"If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph."
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Photography quotes
Photography
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Photography quotes (page 16 of 153)
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"Whatever it takes to get the image to reach that level is what that photographer needs to do."
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"I find the single most valuable tool in my darkroom is my trash can"
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"Photography is a brief complicity between foresight and luck."
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"I think of my work as very polarizing; either people really do like it and are touched by it or they really don't get it at all. It's not accessible to all people at the same level."
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"Over the years I have photographed thousands of people. I have never stopped being curious and trying to discover new worlds. I have used my camera as a mirror for my subjects as well. I remember photographing a woman in her 80s for my book, Wise Women, who told me it had been a long time since anyone had really been interested in "seeing" or photographing her. When she saw the picture, she burst into tears. She saw something in the photograph, an inner beauty and soul, she felt had long ago vanished."
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"I've always been obsessed with penetrating the female psyche. When I shoot, I'm like a tornado. I never sit down, never take a break, never eat. I'm focused on getting that moment of revelation, of insight, of poignancy, of meaning."
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"Have the utmost respect for your subjects. Love them."
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"If I had to pick a single word to describe what my pictures are all about, I would say 'secrets.' As a child I always had a secret world and my favorite book was “A Secret Garden."
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"I very strongly believe that if you go back to your roots, if you mine that inner territory, you can bring out something that is indelibly you and authentic - like your thumbprint. It's going to have your style because there is no one like you."
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"It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image."
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"We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman."
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"I don't think it's necessary to put your feelings about photography in words. I've read things that photographers have written for exhibitions and so forth about their subjective feelings about photography and mostly I think it's disturbing. I think they're fooling themselves very often. They're just talking, they're not saying anything."
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"But before all else a work of art is the creation of love. Love for the subject first and for the medium second. Love is the fundamental necessity underlying the need to create, underlying the emotion that gives it form, and from which grows the unfinished product that is presented to the world. Love is the general criterion by which the rare photograph is judged. It must contain it to be not less than the best of which the photographer is capable."
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"Much is missed if we have eyes only for the bright colors. Nature should be viewed without distinction... She makes no choice herself; everything that happens has equal significance. Nothing can be dispensed with. This is a common mistake that many people make: They think that half of nature can be destroyed - the uncomfortable half - while still retaining the acceptable and the pleasing side."
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"My emotions, instincts, and interests are all with nature."
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"Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today."
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"Photography is a very important part of my life."
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"...photographers who carry 60 pounds of equipment up a hill to photograph a view are not suffering enough, although their whining causes enough suffering among their listeners. No, if they really expect us to respect their search for enlightenment and artistic expression, in [the] future they will drag the equipment up the hill by their genitals and take the view with a tripod leg stuck through their foot."
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"Asked for your opinion on the prints, you have two choices: truth or tact. I ask for the bathroom."
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