Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Fowles

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

James Nachtwey

Is it possible to put an end to a form of human behavior which has existed throughout history by means of photography? The proportions of that notion seem ridiculously out of balance. Yet, that very idea has motivated me.

James Nachtwey

The greatest statesmen, philosophers, humanitarians ... have not been able to put an end to war. Why place that demand on photography?

Edward Steichen

I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself...

Edward Weston

Photography, not soft gutless painting, is best equipped to bore into the spirit of today.

Edward Weston

For photography is a way to capture the moment - not just any moment, but the important one, this one moment out of all time when your subject is revealed to the fullest - that moment of perfection which comes once and is not repeated.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

I'm inviting the spirits into my photography. It's an act of God.

Heinrich Heine

Photography is a witness against the mistaken opinion that art is an imitation of nature.

Gustave Flaubert

DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)

John Loengard

The fact is that the camera is literal if anything, which gives it something in common with a thermometer... Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture's true beauty. There is sleight of hand in photography... you make the viewer think he's seeing everything while at the same time you make him realize he's not. I try to make my pictures seem reasonable and then, at the last minute, pull the rug from beneath the viewer's feet, very gently so there's a little thrill.

David LaChapelle

I was always painting when I was a kid. But then when I handled a camera when I was 17, that was it for me. I loved photography. I would work 4 or 5 hours a day. It was like a calling.

David LaChapelle

People say photographs don't lie, mine do.

David LaChapelle

I'm a photographer, period. I love photography, the immediacy of it. I like the craft, the idea of saying 'I'm a photographer.'

For the artist who practises photography, capturing the image is learning how to sketch on some medium, but is only half the challenge; learning how to print is applying a subjective pallet to that sketch, and completes the creative process.

David Hockney

There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don't mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops.

David Hockney

You had to be aware that I saw that photography was a mere episode in the history of the optical projection and when the chemicals ended, meaning the picture was fixed by chemicals, we were in a new era.

David Hockney

Photographs aren't accounts of scrutiny. The shutter is open for a fraction of a second.

David Hockney

The video camera dominates art. It's a bore, it makes everything look a bit the same. If you look at things with a pencil and paper in your hand, you are going to see far more.

David Hockney

The history of photography needs clearing out. It needs something else now. Because photography always acknowledged there were cameras before photography.

David Hockney

Modernism in a way, early modernism, for instance, in pictures, was turning against perspective and Europe . And all early modernism is actually from out of Europe, when you think of cubism is African, is looking at Africa, Matisse is looking at the arabesque, Oceania. Europe was the optical projection that had become photography, that had become film, that became television and it conquered the world.

David Hockney

I think photography has made us see the landscape in a very dull way - that's one of its effects. It's not spatial.

Arnold Newman

We do not make photographs with our cameras. We make them with our minds, with our hearts, with our ideas.

Arnold Newman

A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they'll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won't do a thing for you if you don't have anything in your head or in your heart.

Aaron Siskind

I was given a small camera as a wedding gift from a very dear friend. My first pictures were taken on my honeymoon. As soon as I became familiar with the camera, I was intrigued with the possibilities of expression it offered. It was like a discovery for me.

Charles Baudelaire

If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.

Bill Atkinson

Photography begins not in the camera but in the mind and the eye. The real work is one of noticing and appreciating, seeing things clearly and differently, and sharing that vision with others. I have developed my vision and my photographic craft in order to bring the beauty of nature to light in a fresh way that can inspire and nourish people.

Bill Wyman

I open events for museums and I do charity work and photography.

Dennis Hopper

Photography and painting, all of that fed into my directing eventually.

Edgar Degas

Daylight is too easy. What I want is difficult - the atmosphere of lamps and moonlight.

Edwin Land

Photography is unlike any other art form. In the other arts there is always a continuous interplay between the artist and his art. He has the painting or sculpture before him. What we have tried to do is to provide a medium for "artistic expression" to anyone with only a reasonable amount of time. By giving him a camera system with which he need only control his selection of focus, composition and lighting, we free him to select the moment and to criticize immediately what he has done. We enable him to see what else he wants to do on the basis of what he has just learned.

Edwin Land

Fifty years after we undertook to make the first synthetic polarizers we find them the essential layer in digital liquid-crystal. And thirty four years after we undertook to make the first instant camera and film, our kind of photography has become ubiquitous.

Berenice Abbott

I haven't seen too many images that have impressed me!

Berenice Abbott

I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph.