Famous Quotes & Sayings

Robert Mapplethorpe

I'm looking for the unexpected. I'm looking for things I've never seen before.

Robert Mapplethorpe

People don't have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography.

Robert Mapplethorpe

I was a Catholic boy, I went to church every Sunday. A church has a certain magic and mystery for a child. It still shows in how I arrange things. It's always little altars.

Robert Mapplethorpe

With photography, you zero in; you put a lot of energy into short moments, and then you go on to the next thing.

Robert Mapplethorpe

If I had been born one or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make sculpture.

Robert Mapplethorpe

I never liked photography. Not for the sake of photography. I like the object. I like the photographs when you hold them in your hand.

Robert Mapplethorpe

If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it's as though I've neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up.

Robert Mapplethorpe

I went into photography because it seemed like the perfect vehicle for commenting on the madness of today's existence.

Robert Mapplethorpe

The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.

Robert Mapplethorpe

If I am at a party, I want to be at the party. Too many photographers use the camera to avoid participating in things. They become professional observers.

Val Kilmer

It's the first time that I've ever had an art show based on a film, but it's a photography collage.

Susie Bright

Seeing lesbian photography is just the tip of my radicalized clitoris. I have modeled for, commissioned, published, and fought for these pictures, and answered threats against them. I've seen the feminist movement bring these pictures to life, and I've seen that same movement try to suppress the liberating results.

Taryn Simon

Photography threatens fantasy.

Taryn Simon

There is no truth in photography. One can't reproduce an absolute truth. That said, I don't see [my photographs] as being any less truthful than any other photographs.

Taryn Simon

...photography's history is bound to the mistake, to the accident.

Taryn Simon

The photograph doesn't claim to be a participant, or to know, or to be a club member of whatever it's documenting - photography is more demanding when it doesn't pretend to know.

Taryn Simon

I'm designing a seductive frame to attract an audience to a subject they would otherwise ignore. And that's what I do in all of my photography - give a stage to things that wouldn't normally receive that stage.

Taryn Simon

Simulations directly relate to the process of and complications in photography. They also overtly create layers of fantasies, myths and interventions... The simulation confuses the idea of a truth. I've always been interested in this kind of theater and illusion at the foundation of belief.

Taryn Simon

Documentary photography is becoming more illustrative as people become more familiar with photography’s limitations and vulnerabilities. Reality has always been interpreted through layers of manipulation, abstraction, and intervention. But now, it is very much on the surface. I like this honesty about its dishonesty. Every photograph has many truths and none. Photographs are ambiguous, no matter how seemingly scientific they appear to be. They are always subject to an uncontrollable context. This is a tired statement, but worth repeating.

Spike Lee

Any time you talk about the look of the film, it's not just the director and the director of photography. You have to include the costume designer and the production designer.

Sigmar Polke

I began drawing as a very young child and had a grandfather who experimented with photography, so those things constituted my first exposure to art.

Sigmar Polke

I don't see a big difference between painting and photography. Moreover, such distinctions mean nothing to me.

Sergio Leone

The best photographers are super nice people and that its not a coincidence. Great photographers genuinely like people, and people can feel that. That's what makes people feel comfortable. It is important to appear confident with clients, but it is more important to not be afraid to act like a fool, have fun, laugh and shake your hips to get people comfortable.

Steven Pinker

The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.

Umberto Eco

If photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a natural process but because the latter is also coded.

Rick Steves

I shutter to think how many people are underexposed and lacking depth in this field.

Vik Muniz

Now that photography is a digital medium, the ghost of painting is coming to haunt it: photography no longer retains a sense of truth. I think that's great, because it frees photography from factuality, the same way photography freed painting from factuality in the mid-nineteenth century.

Vik Muniz

I hate to say I'm a photographer, because I learned photography as I went along. But I also hate to say I'm a painter, a draftsman, even an artist. I think it's good when you're confused about what you are; it means you haven't defined yourself as an artist yet.

Sydney Pollack

I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.

Susan Sontag

The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.

Susan Sontag

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

Susan Sontag

Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs ... But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real. ... 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.

Susan Sontag

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.