Famous Quotes & Sayings

Mary Ellen Mark

Photograph the world as it is. Nothing's more interesting than reality.

Mary Ellen Mark

I just think it's important to be direct and honest with people about why you're photographing them and what you're doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul.

Martin Parr

I accept that all photography is voyeuristic and exploitative, and obviously I live with my own guilt and conscience. It's part of the test and I don't have a problem with it.

Martin Parr

Photography's central role is to be the absolute medium of the day. It is fantastic that there is no longer any technical intimidation.

Martin Parr

I do read many of the photography magazines from the U.K. and abroad.

Martin Parr

Color was the palette of commercial photography and snapshot photography.

Martin Parr

Everyone is a photographer now, remember. That's the great thing about photography.

Martin Parr

The knack is to find your own inspiration and take it on a journey to create work that is personal and revealing.

Martin Parr

Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate. Most of the photographs in your paper, unless they are hard news, are lies. Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality... Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.

Martin Parr

We are drowning in images. Photography is used as a propaganda tool, which serves to sell products and ideas. I use the same approach to show aspects of reality.

Martin Parr

Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate, and that is an aspect that I have to puncture. I do that by showing the world as I really find it.

Martin Parr

There are two parts to the process: taking the picture and finding ways of using it.

Martin Parr

For those aspiring to make a living from travel photography, it's a sad fact that the boring shots are the shots that are going to make you money.

Martin Parr

With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society's natural prejudice and giving this a twist.

Martin Parr

Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.

Martin Parr

All photography is propaganda.

Martin Scorsese

[David Lean's] images stay with me forever. But what makes them memorable isn't necessarily their beauty. That's just good photography. It's the emotion behind those images that's meant the most to me over the years. It's the way David Lean can put feeling on film. The way he shows a whole landscape of the spirit. For me, that's the real geography of David Lean country. And that's why, in a David Lean movie, there's no such thing as an empty landscape.

Martin Scorsese

Orson Welles was a force of nature, who just came in and wiped the slate clean. And Citizen Kane is the greatest risk-taking of all time in film. I don’t think anything had even seen anything quite like it. The photography was also unlike anything we’d seen. The odd coldness of the filmmaker towards the character reflects his own egomania and power, and yet a powerful empathy for all of them--it’s very interesting. It still holds up, and it’s still shocking. It takes storytelling and throws it up in the air.

Martin Scorsese

There are movies that change the whole way in which films are made, like Klute, where Gordon Willis’s photography on the film is so textured, and, they said, too dark. At first this was alarming to people, because they’re used to a certain way things are done within the studio system. And the studio is selling a product, so they were wary of people thinking that it’s too dark.

Peter Beard

Photography should be redefined. It's largely technical... Photography is just unbelievably limiting. I always think of David Bailey and all the fashion photographers - they overlap, you can't always tell who did it. I don't really even like photography all that much. I just think it's so overdone.

Penelope Lively

The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.

Megan Fox

There are a lot of people who think celebrities shouldn't complain, that the photography is just a price to pay for having this career. I guess that's bizarre. What they don't understand is that this is all stuff that's really new.

Mathew Brady

I had to go. A spirit in my feet said 'go,' and I went.

Mathew Brady

My greatest aim has been to advance the art of photography and to make it what I think I have, a great and truthful medium of history.

Mason Cooley

Photography knows how to authenticate its misrepresentations.

Mia Wasikowska

Photography, for me, is something I can control fully. It's wholly my own expressions.

Michelangelo Antonioni

We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see.

Mark Rothko

I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.

Terry Richardson

Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, and so many others before me, sexual imagery has always been a part of my photography.

Michael Bergin

I guess that's what I was: a set of abs. And they lit the abs and shot the abs and sent the abs on their way. The photographer didn't look at my face once. I was humiliated.

Nancy Pelosi

Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.

Marcel Proust

Photography is the product of complete alienation.

Marcel Proust

A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.