David LaChapelle Quotes

I believe in a visual language that should be as strong as the written word.

I’m a photographer, period. I love photography, the immediacy of it. I like the craft, the idea of saying ‘I’m a photographer.

My idea was that if I took a picture of somebody and years later, or whenever, they would die and if someone wanted to know who this person was, they could take one of these pictures and it would tell who the person was.

Pictures are an escape. They should be bigger than life. In the same way, celebrities provide an escape from the mundane. They are photographed so we can worship them – so they are worthy of our worship.

The key is to photograph your obsessions; whether that’s old people’s hands or skyscrapers. Think of a blank canvas, because that’s what you’ve got, and then think about what you want to see – not anyone else.

David LaChapelle Quotes on Style

You just do what you love, and then a style happens later on. People put it together and decide it’s yours. But some days you wake up and you’re happy and some days you wake up and you’re sad, some days you wake up and you’re feeling angry about things… if you can translate that through your work, and express those feelings, that’s okay as an artist.

I was working in this very bombastic style. I didn’t really know about style. I didn’t think about it:

I wanted it to provide an escape route, I wanted to make pictures that were fantastic and took you into another world, one that was brighter. I started off with this idea.

I did what I was interested in, what I was attracted to, what I was drawn to. I was drawn to color, and I was drawn to humor, and I was drawn to sexuality and spontaneity. It was all really intuitive. I never really thought, “Well this is the style…”

For me, it’s easier to like more things than to dislike them; I’m not a critic in that sense. I find it easier to like more, to be more open and enjoy more things, which has given me more opportunities.

People say photographs don’t lie, mine do.

I never want people to be repulsed with my pictures; I always want to attract people.

The minute you point a camera at something, you are manipulating the image, because you are cropping out whatever is to the left and right of it. The minute you put a light on someone, you are manipulating the image.

If you want reality take the bus.

LaChapelle on the Art of Photography

I went to art high school and thought I’d be a painter. Unfortunately I didn’t finish high school, but that’s always been part of my work.

I was always painting when I was a kid. But then when I handled a camera when I was 17, that was it for me. I loved photography. I would work 4 or 5 hours a day. It was like a calling.

Just as Renaissance artists provided narratives for the era they lived in, so do I. I’m always looking beyond the surface. I’ve done that ever since I first picked up a camera.

My biggest advice would be to take the pictures you want to take. Don’t think about the marketplace, what sells, or what an editor might say. And don’t think about style. It’s all bullshit and surface stuff.

Then I got this idea in my head that magazines were like a gallery and if you got your magazine page ripped out and someone stuck it on their refrigerator, then that was a museum – someone’s private museum.

It’s much harder to work for yourself, by yourself, than to create work for a gallery, because there are no limits and you can do anything you want. It’s always easier when you have a parameter, when you have a limit. You can work within the limit and push it and walk the line, but when you’re given absolutely no limits, it’s harder. You must really think. It’s more challenging.

I stopped working for magazines in 2006 because I felt I had said all I had to say in that world. I didn’t want to work with celebrities or do fashion any more. It didn’t occur to me that I could make photographs like this one for galleries. To be honest, I didn’t think the art world would have me.

I didn’t see any difference between being a photographer or being an artist. I didn’t make those boundaries. If someone wants to think it’s art, that’s great, but I’ll let history decide.

Fashion and the Business of Photography

I try to get the visual part of my brain turned on. It’s like a muscle that you need to start working. Once I do that the ideas just start coming.

The tools I learned photographing celebrities, now I want to use them to sell ideas.

I have this idea that you can use glamour and still have it represent something that matters.

In the fashion world, I was always an outsider, but I made people look good, so I had a career.

I’ve never wanted to be part of an inner circle of any scene. I’ve always been an outsider looking to question and subvert.

When I shoot, the image has to be there first. And photographs have always been manipulated – [Richard]Avedon retouched all his American west portraits. I could take a photo of you now and crop it to make it look a certain way. But, with me, the image has to come first.

My work is about making candy for the eyes. It’s about grabbing your attention. Even though my work is appearing in magazines I am trying to make a large picture. I want my photographs to read like a poster.

What’s your Favorite David LaChapelle Quote?

Have a favorite David LaChapelle quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. Like the article? Share it with other photographers.

To see more of LaChapelle’s brilliant photography, check out the image archive on his official website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Head over to the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

Related Quote Articles:

• Cindy Sherman Quotes
• Richard Avedon Quotes
• Helmut Newton Quotes
• Fashion Photography Quotes

The post 30 David LaChapelle Quotes on Fantasy, Fashion and Fine Art appeared first on Photogpedia.

Jeff Wall Quotes

I like photographs that don’t look altogether the way photographs are supposed to look. We don’t really know how photographs are “supposed to look.”

