Famous Quotes & Sayings

Gordon Parks

I was there less than a year before I was assigned to the Paris bureau. I spent two years there and, in fact, before I even went on the staff I was sent to Europe to do assignments which they wouldn't normally do for a young photographer just starting out.

Gordon Parks

The photographer begins to feel big and bloated and so big he can't walk through one of these doors because he gets a good byline; he gets notices all over the world and so forth; but they're really - the important people are the people he photographs.

Gordon Parks

Photography was my choice of weapons.

Gordon Parks

I suffered first as a child from discrimination, poverty ... So I think it was a natural follow from that that I should use my camera to speak for people who are unable to speak for themselves.

Gordon Parks

The subject matter is so much more important than the photographer.

John Loengard

The fact is that the camera is literal if anything, which gives it something in common with a thermometer... Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture's true beauty. There is sleight of hand in photography... you make the viewer think he's seeing everything while at the same time you make him realize he's not. I try to make my pictures seem reasonable and then, at the last minute, pull the rug from beneath the viewer's feet, very gently so there's a little thrill.

John Loengard

Perishability in a photograph is important in a picture. If a photograph looks perishable we say, "Gee, I'm glad I have that moment."

John Baldessari

Ideally I would like the work to be a hybrid between painting and photography.

John Baldessari

There's no such thing as a bad photograph.

John Baldessari

Probably one of the worst things that happened to photography is that cameras have viewfinders.

John Baldessari

I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both.

Joshua Foer

Over the last few millennia we've invented a series of technologies - from the alphabet to the scroll to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone - that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity.

Layne Staley

Music is the doorway that has led me to drawing, photography, and writing.

Joseph Goebbels

Photography today is accomplishing a lofty mission in which every German should collaborate by buying a camera. The German people is ahead of every other in the technical domain and, thanks to its exceptional qualities, the small camera has conquered the whole world... Much is at stake here from the point of view of popular consumer goods and, furthermore, photography has a particularly important political role to play. (Addressing the Berlin Photography Fair, 1933)

Julian Schnabel

Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I'm looking for. Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it.

People thought this was a computer IT gig, and that will flow through those nerdy departments and it won't come into fashion photography, it won't come into television, it won't come into my daily communications, it won't come into my telephone, my microphone, my light control, my microwave radio, my - I mean, just name it.

Karl Lagerfeld

I forget nothing and then, one day, there will be revenge. Innocence isn't exactly everywhere. But I will say innocence also takes you far in photography.

Karl Lagerfeld

I'm not a social person. Not that I'm not at ease. I'm pretty good, but it bores me. Not the people, but the whole thing. What for? It's not very productive. I only want to do what I have to do: fashion, photography, books. And that's all.

Julian Lennon

I have always felt that I have observed life in a different way to others... Music has always been one creative outlet for me, but now I'm happy to add another one too, that being photography

Julian Lennon

As much as I love music, in my mind, photography is what makes me the happiest - that's for sure.

Paul Theroux

The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.

Paul Kane

I also paint, draw and I'm into film and photography as well, and the same thing applies to all of them. You're presenting this material to the general public and hoping that they're going to 'get' what you're doing. Some don't, some do.

Paul Kane

Photos represent primarily a seductive but deleterious short cut.

Nick Harkaway

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

Paul Emsley

Photography today is so accurate and so good that it's really so much easier just to take photographs and work from them.

Marshall McLuhan

Nobody can commit photography alone.

Marshall McLuhan

[Cameras] tend to turn people into things and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise and, [in the age of photography] the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other museum and to say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name.

Marshall McLuhan

Photography turns people into things and their image into a mass consumer product.

Marshall McLuhan

The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.

Paul Auster

The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.

Julia Margaret Cameron

When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty to them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has almost the embodiment of a prayer.

Julia Margaret Cameron

My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty.

Joe McNally

John Loengard, the picture editor at Life, always used to tell me, ”If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.