David Bailey Quotes

I go and see anything that's visually new, any technology that's about picture-making. The technology won't make the pictures different, but someone using it will.

What I do is create images, period.

All painters are interested in photography to a certain extent.

The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.

Photography is better than art. It is a solar phenomenon in which the artist collaborates with the sun.

To talk about photos rather than making them seems idiotic to me. It's as though I went on and on about a woman I adored instead of making love to her.

Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyonwith a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

Photography can be a volatile situation. It can be very potent.

I wanted to get into art. I did some neon stuff. I worked in, not computer-generated, but computer manipulation of pictures.

The image is an image.

Making a pretty picture, an image, is a completely different thing from acting to camera.

I used to be a photographer - and now I'm some kind of digital photographic artist.

I've always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.

I've always painted or drawn pictures or taken still photographs; now I shoot movies. It's just about making images, really.

I love working with photographers.

I've been doing visual stuff for as long as I've been making records; in fact, for longer.

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework - that to me is the art of photography.

It's really the artist in me that loves the idea of an image and an image that provokes an emotion.

I love painting. As far as photography is concerned, I understand nothing.

My favourite stuff is visual, and I always want to work with visual artwork. I think it depends on the person, but for me, photographs of an image of something interesting or inspiring is worth a lot more than words to me. I think every concept I've come up with and turned into films or that will be hopefully become a film comes from images first.

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he maycommunicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole.

Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact