Ken Auletta Quotes

Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.

So many girls second-think their pose or what they're doing. And, in turn, the photos will come out really unnatural. I say to really give the camera a performance - that, and make sure you're comfortable with how you look, and give it a good smile and a filter.

When your mouth drops open, click the shutter.

I actually love talking about taking pictures, and I think that helps everyone.

Very often people looking at my pictures say, 'You must have had to wait a long time to get that cloud just right (or that shadow, or the light).' As a matter of fact, I almost never wait, that is, unless I can see that the thing will be right in a few minutes. But if I must wait an hour for the shadow to move, or the light to change, or the cow to graze in the other direction, then I put up my camera and go on, knowing that I am likely to find three subjects just as good in the same hour.

Today there is too much retouching, and I don't like it, except on me.

News photography teaches you to think fast.

The road to life is rocky, and you may stumble too. So while you point your fingers, someone else is judging you.

To talk about photos rather than making them seems idiotic to me. It's as though I went on and on about a woman I adored instead of making love to her.

I learned working with the negatives could make for better pictures

Forget the camera, forget the lens, forget all of that. With any four-dollar camera, you can capture the best picture.

The retouching is excessive. I do not look like that and more importantly, I don't desire to look like that.

It's pretty amazing to see a guy, while steering at the wheel, suddenly raise his little 300 dollar German camera with one hand and snap something that's on the move in front of him, and through an unwashed windshield at that. (On the road with Robert Frank, 1958)

For photography is a way to capture the moment - not just any moment, but the important one, this one moment out of all time when your subject is revealed to the fullest - that moment of perfection which comes once and is not repeated.

You must photograph where you are involved; where you are overwhelmed by what you see before you.

Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it. The photographers eye is perpetually evaluating. A photographer can bring coincidence of line simply by moving his head a fraction of a millimeter. He can modify perspectives by a slight bending of the knees. By placing the camera closer to or farther from the subject, he draws a detail — and it can be subordinated, or he can be tyrannized by it.

Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.

I do not object to retouching, dodging or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique.

My first wedding was 15 people at our condo. The second was maybe about a hundred people at this fabulous casino. And you know what? I have almost no pictures of the second one, because I put disposable cameras on the tables, because everyone said, "The best pictures are the most candid! The best pictures are the ones people just take!" So, I put disposable cameras on the tables, and guess what? There were so many kids there that those cameras were stomped on. I had so many pictures of the floor, of people's eyes, of someone's finger.

The grievance industry always seeks to blame other people while never finding a solution. That's my problem with it, when solutions are there to be had.

If you mess something up, remember who got you there. Don't be pointing fingers, even if finger-pointing is called for. Only one you got to blame is your own self.

What the world needs is a set villain that people can point at and say, “It’s all your fault!

Make people's portraits in familiar and typical attitudes.

And we could all sit around and wonder and feel bad about each other and blame a lot of people for what they did or didn’t do or what they didn’t know. I don’t know. I guess there would always be someone to blame.

Cartier-Bresson has said that photography seizes a 'decisive moment', that's true except that it shouldn't be taken too narrowly...does my picture of a cobweb in the rain represent a decisive moment? The exposure time was probably three or four minutes. That's a pretty long moment. I would say the decisive moment in that case was the moment in which I saw this thing and decided I wanted to photograph it.