Joe McNally Quotes

My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.

I'm so drawn to photography because you can convey a complex story in a single frame.

I love photographs. I love taking photographs. When I see something that's great, I want to capture that. You put it out there and on a place like Instagram you can put it there and review it later.

When we started making 'Where You Live', I bought a bunch of Polaroid cameras in so that people could record the experience. Some of those pictures are in the CD sleeve.

The camera is not the instrument. People are always the instrument.

Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like.

To catch a piece of life on camera and make it come alive, add layers to it and deliver a product that is wholesome is really exciting to me.

I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.

People think photography is about photographing. To me, it’s about relationships.

I loved to press the shutter, to freeze time, to turn little slices of life into rectangle rife with metaphor.

The camera creates a magical transformation. It's not enough to exist; we must chronicle that existence. ... Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don't feel any experience is complete unless it's recorded.

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.

[Photography is ] likewise even French impressionists. So the Sculls bought pop. It was politics, and they moved with it. And I think that could be happening, to some degree, with photography, too. It doesn't cost as much to do it, either.

With a camera, one has to love individual cases.

Photography is something you learn to love very quickly. I know that many, many things are going to ask me to have their pictures taken and I will take them all.

There is no special way a photograph should look.

I think photography is being recognized and collected. Its values have certainly gone up and continue to go up.

I go out to take a walk, I see something, I take a picture. I take photographs. I have avoided profound explanations of what I do.

I think I came alive when I started photography.

You know, a documentary is only interesting once in a while. If you look at a whole book of Dorothea [Lange]'s where she has row after row of people bending over and digging out carrots - that can be very tedious. And so it's only once in a while that something happens that is worth doing.

Photography is better than art. It is a solar phenomenon in which the artist collaborates with the sun.

Photography's central role is to be the absolute medium of the day. It is fantastic that there is no longer any technical intimidation.

Photography is not a sport. It has no rules. Everything must be dared and tried!

The camera’s not a camera, really. It’s an open door we need to walk through. It’s up to us to keep moving our feet.

If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment.