Christopher Isherwood Quotes

I had the attitude that I would work with this present-day material and do the best I could to describe it with photography, not intending to make any particular comment about whether it was good or bad or whether I liked it or not. It was just there, and I was interested in it. That's what I still do today.

Photography has a relation to intervention, but photographing is not the same as an intervening.

The thing is that when you don't carry a camera, that's when you see pictures in particular, or at least that's when you think you see pictures in particular. When you do carry it, if you do see one on the occasion that you do, you can take it.

My work is drawn to the political but avoids an agenda. There is no inherent critique or support.

I do not judge, I only chronicle.

I'm a social writer in the sense that I want to record, but not in the sense of trying to change people's minds.

You can say I give you this information as a dispassionate observer.

Photographers tend to have the non-judgmental gene

Many photographers get involved with the people whom they take pictures of; others prefer being observers, keeping a certain distance.

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.

It's about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception. You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organising them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy.

Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.

In every photographer there is something of a stroller.

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 like fencing. You must keep your distance, wait, and then thrust.

I don't deny or affirm anything. I'm not very personal.

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.

The photographer's art is a continuous discovery which requires patience and time.

Rene Char wrote somewhere, apropos poetry, that there are those who create and those who discover; they are too completely different worlds. Photograph also has two sides to it and thank goodness, I am only intersted in those who discover; I feel a certain solidarity with those who set out in a spirit of discovery; I think there is much more risk invovled in this than in trying to create images; and in the end, reality is more important.

I love people, and photographing people is something I hope I never get tired of.

Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningness. If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

[Nabokov's] language is made visible . . . like a veil or transparent curtain. You cannot help seeing the curtain as you peek into the intimate rooms behind.

I've no doubt that those photographs i took will make people look at everything in a more interesting way - the little tear on one piece of paper, the shadow on another. But good painting has always done that - made you see things. And the most ordinary can be the most extraordinary.

The camera gave me an incredible freedom. It gave me the ability to parade through the world and look at people and things very, very closely.

When I’m photographing I see life.