Famous Quotes & Sayings

Elliott Erwitt

I don't think you can create luck. You're either lucky or you're not. I don't know if it's really luck or if it's just curiosity. I think the main ingredient, or a main ingredient for photography is curiosity. If you're curious enough and if you get up in the morning and go out and take pictures, you're likely to be more lucky than if you just stay at home.

Elliott Erwitt

The thing is that when you don't carry a camera, that's when you see pictures in particular, or at least that's when you think you see pictures in particular. When you do carry it, if you do see one on the occasion that you do, you can take it.

Elliott Erwitt

I don't like explosions. I don't mind progress. But digital photography has made every man, woman, child and chimpanzee a photographer of sorts and consequently has numbed down the general quality of photographs.

Elliott Erwitt

You don't study photography, you just do it.

Elliott Erwitt

You have to devote yourself totally to be successful at it.

Elliott Erwitt

The work I care about is terribly simple. I observe. I try to entertain. But above all I want my pictures to be emotional. Little else interests me in photography.

Elliott Erwitt

Balance of light is the problem, not the amount. Balance between shadows and highlights determines where the emphasis goes in the picture...make sure the major light in a picture falls at right angles to the camera.

Elliott Erwitt

Photography is pretty simple stuff. You just react to what you see, and take many, many pictures.

Elliott Erwitt

You don't study photography, you do it

Elliott Erwitt

Photography is an art of observation - it's about creating something extraordinary out of the ordinary. You choose a frame and then wait until the right time for something magical to come along and fill it.

Elliott Erwitt

Good photography is not about Zone Printing or any other Ansel Adams nonsense. It's just about seeing. You either see or you don't see. The rest is academic. Photography is simply a function of noticing things. Nothing more.

Elliott Erwitt

I like to think I keep my mind open. When I walk the streets I don't look for anything in particular. I come from a philosophy that believes you shouldn't have preconceived notions - that you don't need a gimmick. That you should just photograph what you react to - what you see.

Elliott Erwitt

Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times...I just shoot at what interests me at that moment.

Elliott Erwitt

All the technique in the world doesn't compensate for the inability to notice.

Elliott Erwitt

I like things that have to do with what is real, elegant, well presented and without excessive style. In other words, just fine observation.

Joel Sternfeld

Photography has always been capable of manipulation.

Joel Sternfeld

Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.

Joel Sternfeld

Photography has always been capable of manipulation. Even more subtle and more invidious is the fact that any time you put a frame to the world, it's an interpretation. I could get my camera and point it at two people and not point it at the homeless third person to the right of the frame, or not include the murder that's going on to the left of the frame. You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo. There's an infinite number of ways you can do this: photographs have always been authored.

Joel Sternfeld

No individual photo explains anything. That's what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium. It is the photographer's job to get this medium to say what you need it to say. Because photography has a certain verisimilitude, it has gained a currency as truthful - but photographs have always been convincing lies.

Lou Reed

I mean, there are peripheral things I do, I do photography, I write plays, I have books published, but that's neither here not there.

Lynsey Addario

I found that the camera was a comforting companion. It opened up new worlds, and gave me access to people's most intimate moments. I discovered the privilege of seeing life in all its complexity, the thrill of learning something new every day. When I was behind a camera, it was the only place in the world I wanted to be.

Lynsey Addario

People think photography is about photographing. To me, it’s about relationships.

John Fowles

When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies

Jonathan Lethem

A reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment. Everything in a novel is explicitly chosen, whereas some of what a film captures feels incidental, according to the vagaries of photography and sound recording.

Jon Snow

I don't know whether we think in moving images or whether we think in still images. I have a suspicion that on our hard drive, our series within our brains, [exist] still photographs of very important moments in our lives. ... That we think in terms of still images and that what the photography is doing is making direct contact with the human hard drive and recording for all time a sense of what happened.

John Dykstra

I had done a lot of rock 'n' roll photography when I was in college. I was one of many photographers who worked for The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and all of these rock 'n' roll bands.

John Dykstra

George Lucas wanted this moving camera for all of the photography in Star Wars. He was willing to take a risk with the concepts that I advanced with regard to ways for doing that.

John Berger

If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.

John Berger

Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.

John Berger

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.

John Berger

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.

John Berger

All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this - as in other ways - they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.

John Berger

Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer's decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.