David Hockney Quotes

I'm very interested in the language of photography in relationship to painting.

I've created a vocabulary of different styles. I draw from many different ways to take a picture. Sometimes I go back to reportage, to journalism.

Photographs are two-dimensional. I work in four dimensions.

The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.

In my photography, color and composition are inseparable. I see in color.

I paint in acrylic and sometimes in oil. Sometimes I'll paint my kids. And I'll occasionally do some photography.

On many days my primary artistic struggle is, in fact, photography because it is harder to do good work with that. I see myself as an observer of the world who has a strong drive to testify, which I can do because I have the privilege of living in New York with enough food to eat and shelter.

I'm aware of other artists, but what I'm really most interested in is viewing individual pictures. I like dramatic pictures.

Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

I've no doubt that those photographs i took will make people look at everything in a more interesting way - the little tear on one piece of paper, the shadow on another. But good painting has always done that - made you see things. And the most ordinary can be the most extraordinary.

The camera gave me an incredible freedom. It gave me the ability to parade through the world and look at people and things very, very closely.

The world of the cinema and of painting are very different; precisely, the possibilities of photography and the cinema reside in that unlimited fantasy which is born of things themselves... a piece of sugar can become on the screen larger than an infinite perspective of gigantic buildings.

I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.

...I felt that photography ought to start with and remain faithful to the appearance of the world, and in so doing record contradictions. The greatest pictures would then... find wholeness in the torn world.

What most artists using photography feel that they need to do is to show that they are serious, that they are not taking snapshots. To point a camera at something does not qualify you as an artist because everybody has done that.

Photography is art when it's used by an artist.

And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification, relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw and to describe.

As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.

There are things that I teach, about building photographs, and that's why people come to my workshops. When people come to the workshops, they're consumed with seeking the subject, and I teach seeking the setting.

The photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what's going on and what's happening outside.

Whenever I am tired of making photographs of drawings, I make drawings of photographs.

Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times - the pulse of today.

All photographs are far more important than any painting.

I’m past photographing to see what things look like photographed.