I have looked at so many photographs, I can not see them anymore.
It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.
I would love to photograph Stephen Hawking. I am just fascinated by science, I really am.
A photograph is not an accident - it is a concept.
The question is not whether a picture is good, in some formal, technical sense, but, does it mean what I need it to mean? Writers can edit sentences that may be well-crafted but that don't express an intended thought. But in photography, there are no revisions: A photograph is in or it's out, and the photographer must live with the consequences of his or her choices.
You photograph with all your ideology.
Words are a completely different form of expression. The word P-E-N-I-S is an entirely different form of communication than a photograph of the same thing. H
[The photograph] is fabricated out of the unfabricated dross of passing life (while paradoxically still trading on the indexical heft of that dross).
We perceive and interpret the outer world through a set of incredibly fine internal receptors. But we are incapable, by ourselves, of grasping or tweezing out any permanent, sharable figment of it. Practically speaking, we ritually verify what is there, and are disposed to call it reality. But, with photographs, we have concrete proof that we have not been hallucinating all our lives.
The context in which a photograph is seen affects the meaning the viewer draws from it.
Actors are hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are. You don't know if you're getting a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. It depends what mood they're in.
Trying to analyze a situation without enough data was like looking at a photograph of a ball in flight and trying to gauge its direction. Is it going up, down, sideways? Is it about to collide with a baseball bat? Is it moving at all, or is something on the blind side holding it in place? A single frame didn't mean a thing. Patterns were based on data. With enough datapoints, you could predict just about anything.
For a photographer, it's a necessity that you can shoot stuff magically. Accidents are necessary, but after I take the photograph, it's not over. I work on it more.
I was always involved in art and when I went under contract at Warner Bros. at 18, it afforded me the possibility of never having to stop painting, never having to stop taking photographs and so on, and to actually live a cultural life.
You have to bring to the photograph a prejudice about something, and I'm prejudiced against farmers who tie dead animals on fences. Therefore, I can make a meaningful photograph.
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
Sometimes I photograph without looking through the viewfinder. I have mastered that well enough, it is almost as if I were looking through it.
The transactions between me and the people that I photograph are very very collaborative.
The only objective truth that photographs offer is the assertion that somebody or something. . . was somewhere and took a picture.
there is this one photograph. . . that is just beautiful. it would be impossible to describe how beautiful it is, but i’ll try. if you listen to the song “asleep,” and you think about those pretty weather days that make you remember things, and you think about the prettiest eyes you’ve known, and you cry and the person holds you back, then i think you will see the photograph.