Maripol Quotes

My writing philosophy is throwing spaghetti against the wall. That's how I take pictures, too. If I take 100, surely one will be good.

I always wanted to be a photographer. While I was at school, I got a lab-monkey holiday job in the darkrooms at the 'Independent.' What they taught me there was: you need to get the whole story in one frame.

I played around with the flowers and the lighting, so that was a good way to educate myself.

What I do is create images, period.

I go and see anything that's visually new, any technology that's about picture-making. The technology won't make the pictures different, but someone using it will.

My wife Mariana is a good photographer too and, like me, she just picks up a camera and takes a picture when she sees something, rather than looking too deeply into it.

Has the painter not always gone to an art school, or at least to an established master, for instruction? And the composer, the sculptor, the architect? Then why not the writer? Good poets, like good hybrid corn, are both born and made.

Getting movies developed doesn't do me any good as a producer. It only does me good to get movies made.

A good photographer can make you look incredible, even when you're not feeling very sexy.

We do very little re-writing in the office. We often take on people who show great promise and who we hope will develop into somebody important and someone good.

I'm no snapshot artist. I make very careful choices always, even if I'm using a 35mm camera.

The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.

I still love taking pictures with Polaroid film. For me, it offers the most beautiful way of capturing reality and transferring it onto a flat piece of paper.

I'm not very good with stills. I get all twitchy.

No photographer is as good as the simplest camera.

There's something magical still about it when I get in a darkroom, and you've shot a roll of film and you develop it and you look at your negatives, and there's, like, imagery there. That always stuns me.

I'm an image-maker.

Digital technology has thrown a closed shop wide open, and there are more people out there snapping away than ever before. Some of the pictures are bad, some of them are good, and many of them need some seasoning and direction.

Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.

I photographed rocks and trees and tide pools and nudes and all that stuff for years and years. Until 20 years ago when I found that I could do it in the studio and never have to travel.

Photography, for me, is something I can control fully. It's wholly my own expressions.

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.

I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than of having written something very good, a very good story. Maybe it's because the element of magic is so present in a good photograph - luck and magic, but also hard work and being ready and all that.

When we started making 'Where You Live', I bought a bunch of Polaroid cameras in so that people could record the experience. Some of those pictures are in the CD sleeve.

Polaroids were the instant thing to get a photo back when I started it. You had to wait two days to get your film back if you had a real camera, and I was more of an instant-gratification guy.