Janet Malcolm Quotes

I don't like gimmicky pictures; I've always hated them. I like pictures that are very clear and clean, whether you're a great street photographer - somebody like Friedlander or Winogrand or Cartier-Bresson - or whether you're a portraitist, like Irving Penn.

Going into a shoot not fully knowing what I want to do - that excitement, that thing that happens, is just so powerful and makes such great pictures.

A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image.

Just as Renaissance artists provided narratives for the era they lived in, so do I. I'm always looking beyond the surface. I've done that ever since I first picked up a camera.

My photography is the result of being there at the right moment.

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

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.

I've learned to create a palette, a vocabulary of ways to take pictures.

Video is freeing, but also lazier. You have to recreate the love of the moment.

We're pretty insane about art direction.

It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

The desire to discover, the desire to move, to capture the flavor, three concepts that describe the art of photography.

Beauty is everywhere. And my photography came naturally without any particular inspirations growing up.

There are an awful lot of people in the world and it's going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them... It was my teacher Lisette Model who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it will be.

I enjoy photographing. It's always interesting, so I can't say one thing is more fun than another. Everything has it's own difficulties.

I love photography and art-directing is something that I really would enjoy to do.

There's no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class. I'm always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don't give a damn how it got made.

The art of making a film and its content are far more interesting to me than the result or impact.

I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.

I don't know how to say easily what I learned. One thing I can say I learned is how amazing photography could be.

My recent drawings that personal ones aren't fashion-related. I sometimes sit and draw people on the bus, or some fantasy hybrid animal. You know, wherever the hand will lead.

It's got to do with the contention between content and form. Invariably that's what's responsible for its energies, its tensions, its being interesting or not.

People go, 'What do you want to do?' What do you want to do? What are you feeling? Going into a shoot not fully knowing what I want to do—that excitement, that thing that happens, is just so powerful and makes such great pictures.

I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life.