Famous Quotes & Sayings

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

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.

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

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.

Lucas Grabeel

I hope to be a producer, a musician, a painter, a photographer - I'm going to push myself to do as many things as I can and see where it goes.

Louis Aragon

Photography intervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets, gates, squares of the city into illustrations of a trashy novel, draws off the banal obviousness of this ancient architecture to inject it with the most pristine intensity...

Lori Greiner

In the beginning I was really, really lean. For the longest time I did it all. I played every hat. I was in the factory, doing the graphic design, the photography, the selling - literally everything. I saved money doing what I could myself. It was hard but I learned. I learned that nobody's better than you to get your business off the ground. The experience you get is priceless.

Mahatma Gandhi

I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

Joe Manganiello

I don’t think there’s any such thing as male objectification

James Nachtwey

I want my pictures to cut through political abstractions... and make a connection on a human level.

James Nachtwey

Photography can be perceived as the opposite of war.

James Nachtwey

I began after college, about 1972. I began to teach myself photography. I went to work for a local newspaper for four years as a kind of basic training.

James Nachtwey

I want to record history through the destiny of individuals who often belong to the least wealthy classes. I do not want to show war in general, nor history with a capital H, but rather the tragedy of a single man, of a family.

James Nachtwey

Photojournalists know the horrors of war can only be exposed at close range. Kodak Film.

James Nachtwey

Many people in this world do jobs that are dangerous and where their life is at risk and they feel that there is some kind of value to their job I guess that's how I feel about what I do. There is a social function to documentary photography that is very important and it requires people to take risks.

James Nachtwey

[Photography] puts a human face on issues which, from afar, can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact.

James Nachtwey

But everyone cannot be there, and that is why photographers go there - to show them, to reach out and grab them and make them stop what they are doing and pay attention to what is going on - to create pictures powerful enough to overcome the diluting effects of the mass media and shake people out of their indifference - to protest and by the strength of that protest to make others protest.

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

When the truth is spoken, it doesn't need to be adorned. It just needs to be simply stated, and often it only needs to be said once.

James Nachtwey

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