Taylor Steele Quotes

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

What you need to be a good photographer is an overwhelming curiosity and a good digestion. Sometimes you feel blessed with curiosity, sometimes you feel cursed with it.

To me, that is the essence of me as a photographer. It is those ideas, working with them, formulating them and eventually putting them down on paper, photographing them and then going on to the next step.

One longs for a director with a sense of imagination.

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

It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.

I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn't have a personal vision or doesn't communicate emotion fails.

I fight to take a good photograph every single time.

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.

If you are truly successful in capturing the pulse of life, then you can speak of a good photograph.

A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image.

You want to make the photograph work in every way possible. Doesn't matter where it is in the world.

Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe they do, but I paint from reality. I put several things and ideas together, and perhaps, when I have finished, it could show the future.

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

The language that photography has is a formal language. Any photographer is doing something formal. If it's formal, then it must be an aesthetic way to communicate.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

In photo shoots, I rely on instinct. Which is not to say I don't bring ideas to a project or consider it beforehand.

One drawing demands to become a painting, so I start to work on that, and then the painting might demand something else. Then the painting might say, 'I want a companion, and the companion should be like this,' so I have to find that, either by drawing it myself or locating the image.

You always want to come back with an image that's interesting visually, and you hope to get something from the person you photograph that's different than other images you know of these people.

I look at ordinary objects, and I see things that other people don't see. That's why I'm a photographer.

I always say I make pictures rather than take pictures.

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.

Look at lots of exhibitions and books, and don't get hung up on cameras and technical things. Photography is about images.

For me, Picasso was the ultimate man. He taught me that photography is all about how you approach an image: what you do and what you don't do. He inspired me to go beyond what you think is in front of you.

I have a great little camera, and I had a theory that if the story is interesting, it doesn't matter what medium you shoot it on. You just have to make a good film.