David Hockney Quotes

It's not that photography recaptures the world you have been in; more that it creates a new one: photographs are like Post-It Notes reminding us of the deep architectonic forms of space and thought.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

A photograph is not an accident - it is a concept.

Photography is Art and Art is Photography.

A photograph can look anyway. It just depends basically on what you photograph.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

You don't take a picture, you make a picture.

Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyonwith a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed.

[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

I'm just interested in what makes a photograph.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Draw what you see.

A photographer must choose a palette as painters choose theirs.

I've always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.

I've always painted or drawn pictures or taken still photographs; now I shoot movies. It's just about making images, really.

I like to think of an image as different from a photo.

I believe that the medium of photography prevails entirely as an act of faith in the souls of those who love and practice it. And so every photograph becomes another subtle variation on the theme of the medium itself.

Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

Photography is truth.

Photography... is either an expression of a cosmic vision, an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing - to me. (1919)

I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs. Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he 'uncovers' it.

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.