William Klein Quotes

I was drawn to street photography because there are pictures everywhere there: a woman holding a dog, a baby screaming to be put in a pram, kids playing punch ball, stores with huge barrels of kosher pickles outside. I wanted to photograph life, and here it was.

One of my favorite photographers is Ruvan Wijesooriya, who takes most of the LCD photos. His work is incredibly colloquial and raw.

Photograph the world as it is. Nothing's more interesting than reality.

I don't have lights, I don't have assistants, I just go and meet somebody and take a photograph. That's really basic, and that's how I used to work when I was 17 or 18 in Holland.

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

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

All I wanted was to connect my moods with those of Paris. Beauty paints and when it painted most, I shot.

Some time ago, we went to Asia and took a camera along, and I began to do what I'd done even years ago doing people. I couldn't get interested in it. And I did hundreds of photographs of details of the monuments as sculpture.

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

I have a low-tech camera with one lens that I've shot everything in my life on. My subjects and my subject matter sometimes really are powerful, and so my job is to get it into focus.

How I wished I'd have had a camera of my own, a mad mental camera that could register pictorial shots, of the photographic artist himself prowling about for his ultimate shot - an epic in itself. (On the road with Robert Frank, 1958)

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

I remember the first time I went out on the street to shoot pictures. I was in downtown Philadelphia, and I just took a walk and started making contact with people and photographing them, and I thought, 'I love this. This is what I want to do forever.' There was never another question.

I knew from the first moment I picked up a camera, on my first school assignment, what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was going to find a way to travel the world and tell the stories of the people I met through photographs.

Just film what's there, trust what came before, one hour before, and make it easy.

I realize that I had the best of serious picture journalism.

A number of years ago, I found a book of photography by Weegee; he was a crime photographer in the 1930s in New York. He was the first person to put a police scanner in a car and drive around.

I think that's the strength of photography - to decide the decisive moment, to click in the moment to come up with a picture that never comes back again.

I don't click pictures. People carry a camera with them while travelling, take pictures, keep them as memories, but I don't. I don't even have a camera.

I admired the work of photographers like Beaton, Penn, and Avedon as much as I respected the grittier photographers such as Robert Frank. But in the same way that I had to find my own way of reportage, I had to find my own form of glamour.

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.

I think a lot of times, especially for certain stories, photographers travel together for safety reasons, and they also invariably cross paths. But you could have 10 photographers shooting together in the same spot but capturing different images.

At some point during my travels, I had a slight change of focus which would end up defining the rest of my career. I began taking pictures of people. In addition to all the buildings, street signs and fire hydrants, I started photographing some of the interesting humans that passed by me on the street.

Each time I arrived in a new city, I'd get lost in the streets and photograph everything that looked interesting, taking nearly a thousand photographs every day. After each day of shooting, I'd select 30 or 40 of my favorite photographs and post them on Facebook. I named the albums after my first impression of each city.