Lou Reed Quotes

Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.

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

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important.

Sometimes you feel uncomfortable taking a photograph, but that's all part of the job.

All I do is make photos. It's my life.

As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.

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.

Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.

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

When we started making 'Where You Live', I bought a bunch of Polaroid cameras in so that people could record the experience. Some of those pictures are in the CD sleeve.

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

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.

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.

As a photographer, I don't really have a view of the world in general. Someone taking pictures for 'National Geographic' might. Each of us works to our full capacity when we're in the midst of a shoot. Each of us finds our own level of intensity, and that's the fun of it.

I seem to be always returning to photography in my poetry. I guess you could say that I'm documenting the personal history and relationship I have with photography.

There is a secret, I think. When you are front of a camera there is something that happens. Some relationship, some movement, some strange kind of suspension. That's where you find the layer in yourself that is duplicated in everyone. And when you get it right, if you can imagine all the hearts beating in one beat, it's like that. It's beautiful.

To take photographs is putting one's head, one's eye, and one's heart on the same axis

You see someone like maybe William Eggleston. William doesn't even really talk about what he does; he just wants to make these images. He kind of hovers around a location and extracts these images.

It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.

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.

The camera is a remarkable instrument. Saturate yourself with your subject, and the camera will all but take you by the hand and point the way.

Photography is nothing-it's life that interests me.

I'm not very eloquent about things like this, but I think that writing and photography go together. I don't mean that they are related arts, because they're not. But the person doing it, I think, learns from both things about accuracy of the eye, about observation, and about sympathy toward what is in front of you... It's about honesty, or truth telling, and a way to find it in yourself, how to need it and learn from it.