Taking the photograph is the easiest part for me
When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects. So that no one would say, how did you do it, where did you find it, but they would say that such things could be.
Photograph because you love doing it, because you absolutely have to do it, because the chief reward is going to be the process of doing it. Other rewards - recognition, financial remuneration - come to so few and are so fleeting. . . Take photography on as a passion, not a career.
A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.
We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.
The transactions between me and the people that I photograph are very very collaborative.
My way of photographing is my way of life. I photograph from my experience, my way of seeing things.
The only objective truth that photographs offer is the assertion that somebody or something. . . was somewhere and took a picture.
A photograph is a photograph. When I am making a picture I am just interested in making a very interesting photograph. I don't care where it's going to go.
A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model but despite the promptings of our critical intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith.
I've always been interested in people that you wouldn't see otherwise. If you look back at my books, photographs, and films-and since I'm doing this retrospective I've been forced to look back-the work is always about a small group of people who are somewhat isolated, and who you would never see if I didn't film or photograph them.
Photography, when used as a representational art, is not a mere copy of nature. This is proved by the rarity of the 'good' photograph.
Everything rational and sensible abandons me when I try to throw out photographs. Time and time again, I hold one over a wastebasket, and then find it impossible to release my fingers and let the picture drop and disappear.
A technically perfect photograph can be the world's most boring picture.
If I’d only known which [photographs] would be very good and liked, I wouldn’t have had to do all the thousands of others.
What would please me most is to make photographs as incomprehensible as life.
The sophisticated concern about art sinks before a spontaneous love of reality, and I thank the photograph for being so transparent a vehicle for things.
The photograph is married to the eye, Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth.
I never had any intention nor interest in being an artist, but when I made work I realized that this was my language. What I had to say needed to be said in this way. I always loved taking photographs - but never considered myself a photographer. I have tremendous respect for photographers. I do use a camera and a photo as a basis for a lot of my work, but I use it as a means to attain an image to work from. The actual photography in my work is a monochromatic photograph. I'll photograph something and extract a color that will then be the background for a painting.