Image Composition Quotes

I have no interest in being famous. I just want to make famous photographs.

Digital technology has thrown a closed shop wide open, and there are more people out there snapping away than ever before. Some of the pictures are bad, some of them are good, and many of them need some seasoning and direction.

Photography should be redefined. It's largely technical... Photography is just unbelievably limiting. I always think of David Bailey and all the fashion photographers - they overlap, you can't always tell who did it. I don't really even like photography all that much. I just think it's so overdone.

Photography is the most direct communication in non-violent contacts.

You become technically proficient whether you want to or not, the more you take pictures.

I was just taking pictures to see what they looked like. Just for the fun of it. It wasn't about anything in some cases. Some of them were just about the joy of opening up an aperture and seeing what shows up.

I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.

My first pictures are from 1972, and my first proper camera dates back to 1973. During the first year I used my father's camera. It had a flash on it, which I don't like, but I didn't know anything about photography back then, so it was just what I did.

I take it very seriously, the photographic craft.

It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.

I don't have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions.

Photography was my choice of weapons.

PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne.

There's nobody between you and the print. Nobody. It's you and the subject and the final print. And if you get it published that way, you've said it.

I'm not trying to be in your face and take a picture that is like a journalistic kind of image. I got interested in a kind of complicated, compiled, visual field.

I wanted to be a scientist. I did a thesis on lions. But I realised photography can show things writing can't. Lions were my professor of photography.

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

The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.

None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.

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 head of the photographer is more important than his camera

My two great loves when I'm shooting are working with great actors and composing images.

When people talk to me about picture hunters, I very quietly laugh. I'm not a hunter of pictures, I'm a fisher of pictures.

A photograph is just a tiny slice of a subject. A piece of them in a moment. It seems presumptuous to think you can get more than that.

Look, I'm not an intellectual - I just take pictures.