Teju Cole Quotes

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.

When a moment in front of me appears to be particularly special, whether it be by beauty or experience, I capture it. I usually find a reason to justify taking that photo - symmetry, or color, or contrast - and it's my hope that my photography sheds light onto what I see and do on a daily basis.

I think about a Richard Avedon photo series, the kind of faces he gets of real people, which I find so captivating. Fellini was also great in filling his films with this ambiance, this environment, sometimes chaotic and carnival-like, but people's faces were always amazing.

I consider myself very lucky. I'm known for photographing celebrities, but, in a nutshell, my first love is photography.

I think each shoot has a different personality.

Most photographers would feel a certain embarrassment in admitting publicly that they carried within them a sense of wonder, yet without it they would not produce the work they do, whatever their particular field.

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

My photography is often a sociological look at American culture, and it's been very well published in the U.K.

First you study photography, then you practice photography, then you serve photography, and finally one becomes photography.

I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.

I wanted to be a scientist. I did a thesis on lions. But I realised photography can show things writing can't. Lions were my professor of photography.

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

Capturing a beautiful moment in a photo is something I'm very passionate about.

I got my first camera when I was 21 - my boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday - but at that point politics was my life, and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium.

I like Ryan McGinley's work.

Photography belongs to a fraternity of its own. I was young and enthusiastic and wanted to take good pictures to show the other photographers. That, and the professional pride of convincing an editor that I was the man to go somewhere, were the most important things to me.

Anybody doesn't like these pitchers don't like potry, see? Anybody don't like potry go home see television shots of big hatted cowboys being tolerated by kind horses. Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the poets of the world. To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.

My work is about making candy for the eyes. It's about grabbing your attention. Even though my work is appearing in magazines I am trying to make a large picture. I want my photographs to read like a poster.

The camera's a ballpoint pen, an imbecile; it's not worth anything if you don't have anything to say.

I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs. Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he 'uncovers' it.

We're making so many images today and it's unbelievable. I shoot stuff all the time. I try to figure a lot out before I paint. I do a tremendous amount of shooting.

Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.

I have no interest in being famous. I just want to make famous photographs.

It is a great honor for me to be compared to Henri Cartier-BressonBut I believe there is a very big difference in the way we put ourselves inside the stories we photograph. He always strove for the decisive moment as being the most important. I always work for a group of pictures, to tell a story. If you ask which picture in a story I like most, it is impossible for me to tell you this. I don't work for an individual picture. If I must select one individual picture for a client, it is very difficult for me.