Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Photography Quotes from famous persons: Martin Parr, Freddie Fox, Johan Renck, Ben Schott, Cole Sprouse. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Photography Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.
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When you first start photographing a show or being into photography, you might think it’s cool to see people with their phones, like, ‘It’s so novel; everyone cares about this moment so much,’ but then it becomes… trite, y’know, and shallow. I think the best moments of my life have been spent without phones.
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When I first became interested in photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don’t give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself.
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I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.
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Photography is an accident.
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My use of the medium – photography – is in some ways traditional.
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Photography is very presumptuous. Photographers are always photographing other people’s lives – something they know nothing about – and drawing great inferences into it.
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Contrast is what makes photography interesting.
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Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn’t interest me.
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I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do – that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.
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Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.
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The thing with computer-generated imagery is that it’s an incredibly powerful tool for making better visual effects. But I believe in an absolute difference between animation and photography.
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Photography to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasurable it my be.
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I take a lot of pride in my photography.
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To me, Celine is unrivaled, and Hedi Slimane has such a multifaceted talent – from clothing design to photography. He creates this rare, incredible, and desirable world through his vision. I’m always inspired by his work.
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I feel more like a creative artist using photography because there’s – the digital work is so interesting now. It’s come to that. I have had many different stages of photography – there are many different ways to take photos. But I feel now I’m in that stage of my life where I use the camera, you know, in that way.
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I know that my mind is so A.D.D., and I want instant gratification – and photography can provide me with that – but at some point, I want to make an independent feature.
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With light field technology, there is a huge opportunity for creativity in photography that hasn’t been available in the past.
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My interest in architecture has always been sculptural. Most of my photography is of architecture.
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Photography, painting or poetry – those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things; they are my way of communicating.
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With photography, I always think that it’s not good enough.
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‘Woman on the Plaza,’ with its distinct horizon, snow-like surfaces, wintry wall, stunning sunlight, sharp shadows, and hurrying figure, would become the most biographical of my photographs – an abstract image of the landscape and life of northern Ohio where I grew up and first practiced photography.
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I find it satisfying that what I’ve done in photography has had so much influence in how people take photographs and what they look at and how they look at things.
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Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.
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Photography, sculpture, and painting were wielded as cultural weapons over the course of generations to substantiate the idea that black people were inherently subordinate beings; they were used to make slavery acceptable and to make black subjugation more palatable.
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For me, photography is not just about exposing film, it’s about exposing the viewer to something new, a place they haven’t gone before, but most importantly, to people that they might be afraid of.
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I began drawing as a very young child and had a grandfather who experimented with photography, so those things constituted my first exposure to art.
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There’s something really magical about trying to see things in new ways that go beyond, in some sense, the biological human experience. Light-field photography, too, goes beyond the human experience because our eyes work like conventional cameras.
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My inspiration has always been photography’s ability to stop time and reveal what the naked eye cannot see.
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I just love the world of photography.
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The nature of photography has always resisted that temptation of interpretation. I look, and what I see looks back at me.
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Photography has literally changed my life.
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I just wanted to be creative, so I did photography, and that led me ultimately to music.
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In terms of digital photography, I continue to print and use film for the most part. I still shoot with film, 21/4 film specifically, and I love it. I love it because I know what it does, how it really responds to light.
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Since high school, I’ve always been super into photography. I event went to Valley College for photography.
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I’ve always been interested in photography. I remember when I was about 14, I spent an entire summer selling lottery tickets in some little booth so I could make enough money to buy an Olympus camera.
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Now, when I came on to Washington to begin my job, I was so interested in photography at that time that I really would have preferred to work with Stryker than with my department, which was more artistic if you wish.
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The most important part of fashion photography, for me, is not the models; it’s not the clothes. It’s that you are responsible for defining what a woman today is. That, I think, is my job.
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It is my intention to present – through the medium of photography – intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.
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The main thing I love about street photography is that you find the answers you don’t see at the fashion shows. You find information for readers so they can visualize themselves.
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I’ve been taking photographs since I was a teenager, and fashion has taught me a lot more about photography. It’s definitely inspired me.
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Of course, I won’t be abandoning photography, because it is my life.
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For example, Michael Mann’s film Collateral – there is certain kinds of stories that lend themselves to digital photography. Some things are very raw stories that digital photography kind of lends itself to.
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I’d really likely to shoot wildlife documentaries. I watched so many of those as a child, and I’m quite into wildlife and love photography as well, so that’s something I’d like to do.
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There are people who expect me to look the way I do on-screen, where I have a great director of photography and fantastic lighting. I’m sorry to disappoint people, but I don’t look like that all the time – no actress does.
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Photography can be a deceitful, superficial medium that leads us into believing something even though we know it’s not necessarily true. It lulls us into a false sense of complacency.
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Painting, drawing – I’m really into photography, I’ve done it since high school.
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Being a celebrity you always get really good seats to sporting events but you never get as good seats as the photographers get. And I really love sports. So one of the scams I have going now is I want to learn sports photography so I can get better seats at a sporting event.
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Drones ply the liminal space between the physical and the digital – pilots fly them, but aren’t in them. They are versatile and fascinating objects – the things they can do range from the mundane (aerial photography) to the spectacular – killing people, for example.
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Digital photography makes you a better photographer.
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Even when political reporting is not reduced to personality, political photography is. An article might offer depth and complexity, but is illustrated with a photo of one of the 10 politicians whose picture must be attached to every news story.
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Every part of me is a surfer. I love surfing, and I love the waves that I surf. So that’s the thing that I get excited about most: What kind of waves am I going to be able to surf? Am I going to be surfing alone, or will we be surfing waves that no one’s surfed before? Second to that is photography.
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Photography was a blessing because it filled my time.
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Lack of courage or means often deters the European woman from more independent business activity, and this in spite of increasing freedom to choose her occupation, in spite of brilliant examples of successful undertakings of women, in photography, hotel or boarding-house management, dress-making, etc.
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In the time between records, I always have lots of stuff going on. I shoot photography, make little sculptures, play video games.
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I read like a crazy person, I play the piano, and I’m a photographer. I always say my photography keeps me sane. I spend a lot of time in the darkroom. It’s a very solitary, quiet life when I’m not working.
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To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.
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I had no idea how I wanted to get into photography, but I just knew I wanted to do it.
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The boy I was crazy about was super into photography, so I weaseled my way into AP Photo to impress him and spend more time with him. He never liked me back, but I ended up spending most my senior year in the darkroom – it became a sort of safe haven for me.
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I like to keep my personal life private. I did read one of those stories, and it made it seem like just because I don’t go out and I’m not the subject of tabloid photography, I’ve never had a relationship in my life, like if a relationship isn’t documented by a picture, it doesn’t exist. I don’t want to talk about it.
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The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each to himself. And that is the most complicated thing on earth.
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You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo. No individual photo explains anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium.
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What I love about photography, and it’s the same thing I love about acting, really, is that it forces you, like, right into the moment, where you can’t be distracted, where you can’t be, like, thinking about other things or ahead of yourself or behind yourself.
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It was only after a while, after photographing mines and clear-cutting of forests in Maine, that I realized I was looking at the components of photography itself. Photography uses paper made from trees, water, metals, and chemistry. In a way, I was looking at all these things that feed into photography.
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Everything always looked better in black and white. Everything always looked as if it were the first time; there’s always more people in a black and white photograph. It just makes it seem that there were more people at a gig, more people at a football match, than with colour photography. Everything looks more exciting.
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Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.
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War is the easiest photography in the business. Just get close, be lucky, know how your camera works. There are subjects everywhere. Everyplace you go, there is something to photograph in a war, like being in the middle of a hurricane or a train crash or an earthquake. You can’t miss it.
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I have problems with a lot of photography, particularly street photography and photojournalism – objectifying the other, finding the contempt and exoticism that you might feel within yourself or toward yourself and projecting it out to others. There can be an abusive power to photography, too.
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I like art, photography, film – all that creativity.
