PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne.
I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.
The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.
The art is the challenge which you must meet every day: the technique you should learn to control with time. The science and the art of photography are really one, and not opposed to each other.
The business of making a photograph may be said in simple terms to consist of three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet of paper on which the picture will be realized, and the experience which brings them together.
The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
Well, in terms of what a camera does. Again, you go back to that original idea that what you photograph is responsible for how it [the photograph] looks. And it's not plastic, in a way. The problem is unique in photographic terms.
Photography is the easiest thing to make, and one of the hardest things to make well.
I always prefer photographing in available light – or Rembrandt-light I like to call it – so you get the natural modulations of the face. It makes a more alive, real, and flattering portrait.
Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.
Photographers must learn not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs.
You've got a number of things that take place that are peculiar to still photography. One: how a picture looks - what you photograph is responsible for how a photograph looks. In other words, it's responsible for the form.
I love photography and I love the art of photography. So when I'm working with high-level art photographers, I give them artistic freedom because I want that for myself when it's my turn to do my work and I never try and control it or say I'll only do this or I want it like that.
What you photograph is responsible for how a photograph looks - the form, the design, whatever word you want to use.
I was always interested in photography because it makes a picture.
