Jacques-Henri Lartigue Quotes

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

The camera is a remarkable instrument. Saturate yourself with your subject, and the camera will all but take you by the hand and point the way.

I love making pictures but I don't like talking about them.

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

All I do is make photos. It's my life.

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.

I'm an image-maker.

If you're a photographer, you end up being the raw creative force that allows other people to see what kind of narrative you want to be giving or what kind of art that you want people to see.

I sometimes think I'm a mechanic. I just take pictures.

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

Photography's like this baby that needs to be fed all the time. It's always hungry.

I like to work my camera as if it were a musical instrument.

I consider myself very lucky. I'm known for photographing celebrities, but, in a nutshell, my first love is photography.

I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important.

My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.

I'm just interested in what makes a photograph.

Photography was a blessing because it filled my time. If I had to start over, I'd pursue photography - probably to the exclusion of acting.

Fashion photographers are the new painters.

As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.

What I do is create images, period.

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

My dad had been an ardent amateur photographer, and he taught me to compose a photograph from the back to the front, and then populate the picture.

I have always stood in awe of the camera. I recognize it for the instrument it is, part Stradivarius, part scalpel.

I don't have a favorite photo. As a photographer, I have attachments to each image. Not the one photo: the experience of getting the photos is the challenge or the thing.

Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.