Jack Kerouac Quotes

I don't roam around with a camera and never did. I took pictures in spurts, for my books, for some assignments or on special occasions. Like people who take out their cameras for Christmas and birthdays. Each time, like them, probably, I feel it’s the first time and as if I would have to relearn the moves. Luckily, it comes pretty fast, like riding a bike.

Photography is my one recreation and I think it should be done well.

Photograph the world as it is. Nothing's more interesting than reality.

Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.

I remember the first time I went out on the street to shoot pictures. I was in downtown Philadelphia, and I just took a walk and started making contact with people and photographing them, and I thought, 'I love this. This is what I want to do forever.' There was never another question.

I was drawn to street photography because there are pictures everywhere there: a woman holding a dog, a baby screaming to be put in a pram, kids playing punch ball, stores with huge barrels of kosher pickles outside. I wanted to photograph life, and here it was.

One of my favorite photographers is Ruvan Wijesooriya, who takes most of the LCD photos. His work is incredibly colloquial and raw.

For my first book, 'New York,' I had one camera and two lenses. It was fotografia povera.

Sometimes I have taken photographs and just felt so excited that I could barely hold the camera steady, and the photo was boring.

When your mouth drops open, click the shutter.

I guess I've shot about 40,000 negatives and of these I have about 800 pictures I like.

When I was younger I used to be really into photography, and I still am, I just don't really get to do it besides taking my own artists photos and stuff like that.

I've thought of becoming a photographer! To save my talent as a writer.

I am a professional photographer by trade and an amateur photographer by vocation.

In photography, you've got to be quick, quick, quick, quick...Like an animal and a prey.

When the light is right and everything is working for me, I feel as tense as when making a difficult maneuver high on a mountain. A minute - and sometimes mere seconds - can make the difference between a superb image and a mundane one.

There are photographic fanatics, just as there are religious fanatics. They buy a so-called candid camera there is no such thing: it’s the photographer who has to be candid, not the camera.

I don't think of it as difficult. It would be difficult if I were carrying something heavy, but I carry Leicas. You can't talk about it that way. I'm not operating a shovel and getting tired.

I started photography more or less by accident when I was already 27. I was taken on as an assistant by a photographer who was a friend of a friend and I very quickly understood the potential of expression in photography.

I think the camera is a wonderful machine, don't you? And not to take photographs in this century is crazy.

Everybody can take a good picture. Everybody is interesting. Everyone has an interesting face. Some people are more difficult or more nervous or more tired. When you do a movie, you have action, you're talking, you're moving. You don't see the camera. Taking a picture with a photographer, you don't talk, it's more difficult than in a movie for your body to relax, to be yourself.

The technique of 35mm photography appears simple. One is beguiled by the quick viewing and operation, and by the very questionable inclination to make many pictures with the hope that some will be good.

He wanted head and hands and arms on a pillow - in many different positions. I was asked to move my hands in many different ways - also my head - and I had to turn this way and that. There were nudes that might have been of several different people - sitting - standing - even standing upon the radiator against the window - that was difficult - radiators don't intend you to stand on top of them. (On being photographed by Alfred Stieglitz)

Photography has been a passion of mine since I was 15.

Very often people looking at my pictures say, 'You must have had to wait a long time to get that cloud just right (or that shadow, or the light).' As a matter of fact, I almost never wait, that is, unless I can see that the thing will be right in a few minutes. But if I must wait an hour for the shadow to move, or the light to change, or the cow to graze in the other direction, then I put up my camera and go on, knowing that I am likely to find three subjects just as good in the same hour.