Visual Capture Quotes

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

I could take a photo, but I'd rather paint a picture.

You know, they always say that the photographer is a hunter of images. That is a flattering image, the idea of a hunter, it's virile, acquired power. Actually though, it isn't that. We are really fishermen with hooks and lines.

However spontaneous I hope a photograph will look, I always put a lot of thought into how I can make it happen. The very best pictures are the most relaxed, so a lot of fussing around technically can completely break the spell, and everyone freezes up with nerves.

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

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

Most people if I like their music, I can get good pictures.

Watching a movie should be like hunting. Out of context, every image of the cinema is yours for a split second. Take them before they bury it.

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

I seldom think when I take a picture. My eyes and fingers react - click. But first, it's most important to decide on the angle at which your photograph is to be taken.

It's like being called up in the draft. The peculiar joy of hemorrhaging without bleeding starts when the evil little red light glows on the monstrous camera.

All things are photographable.

Something catches your eye, or your interest. You attack it in some way or observe it in some way, and try to put it in some kind of form and take a picture. It's as simple as that.

Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.

You can't expect to take a definitive image in half an hour. It takes days, often years.

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.

When I take a picture I take 10 percent of what I see.

It's so hard to shoot wealth. It doesn't show up on film.

Memory selects single important images, just as the camera does. In that manner both are able to isolate the highest moments of living.

Photography is an investigation of both the outer and the inner worlds. The first experiences with the camera involve looking at the world beyond the lens, trusting the instrument will 'capture' something 'seen.' The terms shoot and take are not accidental; they represent an attitude of conquest and appropriation. Only when the photographer grows into perception and creative impulse does the term make define a condition of empathy between the external and the internal events.

The camera is objective. When it records a face it can't make any hierarchical decisions about a nose being more important than a cheek. The camera is not aware of what it is looking at. It just gets it all down.

Everything is a subject. Every subject has a rhythm. To feel it is the raison detre. The photograph is a fixed moment of such a raison detre, which lives on in itself.

My way is to seize an image the moment it has formed in my mind, to trap it as a bird and to pin it at once to canvas. Afterward I start to tame it, to master it. I bring it under control and I develop it.

When taking a photo, I tend to look for one of the following: depth, symmetry, color or contrast. All of those things catch my eye to the point where I stop dead in my tracks to capture whatever it is that I've seen.

Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.