photography creativity Quotes

If you have enough craft, you've done your homework and you're practiced. You can then make the photograph you desire.

There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

If the guy behind the camera is not good, the pictures are bad. It's still you, and it's the same lines and everything, but it doesn't work.

I started photography more or less by accident when I was already 27. I was taken on as an assistant by a photographer who was a friend of a friend and I very quickly understood the potential of expression in photography.

I like there to be a joke in practically every photo I take. Nobody has the right to make photography boring.

The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.

There is something about this process, and about the whole 8 x 10 [camera] business, that takes it out of the arena of the snapshot, even though, of course, I'm always desperate for that feeling. I wanted those family pictures to look effortless. I wanted them to look like snapshots. And some of them did.

What you need to be a good photographer is an overwhelming curiosity and a good digestion.

The camera cannot, but the photographer can.

There's no great mystique to photography. A lot of photographers like to put their hands up to their forehead and tell you how they've suffered and so forth. Well, I just rent a car and drive to the place and take the pictures.

The thing about photography is, some people surround themselves with extremely strong subject matter. And unless you're a moron, you're going to get a really strong photograph.

You can't teach people photography, they've got to learn how to do it the best way possible for them. They can learn from looking at pictures taken by well-known people, but they don't really get intimate with the medium until they've made a few bad shots!

I don't care how you photograph - use the kitchen mop if you must, but if the product is not true to the laws of photography... you have produced something that is dead. (1923)

I didn't see painters doing paintings of glassware and glass shelves or sand dunes and receding snow fences. Why does that interest photographers and not artists?

I think there can no longer be such a thing as hitting a wall on a photo shoot. If I ever hear a photographer say to me, 'OK, what else?' I should retire, because that should never happen now having experienced just how much the body is capable of doing.

Photography is my one recreation and I think it should be done well.

The technique of 35mm photography appears simple. One is beguiled by the quick viewing and operation, and by the very questionable inclination to make many pictures with the hope that some will be good.

I’ve said about a million times that the best thing a young photographer can do is to stay close to home. Start with your friends and family, the people who will put up with you. Discover what it means to be close to your work, to be intimate with a subject. Measure the difference between that and working with someone you don't know as much about. Of course there are many good photographs that have nothing to do with staying close to home, and I guess what I'm really saying is that you should take pictures of something that has meaning for you

For half a century photography has been the "art form" of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? to the finger on the button? to the law of averages?

I've thought of becoming a photographer! To save my talent as a writer.

I don't care how they think of it. Some of these people are acquiring some very good pictures by a lot of different photographers.

I want to be the toughest photographer in the world.

This might seem off the track, but an interesting thing to me that others could talk about better than I, but one of the growth areas in photographic education has been the so-called slow photography.

There are photographic fanatics, just as there are religious fanatics. They buy a so-called candid camera there is no such thing: it’s the photographer who has to be candid, not the camera.