Famous Quotes & Sayings

Martin Parr

There are two parts to the process: taking the picture and finding ways of using it.

Martin Parr

For those aspiring to make a living from travel photography, it's a sad fact that the boring shots are the shots that are going to make you money.

Martin Parr

With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society's natural prejudice and giving this a twist.

Martin Parr

Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.

Martin Parr

All photography is propaganda.

Martin Scorsese

[David Lean's] images stay with me forever. But what makes them memorable isn't necessarily their beauty. That's just good photography. It's the emotion behind those images that's meant the most to me over the years. It's the way David Lean can put feeling on film. The way he shows a whole landscape of the spirit. For me, that's the real geography of David Lean country. And that's why, in a David Lean movie, there's no such thing as an empty landscape.

Martin Scorsese

Orson Welles was a force of nature, who just came in and wiped the slate clean. And Citizen Kane is the greatest risk-taking of all time in film. I don’t think anything had even seen anything quite like it. The photography was also unlike anything we’d seen. The odd coldness of the filmmaker towards the character reflects his own egomania and power, and yet a powerful empathy for all of them--it’s very interesting. It still holds up, and it’s still shocking. It takes storytelling and throws it up in the air.

Martin Scorsese

There are movies that change the whole way in which films are made, like Klute, where Gordon Willis’s photography on the film is so textured, and, they said, too dark. At first this was alarming to people, because they’re used to a certain way things are done within the studio system. And the studio is selling a product, so they were wary of people thinking that it’s too dark.

Peter Beard

Photography should be redefined. It's largely technical... Photography is just unbelievably limiting. I always think of David Bailey and all the fashion photographers - they overlap, you can't always tell who did it. I don't really even like photography all that much. I just think it's so overdone.

Penelope Lively

The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.

Megan Fox

There are a lot of people who think celebrities shouldn't complain, that the photography is just a price to pay for having this career. I guess that's bizarre. What they don't understand is that this is all stuff that's really new.

Michael Heizer

I have looked at so many photographs, I can not see them anymore.

Mathew Brady

I had to go. A spirit in my feet said 'go,' and I went.

Mathew Brady

My greatest aim has been to advance the art of photography and to make it what I think I have, a great and truthful medium of history.

Mason Cooley

Photography knows how to authenticate its misrepresentations.

Mia Wasikowska

Photography, for me, is something I can control fully. It's wholly my own expressions.

Michelangelo Antonioni

We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see.

Mark Rothko

I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.

Terry Richardson

Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, and so many others before me, sexual imagery has always been a part of my photography.

Michael Bergin

I guess that's what I was: a set of abs. And they lit the abs and shot the abs and sent the abs on their way. The photographer didn't look at my face once. I was humiliated.

Nancy Pelosi

Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.

Marcel Proust

Photography is the product of complete alienation.

Marcel Proust

A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.

Lisa Kristine

One advantage of photography is that it's visual and can transcend language.

John Updike

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

John Updike

Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.

John Szarkowski

Photography was not invented to serve a clearly understood function. There was in fact widespread uncertainty, even among its inventors, as to what it might be good for.

John Szarkowski

Photography's central sense of purpose and aesthetic: the precise and lucid description of significant fact.

John Szarkowski

What's happening is that people are making a billion photographs a year of their cats, frequently with the cats wearing costumes. Do you think I should be doing shows of cat photography?

John Szarkowski

The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it.

John Szarkowski

Most of Tina Modotti's work that is known to the photography world was done in Mexico in the years 1923 through 1926, when she lived and worked with Edward Weston.

John Szarkowski

Photography is choosing where to point your eye-cone.

John Szarkowski

A camera has interesting ideas of its own.