After writing all day I go for a walk and see a piece of architecture i want to photograph and i have to take a picture and later a poem comes in my mind.
If all your life means to you is water running over rocks, then photograph it, but I want to create something that would not have existed without me.
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.
Photographs don’t lie, but liars may photograph
A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.
In my philosophy, the meaning of life derives from the people one has known and loved. I have met my share of evil people and know what they are capable of - I was at the liberation of Dachau - but I have always held that evil is not inherent in men and women. I still believe that within a caring society, only the best people will flourish. That is the spirit that has moved me to photograph.
It must be hard to be a model, because you'd want to be like the photograph of you, and you can't ever look that way.
The most important thing is that, when you work with somebody, you build a rapport with that person. They have a certain trust in you. You don't have to explain that much. It's very hard when you photograph someone who's a fresh face and then you don't work with them again for six months. All these people I work with over and over again have qualities that I love. There's something very free about them or there are some slight imperfections about them. I think the more you work with someone, the pictures get better and better.
We sort of understand how painkillers work. You take one, and it reduces your headache. We don't understand how photographs work. And that, to me, is an essential problem as a practitioner.
If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it's a street photograph
The photograph. . . is not a picture of something, but is an object about something.
Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.
A photograph permits a first viewing, and then an individual reflection. It solicits participation, and encourages individuality in interpretation. Television is an autarchy, a dictatorship.
There are photographs that I don’t take now, that I previously would have taken without any thought at all as to any misinterpretations.
It's not enough that [the photograph] is beautiful. If it doesn't move my heart, it won't move anyone else's heart.
The collection of photographs is a statement about the relationship of my camera and me.
That [photographs] disturb readers is exactly as it should be: that's why photojournalism is often more powerful than written journalism.
Photograph because you love doing it, because you absolutely have to do it, because the chief reward is going to be the process of doing it. Other rewards - recognition, financial remuneration - come to so few and are so fleeting. . . Take photography on as a passion, not a career.
We do not see everything in the environment in the complete, totally resolved, explicit character of the photograph. We, in fact, prioritize our seeing.
I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme.