James Balog Quotes

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.

I'm very interested in the language of photography in relationship to painting.

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.

If you're a photographer, you end up being the raw creative force that allows other people to see what kind of narrative you want to be giving or what kind of art that you want people to see.

Photography is Art and Art is Photography.

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.

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.

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

Fine art is knowledge made visible.

What I do is create images, period.

I go and see anything that's visually new, any technology that's about picture-making. The technology won't make the pictures different, but someone using it will.

My attitude towards drawing is not necessarily about drawing. It's about making the best kind of image I can make, it's about talking as clearly as I can.

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

Photography helps people to see.

Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.

I just love photographing. I don't do it for anyone else.

Photography, for me, is something I can control fully. It's wholly my own expressions.

The camera is not the instrument. People are always the instrument.

Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like.

I have more of a relationship with the subject than I do with my camera equipment. To me, camera equipment is like a tin of shoe polish and a brush - I use that as a tool, but my basic camera is my emotion and my eyes. It's not anything to do with the wonderful cameras I use.

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.

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

The camera can be a machine gun, a warm kiss, a sketchbook. Shooting a camera is like saying, Yes, yes, yes. There is no maybe. All the maybes should go in the trash.

Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.