Photographer Quotes - Page 39

• We are entering into an age in which visual language is defined by a dialogue between photographers and audiences. This means not just the democratic posting of images but the democratic interpretation of images.

  Gilles Peress

  Mean, Age, Entering

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• We photographers say that we take a picture, and in a certain sense, that is true. We take something from people's lives, but in doing so we tell their story.

  Steve McCurry

  People, Stories, Certain

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• We know photographers make frames, but we deeply believe they can also create frameworks.

  Susan Meiselas

  Believe, Framework, Knows

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• I think that the photos that we like were made when the photographer knew how to disappear. If there were a secret, certainly that would be it.

  Edouard Boubat

  Thinking, Secret, Would Be

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• Nowadays, photographers start out with ideas, and their photos become the expression of an idea. To my way of thinking, a photo should not depend on ideas, should go beyond ideas.

  Edouard Boubat

  Thinking, Expression, Ideas

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• Sometimes I envy painters, it is wonderful to remain in front of a bouquet of flowers a whole morning, or even longer. A photographer is like a cloud, pushed all around, always dependent on the exterior world. That's what I sometimes feel as a pain and an error.

  Edouard Boubat

  Morning, Pain, Flower

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• Even a fellow with a camera has his favourite subjects, as we can see looking through the Kodak-albums of our friends. One amateur prefers the family group, another bathing scenes, another cows upon an alp, or kittens held upside down in the arms of a black-faced child. The tendency to choose one subject rather than another indicates the photographer's temperament. Nevertheless, his passion is for photography rather than for selection, a kitten will serve when no cows are available.

  E. M. Forster

  Photography, Children, Passion

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• There are photographers who push for war because they make stories. They search for a Chinese who has a more Chinese are than the others and they end up finding one. They have him take a typically Chinese pose and surround him with chinoiseries. What have they captured on their film? A Chinese? Definitely not: the idea of the Chinese.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  War, Ideas, Chinese

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• Photographers represented occasions once. You dressed for them as you might for church; they cost money, they recorded important moments.

  Michael Lesy

  Important, Church, Might

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• You are either born to be a photographer or not. The art of photography is not something you can learn in the classroom or by watching someone do it.

  Nobuyoshi Araki

  Photography, Art, Classroom

  Interview with Dr. Anthony Al-Jamie, www.tokyojournal.com. 2002.

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• I was living in Monterey, a place where the classic photographers - the Westons, Wynn Bullock and Ansel Adams - came for a privileged view of nature. But my daily life very rarely took me to Point Lobos or Yosemite; it took me to shopping centers, and gas stations and all the other unhealthy growth that flourished beside the highway. It was a landscape that no one else had much interest in looking at. Other than me.

  Lewis Baltz

  Views, Shopping, Growth

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• [My advice to a beginning photographer is] sit down with a pencil and paper and think about what your life is about. What you are about. Don't even take a camera into your hands before you figure that out.

  Tina Barney

  Thinking, Hands, Advice

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• If I came out a photographer it's because I knew about painting, composition, and the handling of light.

  Lola Alvarez Bravo

  Light, Painting, Composition

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• I think that a visual artist's philosophy develops much more freely than a writer's or a thinker's philosophy. It is not so disciplined. The photographer works with both his eyes and his mind.

  Manuel Alvarez Bravo

  Philosophy, Eye, Artist

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• In a sense, photographs are highly literary, and the photographer, like the writer, has to be both a master of craft and a visionary. Patient accumulation of facts and then speculation about their meaning is the nature of authorship in both mediums.

  Peter C Bunnell

  Visionaries, Crafts, Facts

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• It seems to be extensively believed by photographers that meanings are to be found in the world much in the way rabbits are found in downs, and all that is required is the talent to spot them and the skill to shoot them... But those moments of truth for which the photographic opportunist waits, finger on the button, are as great a mystification as the notion of autonomous creativity.

  Victor Burgin

  Creativity, Skills, Waiting

  Victor Burgin, Alexander Streitberger (2009). “Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin”, p.64, Leuven University Press

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• I met a photographer who agreed to give me a few lessons; in exchange, I had to pose naked for him.

  Sophie Calle

  Giving, Naked, Lessons

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• It was only with the emergence of the Conceptualist approaches of the late 1960s that the opposition between artists using photography and photographers became explicit.

  Jean-Francois Chevrier

  Photography, Artist, Late

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• As the possibilities for straightforward photography seem to have become exhausted it has been the photographers who know about the history of art, not simply the history of photography, who have shaped important directions for the future.

  Van Deren Coke

  Photography, Art, Important

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• What a photograph shows us is how a particular thing could be seen, or could be made to look - at a specific moment, in a specific context, by a specific photographer employing specific tools.

  A. D. Coleman

  Looks, Tools, Moments

  A. D. Coleman (1998). “Depth of field: essays on photography, mass media, and lens culture”, Univ of New Mexico Pr

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• Any photographer worth his/her salt - that is, any photographer of professional caliber, in control of the craft, regardless of imagistic bent - can make virtually anything look good. Which means, of course, that she or he can make virtually anything look bad - or look just about any way at all. After all, that is the real work of photography: making things look, deciding how a thing is to appear in the image.

  A. D. Coleman

  Photography, Real, Mean

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• The principal thing is the question of how our culture views age: that old is ugly. Take a photographer like Mapplethorpe. Every single photograph of his is about classical notions of beauty, of young beautiful black men, young beautiful women, and he selects subjects who are essentially interesting and good-looking and extremely physical. I can't stand them.

  John Coplans

  Beautiful, Men, Views

  John Coplans (2002). “A Body”, powerHouse Books

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• I'm a very, very basic photographer. The main strength of my pictures, I guess, is the mood and feel I get out of the people that I meet. But technically I don't think I'm very advanced. That never interested me.

  Anton Corbijn

  Thinking, People, Mood

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• We are not only a civilization of amateur photographers; we are amateur curators, editors, and publishers.

  Charlotte Cotton

  Civilization, Editors, Curator

  "Charlotte Cotton: Surveillance Revisited". Interview with Nicole Miller, www.guernicamag.com. June 15, 2016.

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• While primarily a photographer, I do not see or think photographically; hence the story of Indian life will not be told in microscopic detail, but rather will be presented as a broad and luminous picture.

  Edward S. Curtis

  Thinking, Stories, Details

  Edward S. Curtis (2015). “The Apache, The Jicarillas, The Navajo”, p.15, Native American Book Publishers, LLC

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