David Bailey Quotes

With photography, I always think that it's not good enough.

If you are truly successful in capturing the pulse of life, then you can speak of a good photograph.

No art is any good unless you can feel how it's put together. By and large it's the eye, the hand and if it's any good, you feel the body. Most of the best stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist's body; you can really lean on it.

Fashion photographers are the new painters.

I like to paint nudes mostly.

I fight to take a good photograph every single time.

Many people when I started didn't believe I was a good fashion photographer, and probably they still think that.

I influenced the BG style by not being able to draw perspective. The BG artists developed cool graphic painting styles to make my bad backgrounds look like they were that way on purpose.

There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough - there has to be vision, and the two together can make a good photograph.

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.

What you need to be a good photographer is an overwhelming curiosity and a good digestion. Sometimes you feel blessed with curiosity, sometimes you feel cursed with it.

When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't.

It's far better to shoot a good picture than a good-looking picture.

This is about relationships, about the placement of potent colors and the canvas sparkling through. I want the eye to dance across the canvas but direct you, too.

I'm a great looker at pictures and paintings, and so forth. That's what I look for - a kind of formal beauty. I want that in my photography. It isn't always what we conventionally think of as beauty.

I model as a human being.

You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.

To compose a subject well means no more than to see and present it in the strongest manner possible.

Good composition is merely the strongest way of seeing.

Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.

I'm a very, very basic photographer. The main strength of my pictures, I guess, is the mood and feel I get out of the people that I meet. But technically I don't think I'm very advanced. That never interested me.

Building becomes architecture only when the mind of man consciously takes it and tries with all his resources to make it beautiful, to put concordance, sympathy with nature, and all that into it. Then you have architecture.

To my way of thinking, the concept drawings that Rembrandt did, the drawings he made that he used to model his artists, to work out the compositions of his paintings: those are cartoons. Look at his sketch for the return of the prodigal son. The expression on the angry younger brother's face. The head is down; the eyebrow is just one curved line over the eyes. It communicates in a very shorthand way. It's beautiful, expressive, and, in a peculiar way, it's more powerful than the kind of stilted, formalized expression in the final painting.

I have never discovered that the nude could be studied in any way except the way I have adopted. All the muscles must be pointed out. To do this all the drapery must be removed.

Ingres was one of those artists to whom the outline was something sacred and magical, and the reason is that it was the means of reconciling the major conflict in his art, the conflict between abstraction and sensibility.