Mario Testino Quotes

With photography, I always think that it's not good enough.

A mad, keen photographer needs to get out into the world and work and make mistakes.

Sometimes I'm amazed by how much you can do as a photographer.

I can tell you what I personally use a camera for. Basically, it is to record a moment. A moment that is vital to give the viewer a sensation of liveliness, sadness, joy and so on.

Which is my best picture? The one I will do tomorrow.

You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.

I think a lot of the time these days people are so concerned about having the right camera and the right film and the right lenses and all the special effects that go along with it, even the computer, that they're missing the key element.

There are a thousand ways to point a camera, but really only one.

I'm not photographing anything naked these days. I haven't been concentrating on bodies recently.

I fight to take a good photograph every single time.

I've learned to create a palette, a vocabulary of ways to take pictures.

From the beginning, the camera and I were great friends. It loves me, and I love it.

No photographer is as good as the simplest camera.

I've been taking photographs since I was a teenager, and fashion has taught me a lot more about photography. It's definitely inspired me.

I like photographers. You don't ask questions.

I love a well composed shot. It doesn't necessarily have to be beautiful, but it must be well composed.

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.

I'm aware of other artists, but what I'm really most interested in is viewing individual pictures. I like dramatic pictures.

I have a low-tech camera with one lens that I've shot everything in my life on. My subjects and my subject matter sometimes really are powerful, and so my job is to get it into focus.

Photography is not cute cats, nor nudes, motherhood or arrangements of manufactured products. Under no circumstances it is anything ever anywhere near a beach.

There's no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class. I'm always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don't give a damn how it got made.

I'm a very, very basic photographer. The main strength of my pictures, I guess, is the mood and feel I get out of the people that I meet. But technically I don't think I'm very advanced. That never interested me.

The thing about photography is, some people surround themselves with extremely strong subject matter. And unless you're a moron, you're going to get a really strong photograph.

John Loengard, the picture editor at Life, always used to tell me, ”If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.

I think as I get older that's an area that I'd like to explore more. Going from being in front of the lens to behind it.