Famous Quotes & Sayings

Richard Avedon

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is...the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.

Richard Avedon

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks. He's implicated in what's happening, and he has a certain real power over the result.

Richard Avedon

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Umberto Eco

If photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a natural process but because the latter is also coded.

Robert Capa

It's not always easy to stand aside and be unable to do anything except record the sufferings around one.

Robert Capa

I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life.

Robert Capa

The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda.

Robert Capa

If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough.

Robert Capa

The pictures are there, and you just take them.

Vincent Laforet

Stay open to as many new tools and think of as many ways you can to utilize them to your advantage. This not only includes equipment and hardware but also software or apps like Sun Seeker and social media outlets like Instagram and Twitter to build community.

Weegee

News photography teaches you to think fast.

Weegee

What I did, anybody can do.

I'm not particularly invested in, nor do I really care about, photography in a general sense. It's a medium that's relatively ubiquitous, readily accessible, and that I have some facility with, so it makes sense for me to use it.

Walker Evans

... nature photographs downright bore me for some reason or other. I think: 'Oh, yes. Look at that sand dune. What of it?'

Walker Evans

Color tends to corrupt photography and absolute color corrupts it absolutely. Consider the way color film usually renders blue sky, green foliage, lipstick red, and the kiddies' playsuit. These are four simple words which must be whispered: color photography is vulgar.

Walker Evans

When you say documentary, you have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. It should be documentary style, because documentary is police photography of a scene and a murder ... that's a real document. You see, art is really useless, and a document has use. And therefore, art is never a document, but it can adopt that style. I do it. I'm called a documentary photographer. But that presupposes a quite subtle knowledge of this distinction.

Walker Evans

It's too presumptuous and naïve to think you can change society by a photograph or anything else... I equate that with propaganda; I think that's a lower rank of purpose.

Walker Evans

I never took it upon myself to change the world. And those contemporaries of mine who were going around falling for the idea that they were going to bring down the United States government and make a new world were just asses to me.

Walker Evans

I do note that photography, a despised medium to work in, is full of empty phonies and worthless commercial people. That presents quite a challenge to the man who can take delight in being in a very difficult, disdained medium.

Walker Evans

I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.

Walker Evans

It's easy to photograph light reflecting from a surface, the truly hard part is capturing the light in the air.

Walker Evans

I work rather blindly. I have a theory that seems to work with me that some of the best things you ever do sort of come through you. You don't know where you get the impetus and response to what's before your eyes.

Walker Evans

The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative. By their fewness, and by the importance of the reader’s eye, this will be misunderstood by most of that minority which does not wholly ignore it. In the interests, however, of the history and future of photography, that risk seems irrelevant, and this flat statement necessary.

Walker Evans

The eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

Walker Evans

Good photography is unpretentious.

Walker Evans

The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.

Walker Evans

With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don't think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.

Sally Schneider

I realized I didn't want to be a photographer. I gave it up, but I still worked that job in the restaurant and I found myself constantly hanging out in the kitchen.

Salman Rushdie

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.

Tyson Chandler

I really enjoy the iPad because you can multi-task: I can watch a movie, read, look at pictures that I shot - because I'm into photography. It serves a lot of purposes for me.

Robertson Davies

Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.

Robert Mapplethorpe

People don't have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography.

Robert Mapplethorpe

I never liked photography. Not for the sake of photography. I like the object. I like the photographs when you hold them in your hand.