Peter Bogdanovich Quotes

I'm here to make good pictures. If I don't see it, I won't touch it. I may not make a good picture, but I still gotta believe in it!

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

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.

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

It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.

But if you're talking about fine art work, then I think you have to ask yourself some pretty deep questions about why it is you want to take pictures and what it is you want to say.

It ain't the picture and it ain't the camera - it's the operator.

It has nothing to do with commercial success. You cannot calculate in your head how to put the mosaic together to make a commercial film: that's out of the question.

To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.

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.

You know, as photographers, we do pictures, and people either like them or they hate them.

John Boorman was the best director I've ever had.

It's actually one of the only things that I do that I don't get frustrated over. Everything else I do - racing, golf, video games - those things I want to win at. With photography, I think the camera wins every time.

In everything I do, the aesthetics are driven by the emotion. However I can do that with a camera, whether it's a long lens or a wide lens, I'll do.

You can't make a film for your personal satisfaction. That is why I detest the cinema of people like Mani Kaul.

Many photographers are consumed with the idea of making beautiful contact sheets. I am far more interested in making the best final print I can.

There still is some opposition to it in some museums and art schools, but I think photography has really grown into a mature art form.

Photographs will always be impressive because they show us nature, and all artists will find in them a world of sensations. The photographer must therefore intervene as little as possible, so as not to cause photography to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses, notwithstanding its defects.

I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.

All photography is Pop, and all photographers are crazy... they feel guilty since they don't have to do very much - just push a button.

All bad art is the result of good intentions.

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

On digital photography: It's fantastic, but it's not a freebie for anything. You still have to have this (he points to his eyes), and this (points to his heart), and feet.

For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.

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