photography development Quotes

Learning how to use different formats has made me a better photographer. When I started working in medium format, it made me a better 35 mm photographer. When I started working in 4x5, it made me a better medium-format photographer.

When we take a picture, we have a negative. We put the right solution on it and, suddenly, the picture comes to life. So what do we do? We take the negative and turn it into a positive.

In 1982 I bought the newly released Makina Plaubel 55mm fixed-lens camera. With this shift from 35mm to 6 x 7, I also changed from black and white to color. Later that year, I started my project on New Brighton called The Last Resort. However, the first project I shot in colour was composed of urban scenes from Liverpool. This image was on the second roll of film. It's the first good photo I made in this new chapter of my work.

From my point of view, photography never got any better than it was in 1840.

Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse.

I read the other day that Minor White said it takes twenty years to become a photographer. I think that is a bit of an exaggeration. I would say, judging from myself, that it takes at least eight or nine years. But it does not take any longer than it takes to learn to play the piano or the violin. If it takes twenty years, you might as well forget about it!

I got a job in the tear-sheets department, ripping up magazines like People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Time, and delivering the editorial pages.... So I began to use a camera to make fake photographs of the ads. By re-photographing a magazine page and then developing the film in a cheap lab, the photos came out very strange.

It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image.

I now measure my growth as a photographer in terms of the degrees to which I am aware of, have developed my sense of, and have the skills to symbolize visually the four-dimensional structure of the universe.

I used to always love taking photos, but I would always give a camera away to someone else. Now I don't give the camera away anymore. It also takes a long time to develop a visual style, and I think that the things that I was imitating were people I love, like Judy Linn or Gerald Turner, and then it slowly started to become more myself.

My introduction to photography and a lot of how I developed aesthetically was through '50s and early-'60s fashion magazines like Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.

When I started, art photography, like that of Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Struth, didn't exist.

The thing that was most interesting to me was getting my first prints back from the printer and realizing photography doesn't end with the click of a button, it starts there. Printing is so exciting.