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I love Instagram and photography.
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I wish more people felt that photography was an adventure the same as life itself and felt that their individual feelings were worth expressing. To me, that makes photography more exciting.
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Technology has eliminated the basement darkroom and the whole notion of photography as an intense labor of love for obsessives and replaced them with a sense of immediacy and instant gratification.
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When I was in the 12th standard itself, I decided to join the Adyar Film Institute and study photography. I specifically chose photography because I see photography as an applied science. There is an artistic element also in it. If you perfect your scientific element, you can attain certain quality.
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I love football, but I’m also very passionate about photography and film.
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Computer photography won’t be photography as we know it. I think photography will always be chemical.
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Before movies, memory unspooled differently in the mind, trailing off in dust-blasted fade-out rather than spliced-together flashback; before photography, memory rippled like a reflection on water’s surface, less precise but more profoundly true.
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I never read about photography.
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I’d love to go off to college to study photography, art history, humanities.
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Philip Greenspun had a huge impact on me. He was the first person I knew of that embraced online communities, created a real business around open source, gave back to the community through education, and inspired me to explore photography.
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I picked up photography in high school.
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With photography, you’ve captured a moment time – it’s that moment only – and in painting, you play with it; you manipulate how time is presented. It’s about fantasy and illusion and the creation of desire.
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When I started, art photography, like that of Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Struth, didn’t exist.
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When I was studying photography, I became interested in conflict photojournalism, and that got me interested in lighting. Then I realized there was this amazing thing called cinematography where you could kind of tell more complete stories photographing for film. So I ended up going to AFI grad school for that.
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The way that light hits objects, I think, is one of the more important things that sculpture and photography share.
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Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment – this very moment – to stay.
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I’m not against digital photography. It’s great for newspapers. And there are photographers doing great work digitally. When they use Photoshop as a darkroom tool, that’s fine, too. But at this point of my life, after so many years, I don’t really want to change, and I still love film.
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I was interested in photography from my college days and wanted to become a cinematographer.
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Painting, music, photography, and visual art have been creative forms of expression for me for decades.
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I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, ‘the ability to conceive failure as progress.’
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I like the idea of infinite human potential, and a lot of my photography and filmmaking has been focused on that.
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I had been teaching myself photography.
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Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
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My father did advertising photography.
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I love to play the guitar. I also love photography and fashion.
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A film carries six fine arts – it consists of architecture, painting, music, writing or literature, photography and performance. It’s a conjecture of all these things and yet based on literature.
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I try to consider each body of work on its own terms, discretely, so terms like ‘sculpture’ or ‘photography’, in their broad sense, don’t really enter into my thinking.
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Many people misunderstand me – I’m quite happy to be called a photographer. All of a sudden, the art world has caught up with photography, and they are trying to hijack us.
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Nowadays shots are created in post-production, on computers. It’s not really photography.
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I’ve got a great collection of photography.
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My photography is mainly focused on my work making movies, which I’ve done my whole life. I think I have a perspective that not many people have. And I get to take advantage of all of the strange sources of light on a set.
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My main camera is a Nikon D3. I use a French camera from the 1800s for wet plate photography, I use a Hasselblad sometimes. But to me the camera really doesn’t matter that much. I don’t have a preference for film or digital.
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I’m studying art and photography, like film and digital – a mix of both.
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Music, photography, media, film – it’s all going to be free on the Internet. We have to accept it.
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As much as I love music, in my mind, photography is what makes me the happiest – that’s for sure.
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I had decent but not great grades in high school because I was highly motivated in some subjects, like the arts, drama, English, and history, but in math and science I was a screw-up. Wooster saw something in me, and I really flourished there. I got into theatre, took photography and painting classes.
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Madonna is her own Hollywood studio – a popelike mogul and divine superstar in one. She has a laserlike instinct for publicity, aided by her visual genius for still photography (which none of her legion of imitators has). Unfortunately, her public life has dissolved into a series of staged photo ops.
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We need to incorporate fashion into every element and institution, whether it be through designer-lecture series, photography exhibitions, or collaborative efforts between artists and designers.
