Debra Granik Quotes

I seem to be always returning to photography in my poetry. I guess you could say that I'm documenting the personal history and relationship I have with 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.

If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera.

I like drawing people in the airport or on the bus or in venues. I like catching people in the moment. It's a similar inspiration for me in terms of songwriting.

I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do - that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.

I would drown in objects if I didn't have the ability to photograph them.

To photograph is to confer importance.

You must photograph where you are involved; where you are overwhelmed by what you see before you; where you hold your breath while releasing the shutter, not because you are afraid of jarring the camera, but because you are seeing with your guts wide open to the sweet pain of an image that is part of your life.

Nothing speaks louder than an evocative photograph that stirs the imagination, tugs at the heart strings and engages the mind.

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

I can remember the moment when I suddenly felt that the camera was a living partner. I suddenly felt this is art, and the camera is a co-operative living person. After that I was extremely happy to act in films.

The directors that I end up having a really good time with are the ones that understand the fluidity of the medium and are interested in catching lightning in a bottle.

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

When we started making 'Where You Live', I bought a bunch of Polaroid cameras in so that people could record the experience. Some of those pictures are in the CD sleeve.

I became obsessed with the storytelling of photography and going on little adventures.

Photography is very personal to me. God knows how many rolls of film I have that I've never shared.

Memories. That's the thing about photography. I look at the contact sheet, and it brings back everything: whether I was tired, whether I was full of beans.

I have more of a relationship with the subject than I do with my camera equipment. To me, camera equipment is like a tin of shoe polish and a brush - I use that as a tool, but my basic camera is my emotion and my eyes. It's not anything to do with the wonderful cameras I use.

There is a secret, I think. When you are front of a camera there is something that happens. Some relationship, some movement, some strange kind of suspension. That's where you find the layer in yourself that is duplicated in everyone. And when you get it right, if you can imagine all the hearts beating in one beat, it's like that. It's beautiful.

Photography is a magic thing. A thing that has mysterious odors, a little strange and frightening, something one quickly grows to love.

From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour, and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.

At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands before our camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect--a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.

Looking through the viewfinder for me is like being in a movie theater. That's what I like about it.

Kodak sells film, but they don't advertise film; they advertise memories.