Famous Quotes & Sayings

Duane Michals

If I indulge myself and surrender to memory, I can still feel the knot of excitement that gripped me as I turned the corner into Rue Mimosas, looking for the house of Rene Magritte. It was August, 1965. I was 33 years old and about to meet the man whose profound and witty surrealist paintings had contradicted my assumptions about photography.

Duane Michals

Most photographs, to me, are description, but they lack insight.

Duane Michals

I think photographers are too polite. There is not enough anger in photography; it's pretty much trivialized.

Duane Michals

I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.

Duane Michals

Taking the photograph is the easiest part for me

Duane Michals

I never went to a photography school, which was my saving grace,

Duane Michals

Photography is very presumptuous. Photographers are always photographing other people's lives - something they know nothing about - and drawing great inferences into it.

Duane Michals

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

Duane Michals

Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing.

Duane Michals

Photography does deal with 'truth' or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality - it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible?

Duane Michals

A photograph of a woman crying tells me nothing about grief. Or a photograph of a woman ecstatic tells me nothing about ecstasy. What is the nature of these emotions? The problem with photography is that it only deals with appearances.

Duane Michals

Photographers tend not to photograph what they can’t see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it. Otherwise we’re going to go on forever just photographing more faces and more rooms and more places. Photography has to transcend description. It has to go beyond description to bring insight into the subject, or reveal the subject, not as it looks, but how does it feel?

Douglass North

While I was there I became deeply interested in photography, and indeed the most noteworthy event in my early life was winning first, third, fourth and seventh prizes in an international competition for college and high school students.

Annie Leibovitz

A photograph is just a little, teeny-weeny, small piece of life. I feel like I see so much more than what I can actually get.

Annie Leibovitz

People buy ideas, they don't buy photographs.

Annie Leibovitz

If it makes you cry, it goes in the show.

Annie Leibovitz

Photography is not something you retire from.

Annie Leibovitz

As you get older, you have different tools, and you learn to use photography differently.

Annie Leibovitz

I'm pretty used to people not liking having their picture taken. I mean, if you do like to have your picture taken, I worry about you.

Annie Leibovitz

Computer photography won't be photography as we know it. I think photography will always be chemical.

Annie Leibovitz

Photography's like this baby that needs to be fed all the time. It's always hungry.

Annie Leibovitz

There's an idea that it's hard to be a woman artist. People assume that women have fewer opportunities, less power. But it's not any harder to be a woman artist than to be a male artist. We all take what we are given and use the parts of ourselves that feed the work. We make our way. Photographers, men and women, are particularly lucky. Photography lets you find yourself. It is a passport to people and places and to possibilities.

Annie Leibovitz

Things happen in front of you. That's perhaps the most wonderful and mysterious aspect of photography.

Annie Lennox

For me, pointing and clicking my phone is absolutely fine. People say that isn't the art of photography but I don't agree.

Annabelle Selldorf

I think when you look at architectural photography it doesn't help to have piles of old clothes lying on the floor. Architectural photography sets up an artifice.

Daniel J. Boorstin

The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera - and himself.

D. H. Lawrence

When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.

Conrad Hall

Contrast is what makes photography interesting.

Conrad Hall

Photography is a very important part of my life.

David Bailey

I never set out to be a photographer.

David Bailey

Rockers are the nicest people to photograph. They have no inhibitions.

David Bailey

I never tried to revolutionise photography; I just do what I do and keep my fingers crossed that people will like it.

David Bailey

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.