Famous Quotes & Sayings

Paul Gauguin

Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth? - photography, once it begins to reproduce colors, and that won't be long in coming. And yet you want an intelligent man to sweat for months so as to give the illusion he can do something as well as an ingenious little machine can!

Paul Gauguin

Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us.

Paul Gauguin

Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth?

Parker Stevenson

My interest in architecture has always been sculptural. Most of my photography is of architecture

Lillie Langtry

Why in the world would anyone want to photograph an old woman like me?

Patti Smith

My introduction to photography and a lot of how I developed aesthetically was through '50s and early-'60s fashion magazines like Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.

Patti Smith

Truthfully, I don't really think of myself as a photographer. I don't have all the disciplines and knowledge of a person who's spent their life devoted to photography.

Patti Smith

Robert was concerned with how to make the photograph, and I with how to be the photograph.

Paul Emsley

Photography today is so accurate and so good that it's really so much easier just to take photographs and work from them.

Marshall McLuhan

Nobody can commit photography alone.

Marshall McLuhan

[Cameras] tend to turn people into things and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise and, [in the age of photography] the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other museum and to say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name.

Marshall McLuhan

Photography turns people into things and their image into a mass consumer product.

Marshall McLuhan

The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.

Joe McNally

John Loengard, the picture editor at Life, always used to tell me, ”If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.

Joe McNally

If you view your life as a piece of fabric or a tapestry, the photography is the stitching. It keeps everything together.

Joe McNally

A career in photography is a journey without a destination.

Joe McNally

You’ve gotta taste the light, like my friend and fellow shooter Chip Maury says. And when you see light like this, trust me, it’s like a strawberry sundae with sprinkles.

Joe McNally

We make pictures. At the end of the day, we create something potentially significant that did not exist at the beginning of the day. We go forward, despite the uncertainty. Because this is an act of love and passion, which defies reason and prudence.

Joe McNally

Always remember to make room to shoot what you love. It's the only way to keep your heart beating as a photographer.

Joe McNally

No matter how much crap you gotta plow through to stay alive as a photographer, no matter how many bad assignments, bad days, bad clients, snotty subjects, obnoxious handlers, wigged-out art directors, technical disasters, failures of the mind, body, and will, all the shouldas, couldas, and wouldas that befuddle our brains and creep into our dreams, always remember to make room to shoot what you love. It's the only way to keep your heart beating as a photographer.

Joe McNally

Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.

Imogen Cunningham

...There are too many people studying it [photography] now who are never going to make it. You can't give them a formula for making it. You have to have it in you first, you don't learn it. The seeing eye is the important thing.

Imogen Cunningham

I was brought up on art. My father thought I had a great hand at art and sent me to art school. But he did not want me to become a photographer.

Imogen Cunningham

The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.

Imogen Cunningham

I don't think there's any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.

Imogen Cunningham

The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.

Imogen Cunningham

I wasn't very ambitious. I think that's the solution. I just took things as they came. I wouldn't say I didn't have any problem, but I didn't care. I didn't think I was going to save the world by doing photography as some of these people do. I was just having a good time doing it, and so I still had a good time no matter what I had to photograph.

Ilka Chase

Some objects and events may be photographed, others, if one is to render their true quality, should be painted or set to music, since their essence is more faithfully reproduced through imagination than by the journalistic report.

Ilka Chase

Very few people, thank God, look like the pictures of them which are published in the papers and the weekly magazines ...

Kim Edwards

Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.

Ken Burns

I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.

Kazimir Malevich

I regard photography and film simply as new technical means which painters must absolutely make use of, just as from time out of mind they have made use of brush, charcoal and color. It is certain, however, that photography and film must become as evocative for the sensibility as pencil, charcoal and brush. (1927)

Margaret Atwood

The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.