Famous Quotes & Sayings

Daniel J. Boorstin

The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera - and himself.

D. H. Lawrence

When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.

Conrad Hall

Contrast is what makes photography interesting.

Conrad Hall

Photography is a very important part of my life.

David Bailey

I never set out to be a photographer.

David Bailey

Rockers are the nicest people to photograph. They have no inhibitions.

David Bailey

I never tried to revolutionise photography; I just do what I do and keep my fingers crossed that people will like it.

David Bailey

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.

Donatella Versace

Richard Avedon is a true genius of photography and one of the greatest artists of our time.

Dorothea Lange

It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.

Dorothea Lange

Photography today appears to be in a state of flight... The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses.

Dorothea Lange

That frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject, you cannot do it by not being lost yourself.

Dorothea Lange

A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.

Dorothea Lange

Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.

Dorothea Lange

Photography is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do-while an audience of people you can't see watches you.

Dorothea Lange

The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.

Dorothea Lange

Seeing is more than a physiological phenomenon... We see not only with our eyes but with all that we are and all that our culture is. The artist is a professional see-er.

Dorothea Lange

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.

Dorothea Lange

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.

Dorothea Lange

To know ahead of time what you're looking for means you're then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.

Dorothea Lange

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind.

Criss Angel

If people are fans of 'Mindfreak,' they are going to be so excited with 'Believe.' They are actually going to see those illusions that people think can only happen with trick photography.

Claude Levi-Strauss

[Photography] remains servile to a thoughtless vision of the world... As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it.

Daniel Clowes

You can give some kind of spark of life to a comic that a photograph doesn't really have. A photograph, even if it's connecting with you, it seems very dead on the page sometimes.

The advent of the digital age and the immediacy and convenience of digital video and photography allows people to become an integral part of the feedback loop which actively shapes the content we are fed.

Damien Hirst

But I always liked the fact that you get these totally unacceptable images, but they're taken by a really expensive photographer, with great light, and in terms of the quality of the photograph it's a great photograph, but in terms of imagery it's unacceptable, and I like that contradiction.

E. B. White

Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he maycommunicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole.

Andy Warhol

My idea of a good picture is one that's in focus and of a famous person.

Andy Warhol

Photographers feel guilty that all they do for a living is press a button.

Andre Breton

The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances.

Ann Beattie

When I was teaching at Harvard in the 1970s, I went to Project Incorporated in Cambridge and took photography classes. I didn't even know how to aim the camera in those days.

Andres Serrano

My use of the medium - photography - is in some ways traditional.

Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.