photographic influence Quotes

I can't be anonymous by reason of your confounded photographs. (To Julia Margaret Cameron)

Photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.

We know that photographs inform people. We also know that photographs move people. The photograph that does both is the one we want to see and make.

Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it; and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.

I began to realize that photographs, these still images, have a tremendous power to move your soul. They can change your life by what you choose to get out of them, and I started to collect photographs.

As far as the surface is concerned - oil on canvas, conventionally applied - my pictures have little to do with the original photograph. They are totally painting (whatever that may mean). On the other hand, they are so like the photograph that the thing that distinguished the photograph from all other pictures remains intact.

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

Sometimes I think the only memories I have are those that I’ve created around photographs of me as a child. Maybe I’m creating my own life. I distrust any memories I do have. They may be fictions, too.

It is probably well on the conservative side to estimate that during the past ten to fifteen years the camera has destroyed a thousand pairs of eyes, corrupted ten thousand, and seriously deceived a hundred thousand, for every one pair that it has opened, and taught.

From the moment that photography appeared, the descriptive genre began to invade Letters... In verse as in prose the décor and exterior aspects of life took an almost excessive place.

I met an Englishwoman in Africa. She said she became a doctor because she saw one of my pictures. That’s all I want – just one doctor in Africa.

Photographs can be forms of recruitment, ways of bringing the viewer into the military, as it were. In this way, they prepare us for war, even enlist us in war, at the level of the senses, establishing a sensate regime of war.

A photo is like a map, a way of giving me a foot into a kind of reality I want... I'm not trying to make paintings look like photos. I want to make paintings using photos as a reference, the way painters did when photography was first invented.

My favourite stuff is visual, and I always want to work with visual artwork. I think it depends on the person, but for me, photographs of an image of something interesting or inspiring is worth a lot more than words to me. I think every concept I've come up with and turned into films or that will be hopefully become a film comes from images first.

Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other peoples pictures too - photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community.

When I was working with Robert Frank, he told me that there was absolutely no relationship between cinema and photography. I challenge that. Surely what you know as a photographer must impact how you set up your shots.

I knew I liked art. I knew I liked photography. I remember seeing photos of Linda Evangelista in Italian Vogue as a teenager, and at the time I didn't know who she was. There were two photos - one shot by Fabrizio Ferri and another one by Steven Meisel. I didn't know who any of those people were. I think it was the first summer I was modeling, I saw these magazines sitting out and looked at them. I remember thinking, These are the kind of images I want to make.

It was 1966 by the time I started taking pictures seriously and books, newspapers and magazines of the time were full of great pictures that helped to inspire me.

A lot of my friends were mostly working in black-and-white-people like Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and others. We would exchange prints with each other, and they were always very supportive of what I was doing. What each of us was doing photographically was entirely different, but we were basically coming from the same place, sort of like a club.