Ari Graynor Quotes

I'm not a politician or a scholar or political historian. I'm just a photographer who's trying to capture a spirit. It's not an intellectual process; it's an intuitive process.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

It doesn't matter if you use a box camera or you use a Leica; the important thing is what motivates you when you are photographing.

I believe in the relation between photography and music; And thats my inspiration.

Let a man of genius make use [of photography] as it should be used, and he will raise himself to a height that we do not know.

You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.

My true program is summed up in one word: life. I expect to photograph anything suggested by that word which appeals to me.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

I am kept awake by the list of possibilities for shooting more photos and deciding what I must prioritise next.

Some time ago, we went to Asia and took a camera along, and I began to do what I'd done even years ago doing people. I couldn't get interested in it. And I did hundreds of photographs of details of the monuments as sculpture.

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

My photography is often a sociological look at American culture, and it's been very well published in the U.K.

What interests me most is when a work of art is no longer just an object, but also touches reality and life.

I'm fascinated by the way Diane Arbus saw things. She came from this fashion background and then twisted it.

Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, and so many others before me, sexual imagery has always been a part of my photography.

'Humans of New York' wasn't the result of a fully finished idea that I thought of and then executed; it was an evolution. There were hundreds of tiny evolutions that came from me loving photography.

I like Ryan McGinley's work.

The Carrie Mae Weems photograph 'Blue Black Boy,' I thought, was fantastic.

Photography is my passion. Whenever I get time, I click.

Cartooning, quietly and discreetly, drew me into the circle of politics and I continue to enjoy both. They both inspire me and I could never given up one for the other.

I started shooting pictures because I had all these photographers around me, and life was kind of boring creatively because you play the same songs every night. So I looked for another outlet, and I started shooting.

When I see a beautiful piece of art, it inspires me to be creative.

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework - that to me is the art of photography.

To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn’t think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.

I've always wanted to be aware of what's going on around me, and I've wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time.