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Essentially what photography is is life lit up.
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It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.
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Photography is not a fine art at all.
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A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.
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I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms – painting, photography, music, dance, theater.
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I don’t story board. I do something else, which is, I block it. We then train to the blocking. In other words, when everybody’s training, they’re actually training a lot of the moves that we are definitely going to use, and then, I do a lot of photography of that, and that becomes where the cameras go.
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Big game photography in Africa is mainly done from a vehicle, so then I feel I might as well take the lot.
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How the visual world appears is important to me. I’m always aware of the light. I’m always aware of what I would call the ‘deep composition.’ Photography in the field is a process of creation, of thought and technique. But ultimately, it’s an act of imaginatively seeing from within yourself.
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I was not getting work, even after auditioning for films. So I started working in a studio as a photographer; I assisted a cinematographer for two ads. I was thinking that I will get into photography or cinematography or assist someone. But then the ‘Dangal’ offer came, and I was busy with the auditions.
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When I was a kid, I loved photography, and I loved makeup.
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When I got to NYU, I immediately inquired about doing a double major in acting and photography.
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I consider myself very lucky. I’m known for photographing celebrities, but, in a nutshell, my first love is photography.
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Light field photography unleashes the power of the light, to forever change how everyone takes and experiences pictures.
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My son does a little photography, but he’s not involved the way I was.
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I really got into filmmaking through photography.
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I loved photography and everybody said it was a crazy thing to do because in those days nobody made it into the film business. I mean, unless you were related to somebody there was no way in.
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I was 24 years old at the time. I had no real notion of what photography was about. I had no training. By accident, I put a negative in an enlarger, and you can do many things with that negative.
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Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.
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I did painting before I did photography.
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I just don’t like to do photography for money.
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The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.
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Maybe I’ll paint, do photography, just something else. I can see that.
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I had become obsessed with the control-freak aspect of photography and with the rising importance of the image in our social media age it ended up working.
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People who are new to photography always pull their subjects directly into the sun, which is the most unflattering light in the world.
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I don’t see how a woman in documentary photography could have children. I think it’s a very difficult thing to do to raise a family, and I have enormous respect for people who do it. I’d hate to do something like that and not be good at it.
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Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.
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Photography must be integrated with the story.
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I first worked on sports photography, and it was until 2002, when I was already 32 years old, that I really started working and enjoying Africa’s wildlife.
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Biking and photography are a perfect combination for me.
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All my film ideas and subjects have come from photography.
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While I was there I became deeply interested in photography, and indeed the most noteworthy event in my early life was winning first, third, fourth and seventh prizes in an international competition for college and high school students.
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I was extremely irritated being photographed for a long time, then I gave up caring. Photography is a nauseating cliche, but there is a lot to it. You can tell so much about a person from it. You are exaggerating the consciousness. It’s life-thickening, photography.
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I was so impressed with the work we were doing and I was very involved ideologically in photography – that I arranged an exhibition at the College Art Association. The first exhibition I picked the photographs and so on and we had an exhibition in New York.
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I love photography and first editions. I have that in my genes. My father was an archivist.
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One advantage of photography is that it’s visual and can transcend language.
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I don’t want to knock photography, and I don’t feel that film is up there but photography isn’t. I think they’re next to each other really, you know. There’s an incredible strength to a still picture. Or there can be an incredible strength to a still picture that can outlive you. That can outlive a film.
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Photography has been a passion of mine since I was 15. After my kids were born I found myself incorporating my photography into different art endeavors and from there it just blossomed.
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There are those photographers who have made a whole career doing commercial work but have never had a museum show, and then there are others who’ve only had museum shows but couldn’t survive for five seconds in the real world of photography. But I’ve done absolutely everything.
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Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.
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Truthfully, I don’t really think of myself as a photographer. I don’t have all the disciplines and knowledge of a person who’s spent their life devoted to photography.
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I think when you look at architectural photography it doesn’t help to have piles of old clothes lying on the floor. Architectural photography sets up an artifice.
