Henri Matisse Quotes

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

I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)

The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.

Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already.

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

I understood the craft of photography when done by an artist is art.

Nature is the most beautiful thing we have. It's better than art because it's from the creator.

The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.

As I grew older, I realized that it was much better to insist on the genuine forms of nature, for simplicity is the greatest adornment of art.

The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.

I've been really interested and inspired by Nan Goldin, the photographer.

I'm a great looker at pictures and paintings, and so forth. That's what I look for - a kind of formal beauty. I want that in my photography. It isn't always what we conventionally think of as beauty.

I see all these professional photographers out at the racetrack, and there's all these people across the world, taking really cool pictures and you're like, 'Man, I want to create that!' I had that mindset when I first grabbed a camera.

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework - that to me is the art of photography.

I was drawn to photography as an extension of film, and the beauty of film is that it's a sensuous, fetishistic medium.

Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

Arguments against photography ever being considered a fine art are: the element of chance which enters in, — finding things ready-made for a machine to record, and of course the mechanics of the medium. I say that chance enters into all branches of art.

I love photography and I love the art of photography. So when I'm working with high-level art photographers, I give them artistic freedom because I want that for myself when it's my turn to do my work and I never try and control it or say I'll only do this or I want it like that.

It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.

No photographer should be blamed when, instead of capturing reality, he tries to show things he has seen only in his imagination. Photography is the youngest art form. All attempts to enlarge its frontiers are important and should be encouraged.

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.

The contest between form and content is what, is what art is about - it's art history. That's what basically everybody has ever contended with. The problem is uniquely complex in still photography.

It always amazes me that just when I think there's nothing left to do in photography and that all permutations and possibilities have been exhausted, someone comes along and puts the medium to new use, and makes it his or her own, yanks it out of this kind of amateur status, and makes it as profound and as moving and as formally interesting as any other medium.

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.