David Bailey Quotes

I became hooked on the idea of being able to shoot an image and process it myself, and end up with a product.

A neighborhood friend showed me how it was possible to go to a camera shop and pick up chemicals for pennies... literally... and develop your own film and make prints.

I like the smell of film. I just like knowing there's film going through the camera.

In school I was in the dark room all the time, and I've always collected stray photographs; there's a great deal of memory in them.

The darkroom is just the means to an end.

Instantaneity is photography.

I became involved in photography when I was about thirteen years old.

I also do my own processing, so it means a big commitment in lab time.

My main camera is a Nikon D3. I use a French camera from the 1800s for wet plate photography, I use a Hasselblad sometimes. But to me the camera really doesn't matter that much. I don't have a preference for film or digital.

I am just trying to find a way to make pictures.

I fell in love with the darkroom, and that was part of being a photographer at the time. The darkroom was unbelievably sexy. I would spend all night in the darkroom.

Years ago - in the 70s, for about a decade - I carried a camera every place I went. And I shot a lot of pictures that were still life and landscape, using available light.

When I'm about ready to press the cable release on the View camera, I've tried to anticipate some of the challenges I'm going to encounter in the darkroom.

You can't name the inventor of the camera. The 19th-century invention was chemical: the fixative.

I take a few pictures a week, but the best part is waiting for my film to be developed. The suspense is exciting, and the reward is great.

I was digging in the backyard to get my own clay and making pottery. And then I started taking pictures and built my own darkroom. I would go out at six in the morning and just take pictures.

My lifestyle is bizarre, but the only thing you need to know is where the darkroom is.

I've always thought photography was a bit of an adventure, so to come home with the film, develop it, then look at the results has more of a sense of excitement.

I discovered that I could do whatever I wanted with a negative in a darkroom and an enlarger.

I had an instamatic wind-on camera and remember buying the flashcubes and fixing on top of the frame. The flash credits were limited so you had to be careful not to waste any.

I just had the joy of taking pictures, and I never cared about my negatives. I just gave them away whenever anybody asked for them.

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

The camera is a remarkable instrument. Saturate yourself with your subject, and the camera will all but take you by the hand and point the way.

Since the recording process is instantaneous, and the nature of the image such that it cannot survive corrective handwork, it is obvious that the finished print must be created in full before the film is exposed.

Well, in terms of what a camera does. Again, you go back to that original idea that what you photograph is responsible for how it [the photograph] looks. And it's not plastic, in a way. The problem is unique in photographic terms.