"If photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a natural process but because the latter is also coded."
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Photography quotes
Photography
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Photography quotes (page 22 of 153)
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"I think a lot of times when people have "creative blocks" and I know my share of friends do as well if they're at just some stuck point. They're not sure what to do with their lives or their writing or their photography or their filmmaking or whatever it is that they're doing. I think the best advice is you have to change your life up completely; to go on a trip, to go spend a year being of service. Be willing to take some major drastic action to get you out of your comfort zone and go inside, not outside."
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"Many photographers think they are photographing nature when they are only caricaturing her."
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"Pay no heed to the average photographer's remarks upon "flat" and "weak" negatives. Probably he is flat, weak, stale, and unprofitable; your negative may be first-rate, and probably is if he does not approve of it."
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""Do not call yourself an "artist-photographer" and make "artist-painters" and "artist-sculptors" laugh; call yourself a photographer and wait for artists to call you brother.""
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""Though many painters and sculptors talk glibly of "going in for photography," you will find that very few of them can ever make a picture by photography; they lack the science, technical knowledge, and above all the practice. Most people think they can play tennis, shoot, write novels, and photograph as well as any other person - until they try.""
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"I often say I've spent more time with photography than I have with literature just in terms of hours."
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"One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent."
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"As for myself, I'm attracted to venture into places with peeling paint, and areas that are crumbling a little bit. It makes sense because we've already established the photography focusing on architecture, even if it looks incorrect, there's something appealing about entering that."
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"The camera does not know what it takes; it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene."
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"When I was at college, the idea of fashion was more immediate to me, whereas art photography, the depth of it, was a different thing. Storytelling - fanciful storytelling - can only be told through fashion photography. It's the perfect way to play with fantasy and dreams."
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"Photography is a very forgiving medium. Anybody that can afford film and a camera can make pictures."
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"I came to photography with the desire to conquer this machine, the camera, and make it my slave. Instead, I have now a respect for it and all machines as expanders of my awareness."
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"I really enjoy the iPad because you can multi-task: I can watch a movie, read, look at pictures that I shot - because I'm into photography. It serves a lot of purposes for me."
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"You don't have to shoot the film in the first couple days of principal photography."
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"Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture."
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"Nature photography... that acknowledges what is wrong, is admittedly sometimes hard to bear - it has to encompass our mistakes. Yet in the long run, it is important; in order to endure our age of apocalypse, we have to be reconciled not only to avalanche and hurricane, but to ourselves."
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". . .art is a discovery of harmony, a vision of disparities reconciled, or shape beneath confusion."
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"I've been so lonely trying to become a photographer. If I'd known that before, I don't know if I had the courage to do it again. You get to a point where you feel that you have something that is your own. And if you don't find an audience for it, you are going to burst."
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"In a foreign country it is far from easy to study a scene at length when you know that at any minute someone may appear and ask what you are doing and that you can't answer, and you haven't many references, and you don't know the law. Neither is it easy to find and know the subjects for portraits or comfortable to make such picture when you cannot apply an anesthesia of small talk."
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