Errol Morris Quotes

However spontaneous I hope a photograph will look, I always put a lot of thought into how I can make it happen. The very best pictures are the most relaxed, so a lot of fussing around technically can completely break the spell, and everyone freezes up with nerves.

In my photographs it is apparent that there was no posing at the moment I released the shutter.

The darkroom is just the means to an end.

The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.

I like to do the pictures before people get too self-conscious. I like to be spontaneous and get a shot before the subject thinks too much about it.

Most people stiffen with self-consciousness when they pose for a photograph. Lighting and fine camera equipment are useless if the photographer cannot make them drop the mask, at least for a moment, so he can capture on his film their real, undistorted personality and character.

A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image.

Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me.

Photography is like a moment, an instant. You need a half-second to get the photo. So it's good to capture people when they are themselves.

Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.

Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.

I photograph different people all the time. I like to shoot all kinds of people.

Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know.

We are only beginning to learn what to say in a photograph. The world we live in is a succession of fleeting moments, any one of which might say something significant.

All my life I've taken photographs of people who are completely at peace being what they were in the situations I photographed them in.

I think that's the strength of photography - to decide the decisive moment, to click in the moment to come up with a picture that never comes back again.

It ain't the picture and it ain't the camera - it's the operator.

Maybe black and white is the best medium for landscapes, I don't know.

If you recognize a photograph by me, I'm a failure.

Suppose Cartier-Bresson asked the man who jumped the puddle to do it again --- it never would have been the same. Start stealing!

No amount of toying with shades of print or with printing papers will transform a commonplace photograph into anything other than a commonplace photograph.

Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.

...candid still photography had taken over... What was interesting was that the photographs came without any intention of instructing you... You're like a cat looking out the window. You don't have to even know what you're watching, but you're watching it, and you're watching it very accurately.

I was always trying to take art photographs, but the most interesting pictures were the snapshots. The artsy pictures were boring, always.

I like there to be a joke in practically every photo I take. Nobody has the right to make photography boring.