photography aesthetics Quotes

I'd like to own a movie camera - a proper one, with film, not a digital thing. Celluloid has more character.

I don't think that digital photography is romantic yet. It's not sympathetic the way that film is.

Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.

If you have enough craft, you've done your homework and you're practiced. You can then make the photograph you desire.

Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste, and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt.

Essentially, in photography, I think on two levels: one emotional and the other technical. The emotional impact has to do with looking for something dramatic happening in the photograph, something that reaches out and touches somebody in some way. And the technical is having to do with composition and framing - light and dark, light and shadow.

The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.

No color will ever be brighter for me than black and white.

Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already.

There is something about this process, and about the whole 8 x 10 [camera] business, that takes it out of the arena of the snapshot, even though, of course, I'm always desperate for that feeling. I wanted those family pictures to look effortless. I wanted them to look like snapshots. And some of them did.

I don't care how you photograph - use the kitchen mop if you must, but if the product is not true to the laws of photography... you have produced something that is dead. (1923)

Color tends to corrupt photography and absolute color corrupts it absolutely. Consider the way color film usually renders blue sky, green foliage, lipstick red, and the kiddies' playsuit. These are four simple words which must be whispered: color photography is vulgar.

Photography is my one recreation and I think it should be done well.

The thing about photography is, some people surround themselves with extremely strong subject matter. And unless you're a moron, you're going to get a really strong photograph.

The technique of 35mm photography appears simple. One is beguiled by the quick viewing and operation, and by the very questionable inclination to make many pictures with the hope that some will be good.

I find the surface of a photograph a thing of beauty in and of itself, and it is this surface that makes a photograph unique relative to other two-dimensional media.

I was always looking at Helmut Newton photos with the Le Smoking suit and Stella Tennant in Self Service magazine. It was never just about an ultrafeminine woman for me.

You've got to deal with how photographs look, what's there, not how they're made.

I don't like a tormented photograph. Something attracts you in them, but the attraction isn't because she has a pot on her head or tonnes of make-up and weird clothes and weird everything.

Black-and-white always looks modern, whatever that word means.

I do not object to retouching, dodging or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique.

For half a century photography has been the "art form" of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? to the finger on the button? to the law of averages?

I don't like gimmicky pictures; I've always hated them. I like pictures that are very clear and clean, whether you're a great street photographer - somebody like Friedlander or Winogrand or Cartier-Bresson - or whether you're a portraitist, like Irving Penn.

For me anyway when a photograph is interesting, it's interesting because of the kind of photographic problem it states - which has to do with the contest between content and form.