Richard Kern Quotes

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

Photography is still a very new medium and everything must be tried and dare.

Of course, I won't be abandoning photography, because it is my life.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

A photo is a creation.

The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.

I don't have a favorite photo. As a photographer, I have attachments to each image. Not the one photo: the experience of getting the photos is the challenge or the thing.

I photographed rocks and trees and tide pools and nudes and all that stuff for years and years. Until 20 years ago when I found that I could do it in the studio and never have to travel.

I've exhibited quite a few of my photographs. I expand them digitally till they're very big. It's an art school thing, I suppose.

Personal sympathy has helped me on very much. My husband from first to last has watched every picture with delight, and it is my daily habit to run to him with every glass upon which a fresh glory is newly stamped, and to listen to his enthusiastic applause. This habit of running into the dining-room with my wet pictures has stained such an immense quantity of table linen with nitrate of silver, indelible stains, that I should have been banished from any less indulgent household.

A photograph is not an accident - it is a concept.

I believe that the medium of photography prevails entirely as an act of faith in the souls of those who love and practice it. And so every photograph becomes another subtle variation on the theme of the medium itself.

It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart and head.

When you work fast, what you put in your pictures is what your brought with yoiu - your own ideas and concepts. When you spend more time on a project, you learn to understand your subjects. There comes a time when it is not you who is taking the pictures. Something special happens between the photographer and the people he is photographing. He realizes that they are giving the pictures to him.

I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.

If the photographer is to create works that will stand for his spirit in the same way as artists in other genres, he must first - having no ready-made, abstract components such as works and sounds - supply other means to abstraction instead.

A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

The art is the challenge which you must meet every day: the technique you should learn to control with time. The science and the art of photography are really one, and not opposed to each other.

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.

When I photograph someone, I want to shoot the subject and get them out of my studio so I can play with the photos and do all the stuff I want.

Photography is a transformation, not a reproduction.

All I'm doing is photographing. When I was working on The Animals, I was working on a lot of other things too. I kept going to the zoo because things were going on in certain pictures. It wasn't a project.

The process must be concealed from - non-existent for - the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in the taking and not in the making photographs... In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture.