If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.
I wish that all of nature's magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.
Photography should be redefined. It's largely technical... Photography is just unbelievably limiting. I always think of David Bailey and all the fashion photographers - they overlap, you can't always tell who did it. I don't really even like photography all that much. I just think it's so overdone.
Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.
I've spent a lot of time in India. When I was a young cinematographer, I was completely enthralled by the color, the movement, the sounds. But photographically, it was very hard to capture it; photographs rarely did it justice.
By itself photography cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract, it does not speak of Man, only of a man ; not of Tree, only a tree.
There are some elements of digital photography that I don't really like, such as the fact that you see the results immediately.
I think that there isn't a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability... They do not tell stories - they show you what something looks like. To a camera.
I'm afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through magazines and through slides and I think this is dreadful, this is anti-art because art is direct experience with something in the world and photography is just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art.
I've always said that the only thing a photograph is good at capturing faithfully is another flat surface.
No matter what lens you use, no matter what speed the film, no matter how you develop it, no matter how you print it, you cannot say more than you can see.
I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)
The photographer will never replace the painter; one is a man, the other a machine. Let us compare them no longer. (1848)
I once got a little camera to use for details of architecture and so forth but the photo was always so different from the perspective the eye gives, I gave it up.
I tell you (dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well) a square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that were ever dipped in acid... Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against sculpture. That and no more. (1865)
I loved photography but was frustrated by the limitations of cameras. When trying to take a picture of a friend's young, active daughter using my DSLR, it was impossible to capture the fleeting moments.
Ironically, my paintings don't photograph well.
You can't photograph everything.
I hate my picture being taken. A photograph by definition captures one mood. And I have a million facets to my personality; I never use just one. That's why I like TV more.
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.
I know from experience it's very hard to get access to a prison to take pictures.
Photography seduces us into thinking we can believe photographs, whereas we can't really believe that a picture can tell us any kind of truth at all.
It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop
The camera will never compete with the brush and the palette, until such time as photographs can be taken in Heaven or Hell.
A close friend of mine, Annie Leibovitz, who I've known for forty years, photographs celebrities every single day of the week but they all seem to look the same even though she's one of the most creative photographers alive. They all just look the same. Brad Pitt is a great actor but all the pictures of Brad Pitt look the same.
