David Hewson Quotes

There's a reason why I use film. It's because it's the best representation of how our eyes work. I really believe that. I think it's better than digital.

The camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time.

You had to be aware that I saw that photography was a mere episode in the history of the optical projection and when the chemicals ended, meaning the picture was fixed by chemicals, we were in a new era.

I hate cameras. They interfere, they’re always in the way. I wish: if I could just work with my eyes alone. To get a satisfactory print, one that contains all that you intended, is very often more difficult and dangerous than the sitting itself. When I’m photographing, I immediately know when I’ve got the image I really want. But to get the image out of the camera and into the open, is another matter.

Let's face it, the human eye is clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible when compared to the camera's eye.

For low light, all the light rays participate. We're using all the light coming through a large aperture to make a picture with a large depth of field - totally impossible with a conventional camera.

Pictures are so good at giving people information that they're not looking for.

I think technology has advanced so far now that there are some cameras on the market that give film a run for its money. It's all about flexibility in capturing images, and digital or film, it doesn't matter to me.

It has been said that 80% of what people learn is visual.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea.

No amount of technology is going to change the fact that people process information visually.

Photography has become so fundamental to the way we see that 'photography' and 'seeing' are becoming more and more synonymous. The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge to curators, practitioners, and critics.

I see through my eyes; the camera is just a machine to record it for me.

The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.

The digital camera has given me total freedom and a different way of filming.

Photography today is so accurate and so good that it's really so much easier just to take photographs and work from them.

With the daguerreotype, everyone will be able to have their portrait taken . . . and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same.

A camera is wild in just about anybody's hands, therefore one must set limits. But cameras have a life of their own. Cameras care nothing about cults or isms. They are indifferent mechanical eyes, ready to devour anything in sight. They are lenses of the unlimited reproduction.

Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

...one sees differently with color photography than black-and-white... in short, visualization must be modified by the specific nature of the equipment and materials being used.

The camera is not only an extension of the eye but of the brain. It can see sharper, farther, nearer, slower, faster than the eye. It can see by invisible light. It can see in the past, present, and future. Instead of using the camera only to reproduce objects, I wanted to use it to make what is invisible to the eye - visible.

I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.

The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.

The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?