Famous Quotes & Sayings

Sam Abell

Editorial photography has to be energetic and visually competitive.

Sam Abell

And that desire-the strong desire to take pictures-is important. It borders on a need, based on a habit: the habit of seeing. Whether working or not, photographers are looking, seeing, and thinking about what they see, a habit that is both a pleasure and a problem, for we seldom capture in a single photograph the full expression of what we see and feel. It is the hope that we might express ourselves fully-and the evidence that other photographers have done so-that keep us taking pictures.

Sam Abell

A mad, keen photographer needs to get out into the world and work and make mistakes.

Sam Abell

Photographs that transcend but do not deny their literal situation appeal to me.

Sam Abell

Above all, it's hard learning to live with vivid mental images of scenes I cared for and failed to photograph. It is the edgy existence within me of these unmade images that is the only assurance that the best photographs are yet to be made.

Sam Abell

How the visual world appears is important to me. I'm always aware of the light. I'm always aware of what I would call the 'deep composition.' Photography in the field is a process of creation, of thought and technique. But ultimately, it's an act of imaginatively seeing from within yourself.

Sam Abell

Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.

Sam Abell

It matters little how much equipment we use; it matters much that we be masters of all we do use.

Sam Abell

My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it.

Ronald Reagan

I like photographers-you don't ask questions.

William Eggleston

My friend who I went to boarding school with was interested in photography. He insisted that I buy a camera and marched me downtown.

William Eggleston

Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me.

William Eggleston

I had the attitude that I would work with this present-day material and do the best I could to describe it with photography, not intending to make any particular comment about whether it was good or bad or whether I liked it or not. It was just there, and I was interested in it. That's what I still do today.

William Eggleston

We have a few things in common - smoking, drinking, and women. Photography just gets us out of the house. (To photographer Juergen Teller)

William Eggleston

I am at war with the obvious.

William Eggleston

Often people ask what I'm photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best what I've come up with is I just say: Life today.

Yann Arthus-Bertrand

The lions taught me photography. They taught me patience and the sense of beauty, a beauty that penetrates you.

Yann Arthus-Bertrand

The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness.

Wynn Bullock

A person is quite different from a tree or rock or stream. By introducing the nude into my pictures, I started perceiving all the things I was photographing in new ways. In contrast or opposition to each other, things became much more significant and interesting, revealing many more qualities than I had ever dreamed of knowing and expressing. By using the nude, I stopped thinking in terms of objects. I was seeing things, instead, as dynamic events, unique in their own beings yet also related and existing together within a universal context of energy and change.

Wynn Bullock

As sounds in a musical composition can be used not to express physical objects but ideas, emotions, harmonies, rhythmic orders and most any expression of the human mind and spirit, so light can be used visually to express the mind and spirit.

Wynn Bullock

For me photography has been a profession, an avocation. Now it has become a way of life.

Wynn Bullock

I love the medium of photography, for with its unique realism it gives me the power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say, This is real, too.

Wynn Bullock

As I became aware that all things have unique spatial and temporal qualities which visually define and relate them, I began to perceive the things I was photographing not as objects but as events. Working to develop my skills of perceiving and symbolizing these event qualities, I discovered the principle of opposites. When, for example, I photographed the smooth, luminous body of a woman behind a dirty cobwebbed window, I found that the qualities of each event were enhanced and the universal forces which they manifested were more powerfully evoked.

Wynn Bullock

I feel all things as dynamic events, being, changing, and interacting with each other in space and time even as I photograph them.

Wynn Bullock

Mysteries lie all around us, even in the most familiar things, waiting only to be perceived.

Wynn Bullock

The urge to create, the urge to photograph, comes in part from the deep desire to live with more integrity, to live more in peace with the world, and possibly to help others to do the same.

Wynn Bullock

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

Wynn Bullock

Searching is everything - going beyond what you know. And the test of the search is really in the things themselves, the things you seek to understand. What is important is not what you think about them, but how they enlarge you.

Marcel Proust

A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.

Kenneth Clark

Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it.

Jonathan Nolan

I'm a big believer in practical and location photography.

Jake Gyllenhaal

At Columbia there's no performing arts department, so I was searching for it everywhere I could, and I took some photography classes and I ended up becoming fascinated with Eastern Religion, and ultimately it seemed to encompass the more abstract mind that I have.

Jacques-Henri Lartigue

Photography and writing are marvelous distractions from painting. I might even have found movies more interesting than photography. I tried it a bit, but not enough.