Irving Penn Quotes

I'm not an equipment nut. I tend to use whatever's to hand. I have several cameras, of course, but I'm not emotional about any of them.

Technically, I have not changed very much. Ask my assistants. They'll tell you, I am the easiest photographer to work with. I don't have heavy equipment. I work out of one bag.

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.

France was very opposite of the show-business experience I'd been living; I was anonymous and alone. I wore no makeup, wore the same clothes every day. And I wrote and wrote and wrote.

I don't have lights, I don't have assistants, I just go and meet somebody and take a photograph. That's really basic, and that's how I used to work when I was 17 or 18 in Holland.

I work very quickly. I only ever take one picture of one thing. Literally. Never two.

Available light is any damn light that is available!

I don't think about what camera I should use that much. I just pick up the one that looks nicest on the day.

The artist who uses the least of what is called imagination will be the greatest.

Simplicity of all things is the hardest to be copy.

I go out to take a walk, I see something, I take a picture. I take photographs. I have avoided profound explanations of what I do.

Nina knew the power of black and white images. Sometimes a thing was its truest self when the colors were stripped away.

I made a rule for myself in my early 20s not to become a record collector in the sense that I reference all my old records. I can't live like that. I'd just be trapped in comparison, trying to emulate something, so I made a rule to just buy what I need, just the records I need.

There are only a few notes. Just variations on a theme.

Good photography is unpretentious.

But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.

Scheherezade is easy; a little black dress is difficult.

We talk too much. We should talk less and draw more.

I embrace the abstract in photography and exist on a few bits of order extracted from the chaos of reality.

Everything went together perfectly, and this is what I mean by knowing. I didn't have to analyze anything. I just recognized what was in front of me. All I had to do was set up and take the picture.

Explain nothing. Put it there. Say it. Leave.

Forget the camera, forget the lens, forget all of that. With any four-dollar camera, you can capture the best picture.

In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.

I really like to keep my palette small but to be very intense, very myopic.