Don McCullin Quotes

Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph

Photography isn't about seeing, it's about feeling. If I don't have some kind of feeling for what I'm shooting, how can I expect the person who looks at it to feel anything?

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

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving.

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.

My films start with images, a few images and a few feelings, and I try to edit them together to see the correspondence between these images and these feelings.

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

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

Eventually, when I got the 'Meadowland' script, I saw something in it that made me think I could make something special out of it, something that could work with my style. Emotionally, I connected to it. I thought, 'If I feel this way just imagining it, maybe we can make that happen on screen and make people feel something when they watch it.'

I want to create films that will speak to different parts of our hearts and brains, stories told from a different angle.

'Phase' is a special song to me, and I wanted the video to make you feel like you are on a journey with me. My team and I shot this video three different times, and every time I got it back, I wanted to go a step further.

My photographs at best hold only a small length, but through them I would suggest and criticize and illuminate and try to give compassionate understanding.

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.

The desire to discover, the desire to move, to capture the flavor, three concepts that describe the art of photography.

The work I care about is terribly simple. I observe. I try to entertain. But above all I want my pictures to be emotional. Little else interests me in photography.

Photography is an investigation of both the outer and the inner worlds. The first experiences with the camera involve looking at the world beyond the lens, trusting the instrument will 'capture' something 'seen.' The terms shoot and take are not accidental; they represent an attitude of conquest and appropriation. Only when the photographer grows into perception and creative impulse does the term make define a condition of empathy between the external and the internal events.

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

Photography is truth.

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.

My real motivation came from my desire for music videos to have the same equal soul-touching emotional resonance that straight music does.

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

The only way an artist can communicate with the world at large is on the level of feeling.

I want my pictures to cut through political abstractions... and make a connection on a human level.