Quotes about photographer

“I can better understand the inert blindness & defiant ignorance of the reactionaries from having been one of them. I know how smugly ignorant I was—wrapped up in the arts, the natural (not social) sciences, the externals of history & antiquarianism, the abstract academic phases of philosophy, & so on—all the one-sided standard lore to which, according to the traditions of the dying order, a liberal education was limited. God! the things that were left out—the inside facts of history, the rational interpretation of periodic social crises, the foundations of economics & sociology, the actual state of the world today … & above all, the habit of applying disinterested reason to problems hitherto approached only with traditional genuflections, flag-waving, & callous shoulder-shrugs! All this comes up with humiliating force through an incident of a few days ago—when young Conover, having established contact with Henneberger, the ex-owner of WT, obtained from the latter a long epistle which I wrote Edwin Baird on Feby. 3, 1924, in response to a request for biographical & personal data. Little Willis asked permission to publish the text in his combined SFC-Fantasy, & I began looking the thing over to see what it was like—for I had not the least recollection of ever having penned it. Well …. I managed to get through, after about 10 closely typed pages of egotistical reminiscences & showing-off & expressions of opinion about mankind & the universe. I did not faint—but I looked around for a 1924 photograph of myself to burn, spit on, or stick pins in! Holy Hades—was I that much of a dub at 33 … only 13 years ago? There was no getting out of it—I really had thrown all that haughty, complacent, snobbish, self-centred, intolerant bull, & at a mature age when anybody but a perfect damned fool would have known better! That earlier illness had kept me in seclusion, limited my knowledge of the world, & given me something of the fatuous effusiveness of a belated adolescent when I finally was able to get around more in 1920, is hardly much of an excuse. Well—there was nothing to be done … except to rush a note back to Conover & tell him I'd dismember him & run the fragments through a sausage-grinder if he ever thought of printing such a thing! The only consolation lay in the reflection that I had matured a bit since '24. It's hard to have done all one's growing up since 33—but that's a damn sight better than not growing up at all.”

“While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.”

“What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”

“To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.”

“One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.”

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”

“Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment.”

“You don't take a photograph, you make it.”

“What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.”

“A photograph is usually looked at- seldom looked into.”

“I had an incident with a really dumb magazine called Voici where they printed a photograph of Lily-Rose, a long-lens shot from very far away, and I just went ballistic. You can sue them — I've sued a couple of times, Vanessa's sued and we win every time — but this time I was beyond suing. I just wanted to beat whoever was responsible into the earth — I just wanted to rip him apart.So I tracked him down and gave him a few suggestions about how to live life and stay healthy and he took my advice. Because that's just unacceptable. They can do anything they want to me — and most tabloids have — but not my kid, not my pure, innocent little baby. She didn't ask to be in this circus.”

“I didn’t try to communicate any kind of philosophy since I am not a philosopher. I am a photographer. That’s it.”

“Everyone has a photographic Memory, some just don't have film.”

“All colors made me happy: even gray.
My eyes were such that literally they
Took photographs.”

“A photograph it a souvenir of a memory.
It is not a moment.
It is the looking at the photograph that becomes the moment. Your own moment.”

“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”

“Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?”

“You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”

“I mean, it's very subtle and a little embarrassing to me, but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.”

“One of my favorite album covers is On the Beach. Of course that was the name of a movie and I stole it for my record, but that doesn't matter. The idea for that cover came like a bolt from the blue. Gary and I traveled around getting all the pieces to put it together. We went to a junkyard in Santa Ana to get the tail fin and fender from a 1959 Cadillac, complete with taillights, and watched them cut it off a Cadillac for us, then we went to a patio supply place to get the umbrella and table. We picke up the bad polyester yellow jacket and white pants at a sleazy men's shop, where we watched a shoplifter getting caught red-handed and busted. Gary and I were stoned on some dynamite weed and stood there dumbfounded watching the bust unfold. This girl was screaming and kicking! Finally we grabbed a local LA paper to use as a prop. It had this amazing headline: Sen. Buckley Calls For Nixon to Resign. Next we took the palm tree I had taken around the world on the Tonight's the Night tour. We then placed all of these pieces carefully in the sand at Santa Monica beach. Then we shot it. Bob Seidemann was the photographer, the same one who took the famous Blind Faith cover shot of the naked young girl holding the airplane. We used the crazy pattern from the umbrella insides for the inside of the sleeve that held the vinyl recording. That was the creative process at work. We lived for that, Gary and I, and we still do.”

