David LaChapelle Quotes

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.

If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason.

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.

My work is about making candy for the eyes. It's about grabbing your attention.

You don't take a picture, you make a picture.

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

Fashion photographers are the new painters.

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.

The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.

I want to photograph what I see and put it in a dramatic context. I'm an actor and a writer, and I want to tell these stories and present these shapes, colors and movements as I see them, as I see them serve a narrative. As I see that narrative serve an audience. That's what I want to do.

'The Gardener' is more than a marvellous collection of images by a master photographer.

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.

I love telling stories with images. But I think there's more to just saying a movie is great visually.

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

Literally, FX is like, 'How can we foster your vision?' My vision is pretty much taking pictures of the way I see my life.

There's one right place to put the camera. I'm a big believer in that. You'd think you could put it anywhere. Nope.

Anybody doesn't like these pitchers don't like potry, see? Anybody don't like potry go home see television shots of big hatted cowboys being tolerated by kind horses. Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the poets of the world. To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.

The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.

A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they'll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won't do a thing for you if you don't have anything in your head or in your heart.

The best pictures differentiate themselves by nuances...a tiny relationship - either a harmony or a disharmony - that creates a picture.

With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don't think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.

Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.

Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.

I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)

A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels...