Joe Berlinger Quotes

The camera gave me an incredible freedom. It gave me the ability to parade through the world and look at people and things very, very closely.

I like playing the guy on the sidelines. They have more fun.

I write and film history; I don't make it. One can be a good critic and a moral observer, but one remains professionally detached as a writer and a filmmaker.

I don't want to manipulate actuality; I want to record it.

I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities.

I really enjoy behind the camera stuff and I'm a frustrated photographer myself and just love the camera. I love that side of it and that part of the filmmaking world and I enjoy developing things. It's an area that I'll continue to be more active in as time goes by.

You know, the camera is not meant just to show misery. You can show things that you like about the universe, things that you hate about the universe. It's capable of doing both.

I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty.

When the camera starts to roll, there is something of death about it.

In a lot of ways I look at these old photos, and I don't know if I would have been able to communicate with these people on this level if I didn't have a camera. I think I would still be so shy.

I always carry a camera because it is so important to me to take pictures and document all the incredible things and places I have been able to see through this experience.

Beautifully shot, impeccably paced, it was a clear, unrelenting look at the National Trust, its friends and enemies, and it makes you want to burn your passport and beg the Luftwaffe to have another go.

I like being behind the camera because I can control perception and what people see.

None. They should just go out and photograph and stop talking about it. That's the only way they are going to find themselves. They can't do it in their heads - they have to go out and do it in the camera and get it on film.

I make the woman look at the camera as a symbol of all the eyes that will see the picture I am making.

I don't really believe in the mystery of cinematography - what happens in the camera is what the cinematographers create and all that nonsense.

Of course, you do not do any research: you have to go there and do your film. It's not that I would travel there before without a camera and spend half a year on one of those volcanoes and then come back with a camera. You have to have some sort of a clear mindset.

The camera is the eye of history.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.

The experience of the individual has become the experience of the people, thanks solely to the camera.

A camera gives you a purpose.

In GENESIS, my camera allowed nature to speak to me. And it was my privilege to listen.

I think that there isn't a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability... They do not tell stories - they show you what something looks like. To a camera.

I don't like work like that. I am the silent partner. I work through events, I live on the sidelines, I dabble in causes and effects, I watch how the misbegotten creatures of this world live their lives.

It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.