My passport photo is one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever seen- no retouching, no shadows, no flattery-just stark me.
Press information is serious information, but press information is also manipulated by people who want you to think that this and that happened. So it's the old thing that you still cannot trust photography at all or you have to know who is distributing the photograph. In terms of cell phone photography, I think nobody cares about a photograph anymore because they're taking so many pictures just for fun.
People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
Photography is pretty simple stuff. You just react to what you see, and take many, many pictures.
Only photography has been able to divide human life into a series of moments, each of them has the value of a complete existence.
The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing.
I think the problem with the arts in America is how unimportant it seems to be in our educational system.
Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human. ') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?
The first picture of his I ever saw was during a lecture at the Rhyl camera club. I was 16 and the speaker was Emrys Jones. He projected the picture upside down. Deliberately, to disregard the subject matter to reveal the composition. It's a lesson I've never forgotten.
The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
I realized I didn't want to be a photographer. I gave it up, but I still worked that job in the restaurant and I found myself constantly hanging out in the kitchen.
Art is what we call. . . the thing an artist does. It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human. Art is not in the. . . eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist.
I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models. . . I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know.
Photojournalism is neither photography or journalism. It has its function but it's not where I see myself: the press is for me just a means for photographing, for material – not for telling the truth.
You always end up with too many pictures to edit and too few that you feel 'got it'.
For me, the creation of a photograph is experienced as a heightened emotional response, most akin to poetry and music, each image the culmination of a compelling impulse I cannot deny. Whether working with a human figure or a still life, I am deeply aware of my spiritual connection with it. In my life, as in my work, I am motivated by a great yearning for balance and harmony beyond the realm of human experience, reaching for the essence of oneness with the Universe.
The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.
One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.
Part of it has to do with the discipline of being actively receptive. At the core of this receptivity is a process that might be called soft eyes. It is a physical sensation. You are not looking for something. You are open, receptive. At some point you are in front of something that you cannot ignore.