Fay Godwin Quotes

I fight to take a good photograph every single time.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

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.

The photographer's art is a continuous discovery which requires patience and time.

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

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.

You have to make thousands and thousands of drawings before an illustration is perfected.

You can't rush an art form.

Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.

To me, that is the essence of me as a photographer. It is those ideas, working with them, formulating them and eventually putting them down on paper, photographing them and then going on to the next step.

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.

I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than of having written something very good, a very good story. Maybe it's because the element of magic is so present in a good photograph - luck and magic, but also hard work and being ready and all that.

I'm here to make good pictures. If I don't see it, I won't touch it. I may not make a good picture, but I still gotta believe in it!

I have a reverence for great photography, but I don't consider myself in that league.

After writing quite a few songs now, I have not a method but a way of being patient with a couple of verses or a certain set of chords. I can match them up quicker now than I used to. The one thing you do improve is songwriting.

If I take enough pictures, I'm going to get a good one, and I know not to stop at a bad one.

There's a lot of research and time that goes into my shoots. I spend weeks on them, even for one picture.

I kind of grew up with a camera in my hand.

I've always believed that you have to have the skills before you destroy the skills. If you want to be crude, be crude, but don't be crude because you don't know how to do it, because you're not perfect at drawing and pattern-cutting.

You know, they always say that the photographer is a hunter of images. That is a flattering image, the idea of a hunter, it's virile, acquired power. Actually though, it isn't that. We are really fishermen with hooks and lines.

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework - that to me is the art of photography.

It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.

Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.