is a very complicated thing, and that's one of the reasons why I like making photographs.
I do photograph things for people to look at 100 years from now. But we're such a mediated society that things become historical the next day.
You can't understand how strange it was to be a sculptor who exhibited photographs. (On exhibitions of his earthworks and land art pieces.)
[The photographs] were there simply to indicate a radical art that had already vanished. The photograph was necessary only as a residue for communication.
The photograph gives constant reference to the rectangle. This forces any idea into the confines of pictorial illusionism.
My mother said that when I was young I was constantly saying, Look at this - Look at that. I think that taking pictures must be my way of asking people to Look at this - Look at that. If my photographs make the viewer feel what I did when I first took them - Isn't this funny... terrible... moving... beautiful? - then I've accomplished my purpose.
My photographs are not just about the instant of movement you capture in the camera. It's much more total, about constant movement that became static.
[A photograph] should do something to the beholder; either give a more complete appreciation of beauty, or, if nothing else, even a good mental kick in the pants.
Photographs are but one link in a potentially endless chain of reduplication; themselves duplicates (of both their objects and, in a sense, their negatives), they are also subject to further duplication, either through the procedures of printing or as objects of still other photographs.
I set a discipline for myself to return every afternoon and take photographs like Edward Weston: f22, full sun, big set squares, big circles. I would smoke a joint with some hippies on the grass, then go do some more pictures.
[The photograph] is fabricated out of the unfabricated dross of passing life (while paradoxically still trading on the indexical heft of that dross).
By being fictions and, at the same moment, returning their subjects to us with a compelling fidelity, both photographs and poems work with the same surprise... both strike us as if they were simultaneously remembrances and revelations.
Ansel [Adams] always jumped over the fence to photograph, walked past the garbage. He always looked to get an immaculate view, and I spent my life stepping back to include the garbage in my photographic view.
You have to bring to the photograph a prejudice about something, and I'm prejudiced against farmers who tie dead animals on fences. Therefore, I can make a meaningful photograph.
So many people are diverted to doing what people want photographed - fashion models, buildings, mountains - they get to thinking those photographs are good.
I have an abiding faith in the fact that time will change the value of photographs. What you see today may be so familiar to everyone that they don't immediately appreciate or value it.
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