Rachel Morrison Quotes

I have more of a relationship with the subject than I do with my camera equipment. To me, camera equipment is like a tin of shoe polish and a brush - I use that as a tool, but my basic camera is my emotion and my eyes. It's not anything to do with the wonderful cameras I use.

On digital photography: It's fantastic, but it's not a freebie for anything. You still have to have this (he points to his eyes), and this (points to his heart), and feet.

You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

There are photographers who don't really engage with their subject. It's a really unfortunate phrase, but they take their photo and they leave with it. It works but I think it ultimately limits how profound the work can be.

I like to work my camera as if it were a musical instrument.

The filmmaking process is a very personal one to me, I mean it really is a personal kind of communication. It's not as though its a study of fear or any of that stuff.

I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn't have a personal vision or doesn't communicate emotion fails.

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.

A style is not a matter of camera angles or fancy footwork, it's an expression, an accurate expression of your particular opinion.

Saturate yourself with your subject and the camera will all but take you by the hand.

What I think of as style - and I've gotten to this over years of really thinking about it - is that style is the unconscious choices I make.

I've been obsessed with this kind of visual storytelling for quite a while, and I try to create material that allows me to explore it.

I think photography is closest to writing, not painting. It's closest to writing because you are using this machine to convey an idea. The image shouldn't need a caption; it should already convey an idea.

Photography is the easiest medium with which to be merely competent. Almost anybody can be competent. It's the hardest medium in which to have some sort of personal vision and to have a signature style.

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

The camera is not the instrument. People are always the instrument.

For me, I'm not a great wordsmith, and so maybe from lack of great dialogue writing, I thought it's easier and better to express a story through visuals.

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

The ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired off-hand, but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labor.

I just walk around, observing the subject from various angles until the picture elements arrange themselves into a composition that pleases my eye.

From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour, and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

You don't make a photograph just with a camera

The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.