Antony Armstrong-Jones Quotes

My best efforts were some modern things that looked like very lousy Matisses. Thank God I had the sense to realize they were lousy, and leave Paris.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

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.

People see my photos and think I labor over my image and I'm this cool, brooding artist. But I'm just having fun with it.

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

Maybe black and white is the best medium for landscapes, I don't know.

You know, as photographers, we do pictures, and people either like them or they hate them.

From the moment that photography appeared, the descriptive genre began to invade Letters... In verse as in prose the décor and exterior aspects of life took an almost excessive place.

Photography is Art and Art is Photography.

A photograph can look anyway. It just depends basically on what you photograph.

I came in as an established artist. People were hiring me for what I did and for who I was. I think that has given me a vast amount of leeway; I feel so lucky that I came in that way.

The world of the cinema and of painting are very different; precisely, the possibilities of photography and the cinema reside in that unlimited fantasy which is born of things themselves... a piece of sugar can become on the screen larger than an infinite perspective of gigantic buildings.

Because I'm interested in depiction, representation, therefore you're interested in photography. You don't ignore it.

What an artist does, is fail. Any reading of the literature, (I mean the literature of artistic creation), however summary, will persuade you instantly that the paradigmatic artistic experience is that of failure. The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition. There is something "out there" which cannot be brought "here". This is standard. I don't mean bad artists, I mean good artists. There is no such thing as a "successful artist" (except, of course, in worldly terms).

I can't talk about my style. It us kind of difficult for me. I don't like styles. I only like taking photos and expressing myself through them.

You don't take a picture, you make a picture.

Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyonwith a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed.

Photography is not only drawing with light, though light is the indispensable agent of its being. It is modeling or sculpturing with light, to reproduce the plastic form of natural objects. It is painting with light.

If you take a good look at the book [ Stock Photographs], it's largely a portrait gallery of faces - faces that I found dramatic. And some of those turned out to be reasonably dramatic photographs. But that's all it is, I think.

There is no special way a photograph should look.

I'd always wanted to know the difference between a mark that was art and one that wasn't.

There are two parts to the process: taking the picture and finding ways of using it.

Clothing is always a tool that helps me take a picture. But it's never about the clothing.

I could take a photo, but I'd rather paint a picture.

I didn't become a commercially successful artist by design, and actually I think that commercially successful just means, if you analyse it, that a lot of people like you. It's become a dirty word, and I don't necessarily think it needs to be.