Photographic Legacy Quotes

I've been going through photos of my mother, looking back on her life and trying to put it into context. Very few people age gracefully enough to be photographed through their aging.

I went to Yosemite as an homage to Ansel Adams. I could never be Ansel Adams, but to know that's there for us - there's so much for us in this country.

I do photograph things for people to look at 100 years from now. But we're such a mediated society that things become historical the next day.

I took photos from 1976 to when I left in 1993, primarily for Interview and a column I had called "Bob Colacello's Out" which Andy had conceived of. I've never taken a picture since, not even with my phone! It just felt too Andy Warhol to keep going around town taking photographs. And I never really thought of doing anything with them after I left the magazine until this great Art Director Sam Shahid about for or five years ago asked where all of the old photos were.

Yes, there are billions more photographers, and billions more photographs every day, but who's building up a point of view? Who's photographing with intention, and whose body of work will sustain itself and survive?

Madonna, I think, is the greatest visual musical artist that we've ever had. If you look at her photo log, the photographers that she was able to work with throughout her career framed her in the proper way. It was the proper context. It was that visual that made sure that everything was gonna cut through in a certain way.

Billions of photos are shot every year, and about the toughest thing a photographer can do is invent an original, deeply personal, instantly recognizable visual style. In the early nineties, Wolfgang Tillmans did just that, transforming himself into a new kind of artist-photographer of modern life.

I didn't take that many pictures of The Beatles, but I did photograph them before anybody else knew about them, and that makes me proud. I saw something in them.

Many people misunderstand me - I'm quite happy to be called a photographer. All of a sudden, the art world has caught up with photography, and they are trying to hijack us.

There are a lot of ways to talk about the life of a photograph. You can talk about the afterlife of a photograph, and in the end I talk about that, with the Richard Prince picture. But mainly, what I dedicated the book to being about was how photographs begin their life, and where they begin it. And they begin it with the photographer's imagination and instinct and experience.

Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.

I'm so personally attached to all the characters I met and photographed over the years ... the anthology is like a photographic reliquary that could potentially preserve their grace, fierce joy, and restlessness.