Famous Quotes & Sayings

Richard Avedon

The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.

Richard Avedon

I think all art is about control, the encounter between control and uncontrollable.

Richard Avedon

There was no such person as Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe was an invention of hers. A genius invention that she created, like an author creates a character. She understood photography, and she also understood what makes a great photograph. She related to it as if she were giving a performance. She gave more to the still camera than any actress-any woman- I've ever photographed.

Richard Avedon

I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense... symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller - to find out how they are.

Richard Avedon

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.

Richard Avedon

And 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. I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.

Richard Avedon

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.

Ryan Lewis

I love history, cultural and religious studies, philosophy, photography and traveling.

Ryan McGinley

I know that my mind is so A.D.D., and I want instant gratification - and photography can provide me with that - but at some point, I want to make an independent feature.

Robert Barry

I don't really use still photography very much anymore except to document my work.

Richard Gere

His Holiness [the Dalai Lama] has told me, urgently and repeatedly, that he thinks my photographs are crap. His exact words were, 'These photos are of poor quality. Why is there no sharp focus? There is no clarity!' I said, 'But your Holiness, it's Goyaesque.' And he said, 'No! It's out of focus!'

Robert Doisneau

When people talk to me about picture hunters, I very quietly laugh. I'm not a hunter of pictures, I'm a fisher of pictures.

Robert Doisneau

Photography is very subjective. Photography is not a document on which a report can be made. It is a subjective document. Photography is a false witness, a lie.

Robert Doisneau

A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there-even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.

Robert Doisneau

If you take photos, don't speak, don't write, don't analyze yourself, and don't answer any questions.

Robert Doisneau

I don't photograph life as it is, but life as I would like it to be,

Robert Doisneau

You've got to struggle against the pollution of intelligence in order to become an animal with very sharp instincts - a sort of intuitive medium - so that to photograph becomes a magical act, and slowly other more suggestive images begin to appear behind the visible image, for which the photographer cannot be held responsible.

Robert Doisneau

If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time.

Robert Capa

What's the point of getting killed if you've got the wrong exposure?

Robert Capa

It's not always easy to stand aside and be unable to do anything except record the sufferings around one.

Robert Capa

I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life.

Robert Capa

The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda.

Robert Capa

If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough.

Robert Capa

The pictures are there, and you just take them.

Tupac Shakur

If a picture is worth a thousand words, photographers are worth a million.

Roland Barthes

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.

Roland Barthes

Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

Roland Barthes

Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.

Roland Barthes

For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life. Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death.

Roland Barthes

Every photograph is a certificate of presence.

Roland Barthes

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

Roland Barthes

A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony.

Roland Barthes

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.