The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?
My protest against digital has been me saying, "What's going to happen to film?" The result is that Kodak is out of business. That's a national tragedy. We've got to keep making film.
Kodak has always represented innovation that is approachable while delivering the craft of filmmaking.
The camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time.
From my point of view, photography never got any better than it was in 1840.
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.
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 Polaroid camera] places before you a thing that is more of the thing than the thing was.
The digital camera has given me total freedom and a different way of filming.
Why do we use flash at all? Because photography is not the same as eyesight. We can see in low-light situations where cameras, dependent upon a physical process to record visual information, are half blind.
If it were possible for any one person or group of persons to go through a photographic finishing plant's work at the end of a day, you could probably pull out the most extraordinary photographic exhibition we've ever seen. On almost any subject. The trouble is to find the things.
Photography today is so accurate and so good that it's really so much easier just to take photographs and work from them.
The history of photography needs clearing out. It needs something else now. Because photography always acknowledged there were cameras before photography.
I think probably something big can be done with cameras, I'm not saying, er, I'm saying chemical photography's finished, that means you can't have a Cartier Bresson again, you need never believe pictures.
The digital print is becoming the look of our time, and it makes the C-print start to look like a tintype.
The camera is just a machine, which records with impressive and as a rule very cruel faithfulness.
My father was a photographer at the National Bureau of Standards. A self-educated man, he never finished high school, but in his career at the National Bureau of Standards, he made many useful inventions and eventually became chief of the Photographic Technology Section.
I've always shot on film, but the times are changing.
