Ben Shahn Quotes

My uncle was a photographer for 'The Irish Times.'

I came up in photography, and Dust Bowl-era photography is a lot of the reason that I got behind the camera in the first place.

I'm always taking behind-the-scenes photos and stuff.

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

Paparazzi need more flattering lenses.

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 don't have lights, I don't have assistants, I just go and meet somebody and take a photograph. That's really basic, and that's how I used to work when I was 17 or 18 in Holland.

I realize that I had the best of serious picture journalism.

I'm not a photojournalist.

I began after college, about 1972. I began to teach myself photography. I went to work for a local newspaper for four years as a kind of basic training.

I love Instagram and photography.

If I wasn't a comic or TV star, I really wanted to be a photojournalist. That was my other dream job.

I do read many of the photography magazines from the U.K. and abroad.

My dad was a photographer, so we had all these studio portraits of us.

I think a lot of times, especially for certain stories, photographers travel together for safety reasons, and they also invariably cross paths. But you could have 10 photographers shooting together in the same spot but capturing different images.

I work on stories rather than individual pictures.

We really care about photography at 'Vanity Fair.'

'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 got my first camera when I was 21 - my boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday - but at that point politics was my life, and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium.

The most powerful weapon in the world, as far as I'm concerned, is the camera.

[Press] Photographers are the only dictators in America.

Since high school, I've always been super into photography. I event went to Valley College for photography.

I'm not saying that photographers are dumber than other people, but they are the folks who walk around with brilliant white lights in nighttime riots.

I became obsessed with the storytelling of photography and going on little adventures.

I like Ryan McGinley's work.