Lauren Greenfield Quotes

Often as a poet I find that I am somewhat outside an experience I want to hold onto, consciously taking mental notes or writing them down in my journal - for fear that I will forget. It's not unlike being on a trip and taking pictures, your face behind a camera the whole time - the entire experience mediated by a lens.

I go out to take a walk, I see something, I take a picture. I take photographs. I have avoided profound explanations of what I do.

The camera photographs what's there.

The most interesting thing was looking out the window and taking photographs of different places on Earth.

Look around you...Feel the wind, smell the air. Listen to the birds and watch the sky. Tell me what's happening in the wide world.

When I was younger, I did things with a camera I would not do by myself. I remember going down to the docks in San Francisco and asking a fisherman if he would take me out on his boat. I would never do that without a camera.

The camera is the eye of history.

To see life. To see the world. To watch the faces of the poor, and the gestures of the proud. To see strange things. Machines, armies, multitudes, and shadows in the jungle. To see, and to take pleasure in seeing. To see and be instructed. To see and be amazed. (Describing the powers of photography; written for the launch of LIFE Magazine, 1936.)

I see things going on before my eyes and I photograph them as they are, without trying to change them. I don't warn people beforehand. That's why I'm a chronicler. I speak about us and I speak about myself.

Often people ask what I'm photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best what I've come up with is I just say: Life today.

When I'm on an adventure, I live with a camera in my hand, and that's what I try to give to the readers inside the space that gives us every chapter of the story.

Photos have the real task of bringing exposure to places that we otherwise don't have much awareness of.

Filming is a witnessing process. You don't try to control it, even though sometimes you wish you could because it can go really, really wrong for you.

Sketch comes from everyday life. You can see someone on the street, and it can turn into a five-minute sketch.

In every Kubrick movie, there is so much great thought put into the surroundings. It's almost like the sets are huge characters in the movie at all times.

I enjoy photography. It's a lot of fun. It keeps me on my P's and Q's and, when you think about it, most people think photography is just going to a game. But you start to think, dang, that would be a good picture. Or you're driving along and see something and think, 'that would be nice.'

I seem to be always returning to photography in my poetry. I guess you could say that I'm documenting the personal history and relationship I have with photography.

I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities.

Opportunity never knocks. It hangs thick in the air all around you. You breathe it unthinking, and dissipate it with your sighs.

I've always wanted to be aware of what's going on around me, and I've wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time.

...my camera is my friend, and I take it everywhere.

Photography is nothing-it's life that interests me.

I'm not very eloquent about things like this, but I think that writing and photography go together. I don't mean that they are related arts, because they're not. But the person doing it, I think, learns from both things about accuracy of the eye, about observation, and about sympathy toward what is in front of you... It's about honesty, or truth telling, and a way to find it in yourself, how to need it and learn from it.

Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.

In every photographer there is something of a stroller.