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.

Tom Clancy

In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.

Tibor Kalman

I believe that this whole question of some photography being true and some untrue is a non-question. Photography is not objective; it never was objective.

Roman Jakobson

A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.

Roland Barthes

Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography.

Roland Barthes

The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death.

Roland Barthes

The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive... Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.

Roland Barthes

The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

Roland Barthes

Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumes as such, publicly.

Roland Barthes

I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme.

Roland Barthes

As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.

Roland Barthes

[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.

Sunidhi Chauhan

One of my passions is photography. I always carry a camera in my bag whenever I travel. I always take pictures wherever I go, and some of them end up being really crazy ones.

Tatyana Ali

Videos are more like photography. It's not as much about trying to tell a story as it is creating images.

Tallulah Bankhead

They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum.

Syd Barrett

A lot of people want to make films and do photography and things, but I'm quite happy doing what I'm doing.

Thomas Merton

The camera does not know what it takes; it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene.

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.

I never thought I would become a photographer.

On digital photography: It's fantastic, but it's not a freebie for anything. You still have to have this (he points to his eyes), and this (points to his heart), and feet.

To some extent, the cult surrounding black-and-white photography is based on nostalgia.

Tipper Gore

As an avid photographer, I also took advantage of the latest technology in photography - digital photography - to post photos on my website on a daily basis.

Robert Adams

Art does not in fact prove anything. What it does do is record one of those brief times, such as we each have and then each forget, when we are allowed to understand that the Creation is whole.