Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jean Renoir

All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object.

Jean-Luc Godard

The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?

Jean-Luc Godard

Photography could have been invented in color. Colors existed.

Jean-Luc Godard

When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it.

George Bernard Shaw

I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot.

George Bernard Shaw

There is a terrible truthfulness about photography that sometimes makes a thing look ridiculous.

George Bernard Shaw

What, or who, led you to take up photography, and about what date ? George Bernard Shaw – I always wanted to draw and paint. I had no literary ambition. I aspired to be a Michelangelo, not a Shakespeare. But I could not draw well enough to satisfy myself; and the instruction I could get was worse than useless. So when dry plates and push buttons came into the market I bought a box camera and began pushing the button. It was in 1898.

George Bernard Shaw

The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.

George Bernard Shaw

A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.

Galen Rowell

My first thought is always of light.

Galen Rowell

I think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued.

Galen Rowell

My interest in photography did not begin with books or mentors, or with any burning desire to see the world through a camera. It evolved from an intense devotion to mountains and wilderness that eventually shaped all the parts of my life and brought them together.

Galen Rowell

When the light is right and everything is working for me, I feel as tense as when making a difficult maneuver high on a mountain. A minute - and sometimes mere seconds - can make the difference between a superb image and a mundane one.

Galen Rowell

There is no question that photography has played a major role in the environmental movement.

Galen Rowell

Often when I walked alone in the mountains, I tried to make sense out of the two halves of my life. What went on in the city during the week seemed chaotic and unrelated to the events in my mountain world.

Galen Rowell

A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy.

Galen Rowell

Memory selects single important images, just as the camera does. In that manner both are able to isolate the highest moments of living.

Galen Rowell

Ever since the 1860s when photographers travelled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment.

Galen Rowell

I almost never set out to photograph a landscape, nor do I think of my camera as a means of recording a mountain or an animal unless I absolutely need a 'record shot'. My first thought is always of light.

Galen Rowell

One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it...If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only too make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better.

Galen Rowell

I find it some of the hardest photography and the most challenging photography I've ever done. It's a real challenge to work with the natural features and the natural light.

Galen Rowell

I began to realize that the camera sees the world differently than the human eye and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.

Galen Rowell

At the heart of all photography is an urge to express our deepest personal feelings - to reveal our inner, hidden selves, to unlock the artist. Those of us who become photographers are never satisfied with just looking at someone else's expression of something that is dear to us. We must produce our own images, instead of buying postcards and photo books. We seek to make our own statements of individuality.

Franz Kafka

Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.

Erica Jong

The camera creates a magical transformation. It's not enough to exist; we must chronicle that existence. ... Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don't feel any experience is complete unless it's recorded.

Eric Clapton

And I don't like having my picture taken. I'm almost like an old African in that sense. I think it steals a bit of the soul.

Jason Sudeikis

Now Ben Folds is my photography older brother. He was kind enough to give me a photo of his for my 40th birthday.

Jason Sudeikis

One of my oldest friends from Kansas, his sister was married to Ben [Folds] and wrote lyrics on his first couple of albums. I got to meet him the first time I saw them in concert at The Bottleneck, a great bar in Lawrence, Kansas. Then, he was the musical guest my first or second week as a writer on SNL. I was like, "I don't know if you remember me?" And he was like, "Oh my god, yeah!" He's a big photography fan, as am I.

Hanneli Mustaparta

I have always found photography magical, and became more taken with it whilst modeling.

Greg Gorman

For me a photograph is most successful when it doesn't answer all the questions and it leaves something to be desired.

Graeme Le Saux

What it all boils down to for me is having the enthusiasm to do something for enjoyment and being stimulated by what's around you. That's what photography does for me.

Graeme Le Saux

When you live by the sea, there are definite seasons when you can see the weather coming and going, which lends itself to photography.

Graeme Le Saux

My wife Mariana is a good photographer too and, like me, she just picks up a camera and takes a picture when she sees something, rather than looking too deeply into it.