Photographic Process Quotes

My main camera is a Nikon D3. I use a French camera from the 1800s for wet plate photography, I use a Hasselblad sometimes. But to me the camera really doesn't matter that much. I don't have a preference for film or digital.

The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?

I just had the joy of taking pictures, and I never cared about my negatives. I just gave them away whenever anybody asked for them.

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it - the grain, how it feels, the texture.

Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art.

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 are some elements of digital photography that I don't really like, such as the fact that you see the results immediately.

Thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards - never while actually taking a photograph.

The fundamental peculiarity of the photographic medium; the physical objects themselves print their image by means of the optical and chemical action of light.

I enjoy very much seeing a good photographer working. There’s an elegance, just like in a bullfight.

I hate cameras. They interfere, they’re always in the way. I wish: if I could just work with my eyes alone. To get a satisfactory print, one that contains all that you intended, is very often more difficult and dangerous than the sitting itself. When I’m photographing, I immediately know when I’ve got the image I really want. But to get the image out of the camera and into the open, is another matter.

Many photographers are consumed with the idea of making beautiful contact sheets. I am far more interested in making the best final print I can.

Instantaneity is photography.

35mm film isn't ticking away so it's subconscious - performances are allowed to breathe in a much more real way I think.

Photography is, by its nature, exploitative. It's whether you use this process with a sense of responsibility or not. I feel that I do so. My conscience is clear.

From my point of view, photography never got any better than it was in 1840.

Well, in terms of what a camera does. Again, you go back to that original idea that what you photograph is responsible for how it [the photograph] looks. And it's not plastic, in a way. The problem is unique in photographic terms.

Years ago - in the 70s, for about a decade - I carried a camera every place I went. And I shot a lot of pictures that were still life and landscape, using available light.

With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don't think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.

I've never gotten a release from any person. I'm not a businessman; I'm on the side of common sense. Releases ruin the atmosphere of photography.

While photography to Cartier-Bresson is constantly an intuitive process, it is never purely instinctive. It is founded on continuous intellection, on ceaseless consideration during all moments previous to, or preparatory for, the pressing. It does not only operate in the blinding flash of a moment seized; it works all the time. The snatched picture merely cuts across the vein of observable incident or accident which is always beating, whether or not the fingers actually press.

I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.

[Elsa Dorfman]was well known. Certainly in the Boston area, she's well known as a portrait photographer. My wife always wanted to meet her and then there was some benefit where she was taking pictures.

I like the smell of film. I just like knowing there's film going through the camera.

[The daguerreotype] itself must undoubtedly be regarded as the most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science.