Famous Quotes & Sayings

Mary Ellen Mark

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.

Mary Ellen Mark

I'm not against digital photography. It's great for newspapers. And there are photographers doing great work digitally. When they use Photoshop as a darkroom tool, that's fine, too. But at this point of my life, after so many years, I don't really want to change, and I still love film.

Mary Ellen Mark

Nowadays shots are created in post-production, on computers. It's not really photography.

Mary Ellen Mark

If you are interested in photography because you love it and are obsessed with it, you must be self-motivated, a perfectionist, and relentless.

Mary Ellen Mark

The difficulty with color is to go beyond the fact that it's color ? to have it be not just a colorful picture but really be a picture about something. It's difficult. So often color gets caught up in color, and it becomes merly decorative. Some photographers use it brilliantly to make visual statements combining color and content; otherwise it is empty.

Mary Ellen Mark

Photograph the world as it is. Nothing's more interesting than reality.

Mary Ellen Mark

I just think it's important to be direct and honest with people about why you're photographing them and what you're doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul.

Martin Parr

I accept that all photography is voyeuristic and exploitative, and obviously I live with my own guilt and conscience. It's part of the test and I don't have a problem with it.

Martin Parr

Photography's central role is to be the absolute medium of the day. It is fantastic that there is no longer any technical intimidation.

Martin Parr

I do read many of the photography magazines from the U.K. and abroad.

Martin Parr

Color was the palette of commercial photography and snapshot photography.

Martin Parr

Everyone is a photographer now, remember. That's the great thing about photography.

Martin Parr

The knack is to find your own inspiration and take it on a journey to create work that is personal and revealing.

Martin Parr

Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate. Most of the photographs in your paper, unless they are hard news, are lies. Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality... Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.

Martin Parr

We are drowning in images. Photography is used as a propaganda tool, which serves to sell products and ideas. I use the same approach to show aspects of reality.

Martin Parr

Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate, and that is an aspect that I have to puncture. I do that by showing the world as I really find it.

Martin Parr

There are two parts to the process: taking the picture and finding ways of using it.

Martin Parr

For those aspiring to make a living from travel photography, it's a sad fact that the boring shots are the shots that are going to make you money.

Martin Parr

With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society's natural prejudice and giving this a twist.

Martin Parr

Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.

Martin Parr

All photography is propaganda.

Martin Scorsese

[David Lean's] images stay with me forever. But what makes them memorable isn't necessarily their beauty. That's just good photography. It's the emotion behind those images that's meant the most to me over the years. It's the way David Lean can put feeling on film. The way he shows a whole landscape of the spirit. For me, that's the real geography of David Lean country. And that's why, in a David Lean movie, there's no such thing as an empty landscape.

Martin Scorsese

Orson Welles was a force of nature, who just came in and wiped the slate clean. And Citizen Kane is the greatest risk-taking of all time in film. I don’t think anything had even seen anything quite like it. The photography was also unlike anything we’d seen. The odd coldness of the filmmaker towards the character reflects his own egomania and power, and yet a powerful empathy for all of them--it’s very interesting. It still holds up, and it’s still shocking. It takes storytelling and throws it up in the air.

Martin Scorsese

There are movies that change the whole way in which films are made, like Klute, where Gordon Willis’s photography on the film is so textured, and, they said, too dark. At first this was alarming to people, because they’re used to a certain way things are done within the studio system. And the studio is selling a product, so they were wary of people thinking that it’s too dark.

Lisa Kristine

One advantage of photography is that it's visual and can transcend language.

John Updike

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

John Updike

Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.

John Szarkowski

Photography was not invented to serve a clearly understood function. There was in fact widespread uncertainty, even among its inventors, as to what it might be good for.

John Szarkowski

Photography's central sense of purpose and aesthetic: the precise and lucid description of significant fact.

John Szarkowski

What's happening is that people are making a billion photographs a year of their cats, frequently with the cats wearing costumes. Do you think I should be doing shows of cat photography?

John Szarkowski

The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it.

John Szarkowski

Most of Tina Modotti's work that is known to the photography world was done in Mexico in the years 1923 through 1926, when she lived and worked with Edward Weston.

John Szarkowski

Photography is choosing where to point your eye-cone.