Imogen Cunningham Quotes

But I'm the only one who can paint the moon, because I'm the only one who knows whether that's right or not.

The businessman says 'If I don't do it first, somebody else will.' The artist says 'If I don't do it first, nobody else will.'

Making art is different for everyone.

I never set out to make a movie that was everything to everybody; if that were the case, we could all just take a picture of a tree and agree that the tree is beautiful and move on with our lives. I wouldn't even need to show up.

I'm not a politician or a scholar or political historian. I'm just a photographer who's trying to capture a spirit. It's not an intellectual process; it's an intuitive process.

The mindset that I have on every project I take on is, 'How do I make this interesting enough for me to want to stop and look at it?' So in that regard, what I do behind the camera, whether it's still or motion picture, is the same.

People criticized me for my photography. They said it's not art.

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.

So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject. But it's hard, because everybody has style. You can't help it.

Art is all a matter of personality.

Photographers tend to have the non-judgmental gene

Every time I'm preparing a new production, I'm trying to reinvent my style and offer the audience several choices.

I think in any work of art, there always will be randomness about what is good, what is bad.

When Wes has a new a project, you know that it's going to be something as different as the previous was from the previous one. Each time, he tries to take you to a country, or a land that is unknown for you and for him, and reinvent this land. That's what he did with 'Darjeeling,' with 'Mr. Fox,' with 'Moonrise Kingdom.'

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.

When the woman is attractive, is it an interesting picture, or is it the woman? I had a lot of headaches with that, which was why it was interesting. I don't think I always got it straight.

Photographers who come up with power never get accused of imitating anyone else even though they photograph the same broom, same street, same portraits.

As an aspiring artist, you should strive for originality of vision. Have something to say and a fresh way of saying it. No story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it’s not the work of the imagination.

The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope. This is not to say that he is unconcerned with the truth.

In every photographer there is something of a stroller.

I didn't take inspiration from other photographers, which in a way helped to find my own images.

Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.

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

First of all, I should preface this by the observation that artists are not the best judges of what they've done and the word definitive does not belong, in my opinion, in any conversation about art. When somebody says it's the "definitive" something, I'm always recoiling.

Pictures you have taken have an influence on those that you are going to make. That's life!