Wolfgang Tillmans Quotes

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.

Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.

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.

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

Photography is Art and Art is Photography.

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?'

To convey in the print the feeling you experienced when you exposed your film – to walk out of the darkroom and say: ‘This is it, the equivalent of what I saw and felt!’. That’s what it’s all about.

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

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.

Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.

Fashion photographers are the new painters.

Fine art is knowledge made visible.

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

I hate cameras. I hate cameras and I hate camera phones. The camera's my worst enemy and my best friend. It's the way I convey my emotions to the world without saying a word, so I use it. People always say, 'You come alive as soon as the camera's on!'

Through a painting we can see the whole world.

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

If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason.

I'm an image-maker.

I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities.

I believe that the medium of photography prevails entirely as an act of faith in the souls of those who love and practice it. And so every photograph becomes another subtle variation on the theme of the medium itself.

Photography is a bridge between science and art. It brings to science what it needs most, the artistic sense, and to art the proof that nothing can be imagined which cannot be matched in the counterpoints of nature.

...all along I've had an ambivalent relationship to photography - but as to whether I thought it an art form, or a craft, or a technique, well, I've always been taken with Henry Geldzahler's answer to that question when he said, I thought it was a hobby.

Photography... is either an expression of a cosmic vision, an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing - to me. (1919)