“I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.”

“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.”

“The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.”

“This is a photograph of me as I wish I looked all the time. Then I might have a chance of getting in Hollywood.”

“I don't have a photograph. I'd give you my footprints, but they're upstairs in my socks.”

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

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

“When I make a photograph, I make love.”

“Kodachrome,
They give us those nice bright colours,
Give us the greens of summers,
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day,
Oh, yeah, I got a Nikon camera,
I love to take a photograph,
So Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away.”

“There are people who have made me see shapes — and others I thought of a great deal, even people I have loved, who make me see nothing. I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are.”

“But there is one very odd thing - to notice that basically a picture doesn't change, that the first 'vision' remains almost intact, in spite of appearances. I often ponder on a light and a dark when I have put them into a painting; I try hard to break them up by interpolating a color that will create a different effect. When the work is photographed, I note that what I put in to correct my first vision has disappeared, and that, after all, the photographic image corresponds with my first vision before the transformation I insisted on.”

“Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite”

“It would be very curious to record by means of photographs, not the stage of the picture, but its metamorphoses. Perhaps one would perceive the path taken by the mind in order to put its dreams into a concrete form. But what is really very curious is to observe that fundamentally the picture does not change, that despite appearances the initial vision remains almost intact”

“[…], old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it's not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him or herself in us, Who's that looking at me so sadly, he or she would say.”

“The modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world – in other words – expressing the energy, the motion and the other inner forces.... the modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.”

“The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous.
I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen. Being able to sit at home in the parsonage and your books would be very famous and occasionally you would correspond with the Prince of Wales's secretary.
You know I didn't think they'd rake through my bins, I didn't expect to be photographed on the beach through long lenses. I never dreamt it would impact my daughter's life negatively, which at times it has.”

“A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.”

“Your photograph is all I have: it is with me from the morning when I wake up with a frantic half dream about you to the last moment when I think of you and of death at night.”

“The photographer in my head says:
Give me peace.
Flash.
Give me release.
Flash.”

“Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.”

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”

“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality… One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.”

“She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.”

“In the photograph by my bed my mother is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again.”

“Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.”

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.”

“To me, these people were as exotic as animals in a zoo. I'd never seen anything like them. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be one of them or simply live among them taking notes and photographs.”

“He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph. Things should look right. Fun; there should be a lot of fun and no more sadness than absolutely necessary.”

“Do you know what the difference is between Friendship and Love? Friendship is the photograph, Love is the oil painting.”

“I was tanned, happy, and blowing a kiss to Cary, who’d playacted the role of a highfashion
photographer by calling out ridiculous encouragements.”

“Life is a movie; death is a photograph.”

“One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books. See how willingly Nature poses herself upon photographers' plates. No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as those of the human soul.”

“All we ever see of stars are their old photographs.”

“Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.

Photographs are.”

“When do I see a photograph, when a reflection?”

“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”

“Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.”

“This is what I like about photographs. They're proof that once, even if just for a heartbeat, everything was perfect.”

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

“Love After Love
all your life, whom you have ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.”

“I felt like an undeveloped photograph that he was printing, my image rising to the surface under his gaze.”

“Old pictures look very rugged and young, and the people in the photographs always seem a lot happier than you are.”

“The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.”

“To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.”

“You all looked so happy together in the photograph. You looked like the
perfect family. Is there such a thing anymore because if there is, my happy
little unit was definitely not in the queue when they were handing out the
titles.”

“There are two people in every photograph: the photographer and the viewer”

“Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”

“I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps. We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves!”

“I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.”

“We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.”

“I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.”

“It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.”

“Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference”

“Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.”

“To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”

“I just hope I remember to tell my kids that they are as happy as I look in my old photographs. And I hope that they believe me.”

“Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem.”

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

“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.”

“I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it's such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her.”

“He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.”

“In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The 'anything whatever' then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.”

“Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.”

“Although the photographer and the art thief were close friends, neither had ever taken the other's picture.”

“What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”

“One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.”

“she took pictures of germs, viruses, and people reacting to germs and viruses. On weekends, for extra money, she photographed weddings, which really wasn't that much of a stretch”

“Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”

“A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.”

“Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.”

“Somehow it seems wrong to photograph a blind person. It’s like stealing something valuable they don’t even know they own.”

“Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant. once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs.”

“The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness”

“What's really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer.”

“A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.”

“I was only photographing in words the reality of it all.”

“When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.”

“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”