George Stevens Quotes

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.

I think making a film is as much knowing what you don't like as what you do like, and avoiding the things that you don't like like the plague and making sure that they never appear onscreen in any shape or form.

Things develop in front of my camera, and then I will try to do the best out of it. I am close, but in most of the scenes, I am trying not to be seen. I think that's the trick. I think it starts in your heart, goes to the head, and the head puts it into the finger.

Fashion photographers are the new painters.

I've always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.

When you're actually making the film, you're constantly battling to maintain its integrity.

He was a very generous soul and was exceptionally dedicated to the medium of photography.

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.

Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like.

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

I've always preferred being behind the camera.

I have more of a relationship with the subject than I do with my camera equipment. To me, camera equipment is like a tin of shoe polish and a brush - I use that as a tool, but my basic camera is my emotion and my eyes. It's not anything to do with the wonderful cameras I use.

You see someone like maybe William Eggleston. William doesn't even really talk about what he does; he just wants to make these images. He kind of hovers around a location and extracts these images.

It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.

I love photography and I love the art of photography. So when I'm working with high-level art photographers, I give them artistic freedom because I want that for myself when it's my turn to do my work and I never try and control it or say I'll only do this or I want it like that.

From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour, and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.

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

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.

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

You become the movie you are making.

My pictures are my eyes. I photograph what I see - and what I want to see.

I read an interview with Mark Wahlberg, and he was like, 'I might read a script and love it, but it's all about the filmmaker.' I think that's a good lesson for me.

If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera.

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.