Yousuf Karsh Quotes

There are photographers who don't really engage with their subject. It's a really unfortunate phrase, but they take their photo and they leave with it. It works but I think it ultimately limits how profound the work can be.

I've been criticised for pretty, smiley photographs, but at least someone is happy! In my mind, I am always giving the image to the sitter.

It's hard for me to assess what I brought because each time you pick up a camera and point it at a person, you're trying to define that person so to talk generally is difficult because I have to think of a given image in order to conjure up what we're talking about.

The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.

Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.

With modelling, if you want to be good at it, you try to tell a story in a photo and give a person a sense of feeling.

There is a secret, I think. When you are front of a camera there is something that happens. Some relationship, some movement, some strange kind of suspension. That's where you find the layer in yourself that is duplicated in everyone. And when you get it right, if you can imagine all the hearts beating in one beat, it's like that. It's beautiful.

One view of photography is that it is a zen-like act which captures reality with its pants down - so that the vital click shows the anatomy bare. In this, the photographer is invisible but essential. A computer releasing the shutter would always miss the special moment that the human sensibility can register. For this work, the photographer's instinct is his aid, his personality a hindrance.

My biggest fear always is that I’ll photograph an idea rather than a person, so I try to be quite sensitive to how people are.

Photography is a magic thing. A thing that has mysterious odors, a little strange and frightening, something one quickly grows to love.

Photography for me is not looking, it's feeling. If you can't feel what you're looking at, then you're never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.

When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving.

Photography isn't about seeing, it's about feeling. If I don't have some kind of feeling for what I'm shooting, how can I expect the person who looks at it to feel anything?

Rare are the people who can capture a human being.

When you are doing portraits, you have that intimacy with someone for a few minutes. For a really good portrait, you don't take the portrait - it's given.

I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense... symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller - to find out how they are.

Photography's a case of keeping all the pores of the skin open, as well as the eyes. A lot of photographers today think that by putting on the uniform, the fishing vest, and all the Nikons, that that makes them a photographer. But it doesn't. It's not just seeing. It's feeling.

When painting portraits a lot of people say, 'Why not get a photograph of the person?' Photography is wonderful and it is an art form in itself, but... my portrait is a culmination of elements... a truer image of a person than just the 'click' of a snapshot.

The portrait of a person is one of the most difficult things to do. It means you must almost bring the presence of that person photographed to other people in such a way that they don't have to know that person personally, but that they are still confronted with a human being that they won't forget. That's a portrait.

The herculean task of a photographer is to capture a momentary frame as beautiful in reality, as it would be in a dream.

Photography is a transformation, not a reproduction.

We can look at people's faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states - for a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.

When we were kids, growing up in the sixties, the only images we had of ourselves were either still photographs or 8mm movies.... Now we have video, digital cameras, MP3s, and a million other ways to document ourselves. But the still photograph continues to hold a sense of mystery and awe to me.

Often people ask what I'm photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best what I've come up with is I just say: Life today.