Painting has to do with touch… That’s the eros specific to painting… Photography is about the distance, the inability to touch, maybe.

I’m not sure any of us has made photographs as good as Evans’.

Jeff Wall on Walker Evans

I see [photography] as a kind of untheorisable medium, a kind of polymorphic, multivocal and multivalent construction.

Most photographs cannot be looked at very often. They become exhausted. Great photographers have done it on the fly. It doesn’t happen that often. I wasn’t interested in doing that. I didn’t want to spend my time running around trying to find an event that could be made into a picture that would be good.

For a long time it was necessary to contest the classical aesthetic of photography as too absolutely rooted in the idea of fact… I accept that claim, but I don’t think that it itself can be the foundation for an aesthetic of photography, of photography as art. They way I thought I could work through that problem was to make photographs that put the factual claim in suspension, while still creating an involvement with factuality for the viewer.

A picture is something that makes invisible its before and after.

If you are capable of making good pictures it’s immoral not to do so, for whatever reason or excuse you might give.

Because image traffic has become so heavy and so continuous, it now seems as if these millions of images came into being by themselves, without the agency of a person.

Subjects and Staged Photography

I don’t find my own experiences very interesting. I find my observations interesting. Maybe that’s why I’m a photographer. Maybe an observation is an experience that means more to you than other experiences.

My practice has been to reject the role of witness or journalist, of “photographer,” which in my view objectifies the subject of the picture by masking the impulses and feelings of the picture-maker. The poetics or the “productivity” of my work has been in the stagecraft and pictorial composition – what I call the cinematography.

I’m struck by things I’ve seen, but I don’t photograph them. If they persist in my mind, I try to recreate them.

Meaning does not interest me and has almost nothing to do with my decisions or judgments.

I guess you could say I’m like a film director but my movies have only one frame.

Wall on the Process

I begin by not photographing.

The essential model, for me, is still the painter, the artisan who has all the tools and materials they need right at hand, and who knows how to make the object he or she is making from start to finish. With photography this is almost possible.

… electronic image traffic has become present in the relation between the photographer and the picture he or she sees in a viewfinder.

Digital photography provides certain obvious technical advantages and allows you the freedom to do photography either as it has always been done or to do it in rather different ways, and to still be practicing photography.

One paradox I have found is that, the more you use computers in picture-making, the more “hand-made” the picture becomes. Oddly, then, digital technology is leading, in my work at least, toward a greater reliance on handmaking because the assembly and montage of the various parts of the picture is done very carefully by hand.

Jeff Wall Quotes on Art and Photography

Art inherently involves artistry. I prepare certain things carefully because I believe that’s what’s required. Other things are completely left to chance. Anything that is prepared, constructed, or organized is done in order to allow the unpredictable “something” to appear and, in appearing, to create the real beauty of the picture, any picture.

The spontaneous is the most beautiful thing that can appear in a picture, but nothing in art appears less spontaneously than that.

In my time, I’ve been accused of being afraid to go out into the world to take pictures, like a so-called ‘real’ photographer does, and I’ve been accused of making art with a capital A – as if that, too, was a crime.

Photography could emerge socially as art only at the moment when its aesthetic presuppositions seemed to be undergoing a withering radical critique, a critique apparently aimed at foreclosing any further aestheticization of “artification” of the medium. Photoconceptualism led the way toward the complete acceptance of photography as art – autonomous, bourgeois, collectible art – by virtue of insisting that this medium might be privileged to the negation of that whole idea.

What an artist could do with photography wasn’t bounded by the documentary impulse – but that other part was underdeveloped. Painting could be topographical realism or it could be angels – in the same medium. Why couldn’t photography do the same thing?

It is astonishing to remember that important art-photographs could be purchased for under $100 not only in 1950 but in 1960.

I’ve always felt that good art has to reflect somehow on its own process of coming to be.

What’s your Favorite Jeff Wall Quote?

Have a favorite Jeff Wall quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. If you’ve found the article helpful, then we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers.

To see more of Jeff Wall’s photography, check out his image archive on the Gagosian website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Visit the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

Related Quote Articles:

• Julia Margaret Cameron Quotes
• Gregory Crewdson Quotes
• Cindy Sherman Quotes
• The Best Art Quotes from Master Painters

The post 26 Jeff Wall Quotes on Art and Conceptual Photography appeared first on Photogpedia.

Below we’ve put together a list of 40 quotes from the master photographer to inspire, motivate and help take your photography to the next level.

Paul Strand Quotes

Objectivity is of the very essence of photography, its contribution and at the same time its limitation.

You see, the extraordinary thing about photography is that it’s a truly popular medium… But this has nothing to do with the art of photography even though the same materials and the same mechanical devices are used, Thoreau said years ago “You can’t say more than you see.” No matter what lens you use, no matter what the speed of the film is, no matter how you develop it, no matter how you print it, you cannot say more than you see. That’s what that means, and that’s the truth.

I’ve always felt you can do anything you want in photography, if you can get away with it.

I think of myself as an explorer who has spent his life on a long voyage of discovery.

If the photographer is not a discoverer, then he is not an artist.

Photography is only a new road from a different direction, but moving toward the common goal, which is life.

I’ve always felt you can do anything you want in photography, if you can get away with it.

The important thing is, you have to have something important to say about the world.

Documentary Photography Quotes

The documentary photographer aims his camera at the real world to record truthfulness. At the same time, he must strive for form, to devise effective ways of organizing and using the material. For content and form are interrelated. The problems presented by content and form must be so developed that the result is fundamentally true to the realities of life as we know it. The chief problem is to find a form that adequately represents the reality.

It has always been my belief that the true artist, like the true scientist, is a researcher using materials and techniques to dig into the truth and meaning of the world in which he himself lives; and what he creates, or better perhaps, brings back, are the objective results of his explorations. The measure of his talent – of his genius, if you will – is the richness he finds in such a life’s voyage of discovery and the effectiveness with which he is able to embody it through his chosen medium.

If Ansel Adams gets a thousand dollars a print, I want ten thousand.

Honesty no less than intensity of vision is the prerequisite of a living expression. This means a real respect for the thing in front of the photographer. This is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation through the use of straight photographic methods.

The artist is one who makes a concentrated statement about the world in which he lives and that statement tends to become impersonal – it tends to become universal and enduring because it comes out of something very particular.

Photographing People

It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.

I like to photograph people who have strength and dignity in their faces; whatever life has done to them, it hasn’t destroyed them. I gravitate towards people like that.

With the eye of the machine, Stieglitz… has shown that the portrait of an individual is really the sum of a hundred or more photographs. He has looked with three eyes and has been able to hold, by purely photographic means, space-filling, tonality and tactility, line and form, that moment when the forces at work in a human being become most intensely physical and objective. In thus revealing the spirit of the individual he has documented the world of that individual, which is today.

Strand on Subject Matter

Subject matter is extremely important to the artist, because until he talks about something that really means something to him, the audience cannot see anything important or interesting.

I’ve always wanted to be aware of what’s going on around me, and I’ve wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time.

On the whole, I am attracted to those artists who are interested in a large panorama, and not to those who are concerned with their personal likes and dislikes. I am attracted to those who are more interested in everything that exists outside of themselves. That is the final source of all the best in art and it’s a source which has hardly been tapped.

Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningness. If you let other people’s vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

The material of the artist lies not within himself nor in the fabrications of his imagination, but in the world around him. The element which gives life to the great Picassos and Cezannes, to the paintings of Van Gogh, is the relationship of the artist to context, to the truth of the real world. It is the way he sees this world and translates it into art that determines whether the work of art becomes a new and active force within reality, to widen and transform man’s experience. The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.

Photography Technique

The camera machine cannot evade the objects which are in front of it. When the photographer selects this movement, the light, the objects, he must be true to them. If he includes in his space a strip of grass, it must be felt as the living differentiated thing it is and so recorded. It must take its proper but no less important place as a shape and a texture in relationship to the mountain tree or what not, which are included.

We do not photograph some large conception of humanity, but rather go very deeply into a single person, and penetrate very deeply and derive a larger meaning. One person who has been studied very deeply and penetratingly can become all persons. Therefore, it seems to me, that art is very specific and not at all general.

The decision as to when to photograph, the actual click of the shutter, is partly controlled from the outside, by the flow of life, but it also comes from the mind and the heart of the artist. The photograph is his vision of the world and expresses, however subtly, his values and convictions.

Cartier-Bresson has said that photography seizes a ‘decisive moment’, that’s true except that it shouldn’t be taken too narrowly…does my picture of a cobweb in the rain represent a decisive moment? The exposure time was probably three or four minutes. That’s a pretty long moment. I would say the decisive moment in that case was the moment in which I saw this thing and decided I wanted to photograph it.

All good art is abstract in its structure.

The camera machine cannot evade the objects which are in front of it. No more can the photographer. He can choose these objects, arrange and exclude, before exposure, but not afterwards… Your photography is a record of your living, for any one who really sees.

And if you can find out something about the laws of your own growth and vision as well as those of photography you may be able to relate the two, create an object that has a life of its own, which transcends craftsmanship. That is a long road, and because it must be your own road nobody can teach it to you or find it for you. There are no shortcuts, no rules.

The photographer’s problem, therefore, is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium, for it is precisely here that honesty, no less than intensity of vision, is the prerequisite of a living expression. This means a real respect for the thing in front of him, expressed in terms of chiaroscuro through a range of almost infinite tonal values which lie beyond the skill of human hand.

The thing I see is outside myself – always. I’m not trying to describe an inner state of being.

Paul Strand Quotes for Better Photography

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.

When you put a photograph on the wall it either works as a totality or it doesn’t and all the excuses, rationale, and captions underneath will not make it any better.

The unintelligence of present-day photographers, that is of so-called pictorial photographers, lies in the fact that they have not discovered the basic qualities of their medium.

Whether a watercolor is inferior to an oil [painting], or whether a drawing, an etching, or a photograph is not as important as either, is inconsequent. To have to despise something in order to respect something else is a sign of impotence.

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!

You may see and be affected by other people’s ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzche meant when he said, ‘I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him.’ He knew how insidious other people’s ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own personal vision.

Did I express my personality? I think that’s quite unimportant because it’s not people’s selves but what they have to say about life that’s important.

I go and get the camera and do it. Photography is a medium in which if you don’t do it then, very often you don’t do it at all, because it doesn’t happen twice. A rock will probably always be more or less there juts the way you saw it yesterday. But other things change, they’re not always there the day after or the week after. Either you do it or you don’t. Certainly with things as changeable as shy and landscape with moving clouds and so on, if they look wonderful to you on a certain day and if you don’t do it then, you may never see them again for the rest of your life. So as a photographer you become very conscious – at least I do – that everything is in movement.

What’s your Favorite Paul Strand Quote?

Have a favorite Paul Strand quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. If you’ve found the article helpful, then we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers.

To see more of Paul Strand’s photography, check out his image archive on the V&A Museum website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Check out the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

Related Quote Articles:

• Alfred Stieglitz Quotes
• Edward Weston Quotes
• Ansel Adams Quotes
• The 100 Greatest Photography Quotes

The post 40 Inspirational Paul Strand Quotes: The Voyage of Discovery appeared first on Photogpedia.

His work is held in the public collections at some of the most prestigious galleries including the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern. Gursky has twice earned the distinction of the world’s most expensive photographer: In 2006, 99 Cent II (1999) sold for $3.35 million. Five years later, Rhine II (1999) sold for $4.3 million.

In this article we’ll be sharing our favorite 42 Andreas Gurksy quotes on art photography, subjects, technique and process, printing and much more.

Andreas Gursky Quotes

For me, vision is an intelligent form of thought.

I read a picture not for what’s really going on there, I read it more for what is going on in our world generally.

Since the photographic medium has been digitized, a fixed definition of the term “photography” has become impossible.

A word is worth a thousand images.

It is not pure photography, what I do.

My photographs are ‘not abstract.’ Ultimately, they are always identifiable. Photography in general simply cannot disengage from the object.

People keep trying to find a matrix for the perfect image, but it’s intuition, it’s not something that can be taught.

Gursky on Subjects

Try to understand not just that we are living in a certain building or in a certain location, but to become aware that we are living on a planet that is going at enormous speed through the universe. For me it’s more a synonym. I read a picture not for what’s really going on there, I read it more for what is going on in our world generally.

I only pursue one goal: the encyclopedia of life.

I am never interested in the individual, but in the human species and its environment.

My preference for clear structures [within my photographic practice] is the result of my desire, perhaps illusory, to keep track of things and maintain my grip on the world.

My pictures really are becoming increasingly formal and abstract. A visual structure appears to dominate the real events shown in my pictures. I subjugate the real situation to my artistic concept of the picture.

So much has been written about my work with reference to painting, that my works look like paintings. In a way that’s right. But in another way it’s completely not right, because I insist I am a photographer, and if there is quality in my work, it is because I am a photographer, it is not because it’s something that reminds you of something else.

My images are about the way we travel through space on our planet. And the universe is huge and we are so limited in our perception

Paradoxically, this view of the Rhine cannot be obtained in situ; a fictitious construction was required to provide an accurate image of a modern river. On his photograph Rhein II

Gursky Quotes on Ideas and Research

The issues of our time – climate change, the exploitation of natural resources, working conditions, the monopolisation of distribution structures – they’re all themes in my work. But I don’t have solutions to offer. Everyone knows that Amazon represents turbo-capitalism, but it’s for the viewer to come to their own conclusions. I keep awareness of the problems simmering without losing sight of the beauty and complexity of the world so that interest in it doesn’t disappear.

I am a passionate newspaper reader every day, so many of my ideas come from reading newspapers, or looking in magazines or at TV, so that’s the reason why my images are connected to what’s going on in the world.

These days, I no longer go places without a plan, hoping to simply discover things. My process is much more conceptual and research-based.

I collect images which surround us and, from time to time, I check all the images and then, because it is difficult to make a decision – because I don’t have the time or energy to follow everything that seems interesting – it’s a gamble to say okay, this project, I think we should start doing research on it.

Normally, the way I work is that I’m doing research in the media, I find my location, do further research and then I’m asking for permissions. Then I travel to this place and I’m doing my work.

I think I’m a very slow worker, so I focus on one picture and the background of the original idea for why I choose this location or this space is always a reference to a picture that I did before, but then I change the content a bit.

Andreas Gursky Photography Techniques

I compare my work to that of a writer. He writes from what he remembers and his different impressions. In a way, a writer has the freedom to connect different thoughts, and this is the way I work with photography. It is not a straight documentary but the details that are going together, they come from the real world and they exist.

I am making images, and to make an image you have to follow certain rules so that it becomes an image.

For example, I’m working on an image, which is not in the exhibition, which shows the construction of an ocean liner. This is a subject that exists in the world. Millions of people have seen it. And I have an idea of how to show it: it sounds simple if I say it – the size of the boat is so big that our imagination is not strong enough to [encompass] it. But I have a conceptual idea to show this boat in a way you haven’t seen it. If I was still working in analogue, if I didn’t have the abilities to alter or construct images, then I couldn’t make such pictures, because in this case it will be more invention.

Even if a picture is completely invented or built, it’s necessary that you could imagine that it’s a realistic location or place. I am not happy if the picture looks completely surreal. Even if I am working with montage, I want that you don’t see it.

All my pictures are based on a direct visual experience from which I develop an idea for a picture, which is subjected to testing in the studio and eventually worked on and precised at the computer.

Digital Technology and Post-Production

Editor note: Gursky’s final images are built up from multiple images, each slightly different, parts from one added to or replacing another, until he has something that satisfies him.

Digital technology, gives me a lot of possibilities and freedom to work. When I did my straight photographs in the 1980s, it was really tough to find those images. You can’t find a location like Salerno on any [old] day. Because I didn’t know what I was looking for. It was just by chance that I found that image. But once you have made one like that, you look for similar locations and you start to repeat yourself and it becomes more difficult. So now I have [many more] possibilities.

In the early 1990s, I began to work digitally, combining shots, excising certain details, repeating others. The final works were no longer simple straightforward shots, like Salerno, but constructed images. My focus is on the expanse rather than the detail. Critics talk about me always capturing scenes from a raised perspective, but my ceiling images were taken from below, and my Formula 1 work from straight on.

If you do so much post-production, it takes such a long time to finish a picture. Normally, I don’t have the distance after this process to get the right feeling: is it a good picture, an okay picture, or a bad picture? So I need the pictures around me to prove the quality of the picture.

Space and Distance

Distance is also an important factor, which is something else I inherited from the Bechers. If a photojournalist was commissioned to document a scene, they would get much closer. But by always keeping a distance, I allow the viewer to come up with their own opinion. While my images are all comprised of many details – which you can explore in depth because of the high resolution – that’s not what they are about. Each one is always a world of its own, created.

Space is very important for me but in a more abstract way, I think. Maybe to try to understand not just that we are living in a certain building or in a certain location, but to become aware that we are living on a planet that is going at enormous speed through the universe.

My images are a lot about space, but that doesn’t mean it’s space that is unlimited. Space for me is a metaphor for the way we as mankind travel through space at home and on our planet. And the universe is huge and we are so limited in our perception and this is one of the things I want to show in my image.

The Final Print and the Market

I don’t have many choices in producing my work, so I take the photograph but the final result is always this [C-print mounted on] Plexiglas and it’s framed. On the one hand, I am happy that I found a solution that works very well for presentation; but on the other hand, I wish I could work with different materials. I’m a bit jealous of painting, where you have surface and the smell of paint. In my case, it’s always the same. So maybe this is the background for at least trying to make a difference between the sizes.

I love paintings, I collect paintings, and I am jealous because the material I use, the surface of the acrylic glass, is very boring for me. The plastic is not a very sexy material. But it is the only material we can use for making very huge photographs. And if it’s a good picture, you don’t notice the plastic any more.

The American Abstract Expressionists fascinate me. The distinction between photography and painting is still that the viewer always reads photography as what is presented, whereas painting is about the presentation as such. That has always been a guidepost for me. It is interesting to me that someone looking at my work tends to be stunned initially by being first confronted with visual phenomena that cannot be immediately classified.

In the last years, I always produce the big works because I am accustomed to the size and because I normally work a very long time for one picture, and because I am showing in museums that ask for big sizes. The post-production sometimes takes a year and I am not working on so many different pictures at one time. In the last years, my production was more than before, but sometimes it is only three or four pictures a year.

The whole market situation was a topic that might have been important to me. What matters is now, and the fact that I made some money back then is what permits me to be completely free and independent in my work now.

Quotes for Better Photography

In retrospect I can see that my desire to create abstractions has become more and more radical. Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what’s behind something.

I stand at a distance, like a person who comes from another world.

I believe that there’s also a certain form of abstraction in my early landscapes: for example, I often show human figures from behind and thus the landscape as observed “through” a second lens.

I’m always telling my students: you won’t get anywhere sitting at a table thinking. You learn by doing. That’s how you move forward. And even if you do something wrong, the result may be much more interesting than what you went looking for.

One sometimes unconsciously makes the right decision.

What’s your Favorite Andreas Gursky Quote?

Have a favorite Andreas Gursky quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. If you’ve found the article helpful, then we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers.

To see more of Andreas Gursky’s photography, check out the image archive on his official website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Check out the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

Related Quote Articles:

• Cindy Sherman Quotes
• Gregory Crewdson Quotes
• Jeff Wall Quotes
• What Makes a Good Photograph Quotes

The post 42 Andreas Gursky Quotes on Creativity and Art Photography appeared first on Photogpedia.

If you haven’t done so already, we recommend reading our Julia Margaret Cameron master profile article to learn more about her remarkable photography, glass-plate techniques, tableaus and much more.

Julia Margaret Cameron Quotes

My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and ideal and sacrificing nothing of the truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty.

The field in which photography has so great a power of expression that language can never approach it, is physiognomy.

If one believes as I do in the doctrine of compensation one soon accepts the evidence that God gives the material things of this world to some and the spiritual and intellectual riches to others and that the combination of gifts is very uncommon.

By sight and observation and thought, with the help of the camera, and the addition of the date of the year, we can hold fast the history of the world.

The camera has become to me, a living thing, with voice, memory and a creative vigour.

Beauty, you’re under arrest. I have a camera, and I’m not afraid to use it.

Cameron on Getting Started

Many and many a week in the year 1864, I worked fruitlessly, but not hopelessly… I began with no knowledge of the art. I did not know where to place my dark box, how to focus my sitter, and my first picture I effaced to my consternation by rubbing my hand over the filmy side of the glass.

From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour.

When we are angry or depressed in creativity, we have misplaced our power. We have allowed someone else to determine our worth, and we are then angry at being undervalued.

The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be a great artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.

Experimentation, Happy Accidents and Focus

What is focus and who has the right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?

Growth is a spiral process, doubling back on itself, reassessing and regrouping.

A photographer, like all artists, is at liberty to employ what means he thinks necessary to carry out his ideas. If a picture cannot be produced by one negative, let him have two or ten; but let it be clearly understood, that these are only means to an end, and that the picture when finished must stand or fall by the effects produced, and not by the means employed.

I believe that… my first successes in my out-of-focus pictures were a fluke. That is to say, that when focusing and coming to something which, to my eye, was very beautiful, I stopped there instead of screwing on the lens to the more definite focus which all other photographers insist upon.

Art is born. Its midwife is detail.

Cameron on Portrait Photography Quotes

When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavoured to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer.

I counted four hundred and five hundred and got one good picture. Poor Wilfrid said it was torture to sit so long, that he was a martyr! I bid him be still and be thankful. I said, I am the martyr. Just try the taking instead of the sitting!

Mortification is basic to the act of photographing. The person is mobile, … then I freeze one moment in his movement, a mere five-hundredth of a second of that person’s life-time. That’s a very meager or small extract from a life.

The capacity for delight, is the gift of paying attention.

The history of the human face is a book we don’t tire of if we can get its grand truths learn them by heart.

I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied. Its difficulty enhanced the value of the pursuit.

Storytelling and Historical Tableaus

People often believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined.

From days of old, and in all periods, we find documents and books with pictures illustrating them, but photography has presented us with new possibilities and new tasks. It can depict things in magnificent beauty, but also in terrible truth, and can also deceive enormously. We must be able to bear seeing the truth, but above all we should hand down the truth to our fellow human beings and to posterity, be it favorable to us or unfavorable.

What’s your Favorite Julia Margaret Cameron Quote?

Have a favorite Julia Margaret Cameron quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. Also, don’t forget to share it with others through the usual channels (social media, forums, websites, etc).

To learn more about Cameron’s photography, we recommend reading our Julia Margaret Cameron master profile article. To see more of her remarkable photography, check out the Cameron image archive at the Victoria and Albert Museum website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Visit the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

More Quote Articles:

• Cindy Sherman Quotes
• Gregory Crewdson Quotes
• Richard Avedon Quotes
• 150+ Portrait Photography Quotes

The post 25 Timeless Julia Margaret Cameron Quotes to Bookmark appeared first on Photogpedia.

If you would like to learn more about Crewdson’s staged photography and working methods, then check out our Gregory Crewdson master profile article.

Gregory Crewdson Quotes

Photography is a lonely endeavor, and I think all photographers are in one way or another drawn to the medium by kind of an alienated viewpoint.

I think that, in a sense, there’s something about photography in general that we could associate with memory, or the past, or childhood.

In this age of Instagram, and pictures on cell phones, and social media, it’s a real challenge to think of the photograph still meaning something important.

I do think that dread is about a certain kind of expectation. And the fact that a picture can never resolve itself the way a movie can – maybe that’s a specific kind of dread that becomes associated with a picture.

There isn’t a picture that was ever made that doesn’t speak about mortality in some way.

I’m not that particularly talented in terms of making anything or – I’m not technically efficient. I certainly don’t know how to draw very well or paint, and I’m not good with computers. But I think the thing that I’m good at is willing something into life, no matter what. I do what it takes to get it done.

All pictures are autobiographical, yet they’re telling us everything and nothing about the photographer.

Originally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts it is the most democratic, in so far as it’s instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth.

If my pictures are about anything at all, I think it’s about trying to make a connection in the world. I see them as more optimistic in a certain way. Even though it’s very clear there’s a level of sadness and disconnection, I think that they’re really about trying to make a connection and almost the impossibility of doing so.

Nobody on this Earth is going to make these pictures aside from yourself. So if you don’t do it, no one else will.

Quotes on Story and Narrative

Every artist has a central story to tell, and the difficulty, the impossible task, is trying to present that story in pictures.

What the artist attempts to do is to try and tell a story. Attempting to give physical expression to a story that’s internal.

What I’m after, what I’ve always been after is a picture that tells a story. I see it all in my head beforehand, and I set out obsessively – maybe even narcissistically – to make it. Very little is improvised in the end, though I am open to serendipity in some details. In part I see what I am doing as exploring the American psyche through the American vernacular landscape, much as Hopper did.

I’m interested in the question of narrative, how photography is distinct from, but connected to, other narrative forms like writing and film. This idea of creating a moment that’s frozen and mute, that perhaps ultimately asks more questions than it answers, proposes an open-ended and ambiguous narrative that allows the viewer to, in a sense, complete it.

Since a photograph is frozen and mute, since there is no before and after, I don’t want there to be a conscious awareness of any kind of literal narrative. And that’s why I really try not to pump up motivation or plot or anything like that.

For all the talk of my pictures being narratives or that they’re about storytelling, there’s really very little actually happening in the pictures. One of the few things I always tell people in my pictures is that I want less – give me something less.

I never know what to call the subjects in my pictures because I’m uncomfortable with the word actor. I think maybe subjects might be more accurate – or maybe even more accurate is objects.

I have always been fascinated by the poetic condition of twilight. By its transformative quality. Its power of turning the ordinary into something magical and otherworldly. My wish is for the narrative in the pictures to work within that circumstance. It is that sense of in-between-ness that interests me.

As artists we walk around with a single story to tell, some kind of central narrative. And I think the struggle is to attempt to reinvent that story over and over again in different forms and to visualize that story through, in my case, photographs, and try to make it new each time.

The viewer is more likely to project their own narrative onto the picture.

Capturing the Moment

My pictures are moments after the moment between moments really, and I think twilight is a beautiful metaphor for that. In “Twilight,” the narratives are more literal, and the event is much more spectacular. The pictures in “Beneath the Roses” are much more psychological and grounded in reality.

The whole reason I make these pictures is for those moments of clarity. For that single moment, everything seems to make sense in my world. And I think we all look for that in our lives, because our lives are generally filled with chaos and confusion and disorder and complication.

I’m only concerned with that particular moment, the moment of the picture. I really don’t have any interest in what happens before, or what happens after. In a certain way, it’s a privilege that I don’t have to think about plot, or storyline, or character development, that I can just focus on that moment, and how to make that moment as beautiful and as mysterious as possible.

We print these images in large format at this size because it’s like… Well to me it’s like a picture window.

I want to privilege the moment.

You have this ambition to make something perfect, exactly right. Of course, necessarily, it fails in some way and you have to accept that for what it is, and then you’re on to the next thing.

What I am interested in is that moment of transcendence, where one is transported into another place, into a perfect, still world.

My pictures are about a search for a moment – a perfect moment. To me the most powerful moment in the whole process is when everything comes together and there is that perfect, beautiful, still moment. And for that instant, my life makes sense.

Ambiguity and Mystery

I’m interested in this ambiguous moment that draws the viewer in through photographic beauty, through repulsion, through some kind of tension.

I’m very moved by the fact that people are drawn into the pictures and that they do bring their own history and their own interpretation to the photograph. I think that’s why they work in a certain way.

My first impulse is to make the most beautiful picture I can. But then I’m always interested in this idea of a kind of undercurrent in the work… I’m very interested in the uncanny and a way to find something mysterious or terrible within everyday life.