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Orbs are little bundles of positive energy and they think they can move between 500 and 1,000 miles per hour. They look like little round planets, but they come in all shapes and sizes. Conventional photography can’t pick them up, but digital cameras can.
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Photography has become a small world with so many jealous people. You do a story and then a lot of people try to do the same thing.
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I really like photography, and I’d like to do more of that kind of thing. If I had to choose a different job within the industry and do it well, I would love to do cinematography.
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The digital camera takes photographs in practically no light: it will dig out the least bit of light available. I was amazed to see the results of photographs that I wouldn’t take ordinarily. That’s the advantage of digital photography.
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The language that photography has is a formal language. Any photographer is doing something formal. If it’s formal, then it must be an aesthetic way to communicate.
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Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
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Photography is about finding things. And painting is different – it’s about making something.
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Photography helps people to see.
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We’re not going the photography route. I think there is a real distinction between photos and images, and Flickr is for photos, and Instagram is for photos. You wouldn’t put a filter on a meme; you’d put a filter on top of a photo that came from your camera.
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I became involved in photography when I was about thirteen years old.
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Flash photography can be horrible. In the hands of an expert who knows how to bounce all that searing bright light in the right direction, it may make an impossible picture workable.
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My style is in the 21st century. If you look at the process, it goes from photography through Photoshop, where certain features are heightened, elements of the photo are diminished. There is no sense of truth when you’re looking at the painting or the photo or that moment when the photo was first taken.
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Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.
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Writing is my profession. Photography is my hobby.
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Actually, when I first started dabbling in photography, I was still working for my parents as a salesman.
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I got into photography when my kids were little, and I continued talking pictures over the years.
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When I first started ‘Humans of New York,’ I was writing short stories. There were about 50 of them. And, you know, they were a great part of the site, but the photography just started growing so fast that I didn’t have time to make them anymore.
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I went to university in Colorado and studied art history. I did some photography classes there, although it felt really pretentious.
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I love photography myself.
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I’ve always thought photography was a bit of an adventure, so to come home with the film, develop it, then look at the results has more of a sense of excitement.
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I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.
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When I was a teenager, I loved photography and writing.
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I chose makeup over photography because there was something very sensual about makeup that I loved. But photography was always in the back of my mind. That was always something that I was very connected with: looking at magazines, enjoying photography, and then taking pictures myself when I was a kid.
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Photography is a very important part of my life.
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I’m really interested in photography, like every other human being.
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I don’t think there’s any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.
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I don’t need the money I generate from photography to support myself.
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Photography led me to experiment in graphic work and, actually, painting.
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I’ve always thought photography is not so much of an art form but a way of communicating and passing on information.
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Photography is about light and what it does and how it is captured on a piece of negative.
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I never really learned photography.
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With photography a new language has been created. Now for the first time it is possible to express reality by reality. We can look at an impression as long as we wish, we can delve into it and, so to speak, renew past experiences at will.
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I always liked photography in film – I studied photography growing up. I like the medium of film; I like physically holding 35-mm film. I like the way it looks, the quality when it’s projected. I like the way it frames real life.
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Photography is like oxygen for me. My hobby is my oxygen.
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I gravitate toward contemporary art. I love great paintings, sculpture, photography, some video art.
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Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.
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I love photography. And I just eat it up. I feel like I’m an encyclopedia, you know, inside.
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After I left school, where I studied art, photography and textiles at A-level, I started doing an apprenticeship in interior design, but I wasn’t really enjoying it very much, so I decided to do something creative, and in 2009, I began blogging.
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I don’t think there is a movie that I’ve been on that I wasn’t sure I could direct it better. But certainly also, as a director of photography, I have to serve the movie in whatever way I can as a filmmaker.
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I think that’s one of the greatest gifts you get if you’re successful at something like music or film or photography – any of the arts – you can sit there and think. It’s so much fun to sit there and think and wonder about the world and the universe.
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Increasingly, the work I’m doing is in service to an idea rather than just to see what something looks like photographed. I’m trying to explore how I feel about something through photography.
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