Famous Quotes & Sayings

Minor White

Students were taught by doing.

Minor White

Let the subject generate its own photographs. Become a camera.

Minor White

Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts.

Minor White

We could teach photography as a way to make a living, and best of all, somehow to get students to experience for themselves photography as a way of life.

Minor White

Reaching a 'creative' state of mind thru positive action is considered preferable to waiting for 'inspiration'.

Minor White

The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.

Minor White

Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence.

Minor White

Photography is a language more universal than words.

Minor White

At first glance a photograph can inform us. At second glance it can reach us.

Minor White

There's no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class. I'm always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don't give a damn how it got made.

Minor White

No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen.

Minor White

I'm always mentally photographing everything as practice.

Minor White

When gifts are given to me through my camera, I accept them graciously.

Paula Patton

A movie is painting, it's photography, it's literature - because you have to have the screenplay - it's music. Put a different soundtrack to a comedy and it's a tragedy. A movie combines all those forms and forces you to pay attention for two hours with a group of people.

Peter Thiel

Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.

Peter Brook

One view of photography is that it is a zen-like act which captures reality with its pants down - so that the vital click shows the anatomy bare. In this, the photographer is invisible but essential. A computer releasing the shutter would always miss the special moment that the human sensibility can register. For this work, the photographer's instinct is his aid, his personality a hindrance.

Penelope Cruz

I am a big fan of photography, more of being behind the camera - so when I get the opportunity to work with such great photographers, I always try and learn from their technique.

Peter Jackson

I find that in the process of making a film you're constantly discovering things that you never even imagined would work at the beginning. Actors come into the film and do things you never even imagined. Production designers come in, the director of photography lights it in a way that you never imagined. So, it's always evolving, always exciting.

Richard Avedon

It's in trying to direct the traffic between Artiface [sic] and Candor, without being run over, that I'm confronted with the questions about photography that matter most to me.

Richard Avedon

There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone's person.

Richard Avedon

If I could do what I want with my eyes alone, I would be happy.

Richard Avedon

i'm beginning to feel like this. caught the incredible sunshine just in the nick of time today on my walk. the wall of rain approaching from the west desert was pretty spectacular, too. along with being gorgeous, it was sooo muddy. which made driving home in no shoes so very fun :) if only i could post photos here! a picture is worth a thousand words, yes? 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.

Richard Avedon

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is...the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.

Richard Avedon

Photography has always reminded me of the second child.. trying to prove itself. The fact that it wasn't really considered an art.. that it was considered a craft.. has trapped almost every serious photographer.

Richard Avedon

When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.

Richard Avedon

I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.

Richard Avedon

I don't really remember the day when I stood behind my camera with Henry Kissinger on the other side. I am sure he doesn't remember it either. But this photograph is here now to prove that no amount of kindness on my part could make this photograph mean exactly what he.. or even I.. wanted it to mean. It's a reminder of the wonder and terror that is a photograph.

Richard Avedon

A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.

Richard Avedon

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks. He's implicated in what's happening, and he has a certain real power over the result.

Richard Avedon

The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.

Richard Avedon

I think all art is about control, the encounter between control and uncontrollable.

Richard Avedon

There was no such person as Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe was an invention of hers. A genius invention that she created, like an author creates a character. She understood photography, and she also understood what makes a great photograph. She related to it as if she were giving a performance. She gave more to the still camera than any actress-any woman- I've ever photographed.

Richard Avedon

I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense... symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller - to find out how they are.