Photography Essence Quotes

I do not want [photography] explained to me in terms of... formulas, learned, but so hopelessly unsatisfying. I do not want my butterfly stuck on a pin and put in a glass case. I want to see the sunlight on its wings as it flits from flower to flower and I don't care a rap what its Latin name may be.

I never photograph sunsets and I never photograph moonrises. I'm not interested in what things look like.

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

For me, the photography, in its purest form, is a variant of the fable. Another way of saving the appearances - a way of signifying, through this fabulous capture, that this supposed real world is always about to lose its meaning and its reality.

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.

A photograph has no value unless it looks exactly like a photograph and nothing else.

There are a thousand ways to point a camera, but really only one.

I find the surface of a photograph a thing of beauty in and of itself, and it is this surface that makes a photograph unique relative to other two-dimensional media.

A photograph for me does not have a sense of spiritual seduction, it does not have an essence, that this is something that permeates and which is eternal through time.

What to me is anathema - a corpse-like, outmoded hangover - is for photography to be a bad excuse for another medium. ... Is not photography good enough in itself, that it must be made to look like something else, supposedly superior?

Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important.

Objectivity is of the very essence of photography, its contribution and at the same time its limitation

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

It was only after a while, after photographing mines and clear-cutting of forests in Maine, that I realized I was looking at the components of photography itself. Photography uses paper made from trees, water, metals, and chemistry. In a way, I was looking at all these things that feed into photography.

If I photograph you I don't have you, I have a photograph of you. It's got its own thing. That's really what photography, still photography, is about.

This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition - an organic coordination of visual elements.

Part of the mystery of any given photograph is the fact that it was taken at a certain time and in a certain place and time keeps moving on. A photograph might be a moment in time preserved, but the world continues to change around it.

Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography.