Chuck Close Quotes

I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn't have a personal vision or doesn't communicate emotion fails.

I'd very much like to create my own style as a photographer, even if it's just for myself.

It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.

While photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is the hardest in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision.

I've always thought of the book as a visual art form, and it should represent a single artistic idea, which it does if you write your own material.

The camera is my tool. Through it I give a reason to everything around me.

I try to use whatever I know about photography to be of service to the people I'm photographing.

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

Like most photographers, I try to capture a moment in my work.

Everyone takes pictures, so you need to have your own opinion.

It doesn't matter if you use a box camera or you use a Leica; the important thing is what motivates you when you are photographing.

I think photography is closest to writing, not painting. It's closest to writing because you are using this machine to convey an idea. The image shouldn't need a caption; it should already convey an idea.

My visual medium is my videos, and I've got to feel as though I can put my truth in that.

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.

When you're so used to operating the camera, it's an extension of your eye and your heart and your head.

I just started taking pictures, and it was - it was an instant love affair. It was just ecstatic.

During my lifetime I have met dozens of writers and photographers in dozens of different countries. But I have encountered no one who could both write and photograph with the artistry of Robert Vavra.

The camera's a ballpoint pen, an imbecile; it's not worth anything if you don't have anything to say.

The photographs that excite me are photographs that say something in a new manner; not for the sake of being different but ones that are different because the individual is different and the individual expresses himself.

All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object.

I love painting. As far as photography is concerned, I understand nothing.

This profession [photography] is deserving of attention and respect equal to that accorded painting, literature, music and architecture.

Photography was my choice of weapons.

I'm actually not so sure what I'm hoping to find making photographs. 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. I don't know how I go about it. I also don't know how exactly what I set out to get other than these two things.

The precision of hisskill places his work beyond the tentative and the experimental stage. He is continually searching and exploring both himself and his surroundings. and in this exploration of the realm of places, people and things, contrasts and relationships, Callahan is no respecter of conventional technical formula or code. His delicate sense of pattern is an integral part of his photography and not a thing by itself.