I remember borrowing my mum's Instamatic 110 camera as a kid and doing still lifes of tennis balls and benches and thinking they were going to be something really amazing. They ended up being really bad.
I definitely take a lot of bad pictures!
My mum was very interested in art and liked to write, and my dad was a hobbyist photographer.
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
Photography today appears to be in a state of flight... The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses.
Because it's free, easy to use, and high-quality, photography is now a fixture in our daily lives - something we take for granted.
... I'm sort of a nervous person with the camera, so I will just shoot arbitrarily until I can focus and compose something, and then I make a shot. So generally, in [the] proof sheets, there are only three or four really concentrated efforts to take a photograph. It's not like a professional kind of person who sets it up so every photograph looks really cool.
I had a dark room in my bedroom. I was always taking apart cameras and putting them back together. I still am a tinkerer.
For this very reason I refuse all the tricks of the trade and professional virtuosity which could make me betray my career. As soon as I find a subject which interests me, I leave it to the lens to record it truthfully. Look at the reporters and at the amateur photographer! They both have only one goal; to record a memory or a document. And that is pure photography.
We feel more emotion... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history.
I'm an amateur photographer, apart from being a professional one, and I think maybe my amateur pictures are the better ones.
In the '70s, in Britain, if you were going to do serious photography, you were obliged to work in black-and-white. Color was the palette of commercial photography and snapshot photography.
The whole nature of photography has changed with the advent of a camera in everybody's hand.
I think not being a professional photographer was actually a blessing, because it allowed me to shoot things professional photographers wouldn't shoot, or wouldn't try or attempt to shoot without lights. So I did all my stuff natural and without lights.
I made more lousy pictures than any actor in history.
My parents wielded disposal cameras and Polaroids with the best of them, occasionally begging for at least one decent photo of my brother and me at the state fair, in front of the Golden Gate bridge, or smiling half-heartedly next to a mascot.
Digital photography and Photoshop have made it very easy for people to take pictures. It's a medium that allows a lot of mediocre stuff to get through.
As a matter of fact, nearly all the greatest work is being, and has always been done, by those who are following photography for the love of it, and not merely for financial reasons. As the name implies, an amateur is one who works for love.
The first half of the 20th century belongs to Picasso, and the second half is about photography. They said digital would kill photography because everyone can do it, but they said that about the box brownie in 1885 when it came out. It makes photography interesting because everyone thinks they can take a picture.
Photography to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasurable it my be.
Everyone with a cell phone thinks they're a photographer. Everyone with a laptop thinks they're a journalist. But they have no training, and they have no idea of what we keep to in terms of standards, as in what's far out and what's reality. And they have no dedication to truth.
There are so many great 19th-century photographers, and it's really my favorite period, but the amateurs did such beautiful work.
My dad had been an ardent amateur photographer, and he taught me to compose a photograph from the back to the front, and then populate the picture.
Everyone is a photographer now, remember. That's the great thing about photography.
I'm not a serious photographer like many of my contemporaries. That is to say, I am serious about not being serious.
