Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henri Cartier-Bresson

You just have to live and life will give you pictures.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept

Henri Cartier-Bresson

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photography is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It's a way of life.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

One eye of the photographer looks wide open through the viewfinder, the other, the closed looks into his own soul.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart and head.

Gore Vidal

For half a century photography has been the "art form" of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? to the finger on the button? to the law of averages?

Gianni Versace

I love photography and art-directing is something that I really would enjoy to do.

Gerhard Richter

Painting is traditional but for me that doesn't mean the academy. I felt a need to paint; I love painting. It was something natural - as is listening to music or playing an instrument for some people. For this reason I searched for themes of my era and my generation. Photography offered this, so I chose it as a medium for painting.

Gerhard Richter

Suddenly, I saw it in a new way, as a picture that offered me a new view, free of all the conventional criteria I had always associated with art. It had no style, no composition, no judgment. It freed me from personal experience. For the first time, there was nothing to it: it was pure picture. That's why I wanted to have it, to show it - not use it as a means to painting but use painting as a means to photography.

Gerhard Richter

Photography has almost no reality; it is almost a hundred per cent picture. And painting always has reality: you can touch the paint; it has presence; but it always yields a picture - no matter whether good or bad. That's all the theory. It's no good. I once took some small photographs and then smeared them with paint. That partly resolved the problem, and it's really good - better than anything I could ever say on the subject.

Gerhard Richter

I don't mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed.

Gerhard Richter

The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source.

Gerhard Richter

A work of art is itself an object, first of all, and so manipulation is unavoidable: it's a prerequisite. But I needed the greater objectivity of the photograph in order to correct my own way of seeing: for instance, if I draw an object from nature, I start to stylize and to change it in accordance with my personal vision and my training. But if I paint from a photograph, I can forget all the criteria that I get from these sources. I can paint against my will, as it were. And that, to me, felt like an enrichment.

Gerhard Richter

But I would like to reach the point where I could cut up an illustrated magazine at random and see to it that the parts would each become a painting. I cannot properly explain it right now. Already now I am searching for the most boring and irrelevant photo material that I can find. And I would like to get to the point soon where this determined irrelevance could be retained, in favor of something that would be covered up otherwise by artifice.

Gerhard Richter

Unlike the photography and prints, I never catalogued, kept track of or exhibited the sketches. I sold some occasionally, but never saw myself as a graphic artist. They became more important to me thanks to the exhibition, however, and I realized that these drawings were quite interesting after all.

Harold Ramis

I've never taken a script to the stage or to principal photography and said, "This is perfect. This is as good as it can possibly be." It's not Shakespeare, you know; you know it can probably be better.

Jaime King

It was around the age of 18 when I started to feel like I had learned everything I could learn from being a model - modeling is a really incredible form of expression, but I got into modeling because I loved fashion so much and I really loved photography.

Jacques Derrida

I absolutely forbade all public photographs of myself. I like photography, I don't have anything against it, but...

Jackie Cooper

They kept me in short pants as long as they could, until they were shaving the hair on my legs because it was beginning to photograph.

Jackie Collins

I've never been on safari because I've got a phobia of bugs. I just don't want things crawling on me when I'm sleeping. It's a shame given my passion for big cats. But I really enjoy photography, so I'd love to photograph leopards in the wild some day.

Elton John

I've got a great collection of photography.

Jeff Bridges

I found that photography was a great way of relaxing on the set.

Jean Renoir

All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object.

Jean-Luc Godard

The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?

Jean-Luc Godard

Photography could have been invented in color. Colors existed.

Jean-Luc Godard

When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it.

Jerry Saltz

I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.'

Jeffrey Kluger

Photography is about freezing a moment in time; McGinley's is about freezing a stage in a lifetime.

Jeffrey Pierce

The joy for me of television is the sort of family feeling of being involved with an ensemble - the cast and the crew and the director of photography and the guys in the camera truck - and you're all coming together. There's a great feeling when that is a successful unit, a successful family.