My pictures must first be beautiful, but that beauty is not enough. I strive to convey an underlying edge of anxiety, of isolation, of fear.

I think all my pictures are psychologically rooted. There’s not much on the surface that is direct narration. Whatever story is being told should remain a mystery – a question mark even to myself. I’m more interested in telling the submerged narrative using light, colour, atmosphere and mood.

The photograph is still and frozen. From day one, I have been interested in taking that limitation and trying to find the strength in it – like a story that is forever frozen in between moments, before and after, and always left as a kind of unresolved question.

My father was a psycho-analyst and I think that fact was very influential on my development as an artist. Trying to search beneath the surface of things for an unexpected sense of mystery.

All my pictures are very voyeuristic, but ultimately I’m looking at what lurks in my own interior. I make photographs because I want to answer the question of what propels me to do the things that I do. But that always remains a mystery.

Design, Locations and Lighting

I was never conscious of filming except for when I was location scouting. In a way, that is the most important part of the entire process – and the most private. I’m so used to doing that alone. Unlike every other part, it’s just me, alone, on location. It’s very hard to describe what I’m looking for – something that feels both familiar and strange at the same time. It’s not enough for it just to be strange or mysterious, it also has to feel very ordinary, very familiar, and very nondescript.

Usually I’ll drive to certain locations over and over again, over a course of months really. And then it might just be I hit it at the right time, and the right light. And then I might go to that location over and over again, and then what happens in that lag time where – the image sort of locks in – all of a sudden I see it in my mind’s eye.

It’s very hard to describe what I’m looking for – something that feels both familiar and strange at the same time.

The suburban landscape is alien and strange and exotic. I photograph it out of longing and desire. My photographs are also about repression and internal angst.

If there’s one characteristic that separates my work from other artists, it is the light. And to me it’s the most important thing about the entire enterprise – the light. It’s how you tell the story in photography, through light.

It’s about finding meaning through light. I’m always interested in tensions. A primary one is the collision between the familiar and the strange.

I am always conscious of the relationship between the figure and the space – that, to me, is key: how does the figure exist in the larger setting, whether it be an interior or a landscape? For instance, within an interior, there is also a relationship between the figure, the interior space and the exterior space, which all become part of a visual equation. Trying to find a perfect balance between all three is a great challenge in my practice.

I’m interested in using the iconography of nature and the American landscape as surrogates or metaphors for psychological anxiety, fear or desire.

Gregory Crewdson Quotes on Ideas and Influences

It is really important to have an obsessive need to construct something, to understand something from your own experience.

I don’t deliberately look for something dark or bleak or disconnected, in fact that’s not something I’m even conscious of in the work as I’m making it. I’m always trying to create beauty, reveal hope, show the sense of longing that exists in isolation and loneliness, and capture the search for something greater inside all of my subjects.

[On David Lynch’s Blue Velvet] That film was a life-changer for me. I was already making pictures of small towns, but to see his vision of normalcy and the darkest elements of things was very powerful. I came out of that movie a different person.

I think my pictures are really about a kind of tension between my need to make a perfect picture and the impossibility of doing so. Something always fails, there’s always a problem, and photography fails in a certain sense… This is what drives you to the next picture.

I’ve always been interested in the commonplace, in finding a sense of beauty and mystery in everyday life. I’ve always been interested in the psychological nature of picture, in trying to explain my own fear and anxiety and desire in photographs. The pictures are my means of trying to find meaning in the world.

I always loved movies and the look of movies. I’m also a huge student of movies – but could never make one. Working in a linear fashion is foreign to me. I was always interested in using aspects of film production towards a single image – the relationship between movie making and still photography – and blurring the lines between the two. I’m fascinated with telling a story in a single image rather than through time.

Photography is not at all about an exact representation of the truth, but is rather a dramatization of something which ought to have remained hidden.

My pictures are about everyday life combined with theatrical effect. I want them to feel outside of time, to take something routine and make it irrational. I’m always looking for a small moment that is a revelation.

I really love that dynamic between beauty and sadness… there’s always these moments of quiet alienation, the sense of disconnect, but also, these moments of possibility.

I like to mix the ordinary with the fantastical. That makes the tension higher between fiction and reality.

What’s your Favorite Gregory Crewdson Quote?

Have a favorite Gregory Crewdson quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

To learn more about Crewdson’s photography, check out our Gregory Crewdson master profile article. To learn about his process, watch his brilliant documentary Brief Encounters.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. Also, don’t forget to share it with others through the usual channels (social media, forums, websites, etc).

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Visit the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

More Quote Articles:

• Cindy Sherman Quotes
• Julia Margaret Cameron Quotes
• William Eggleston Quotes
• What Makes a Good Photograph Quotes

The post 57 Gregory Crewdson Quotes on Staged Photography and Storytelling appeared first on Photogpedia.

William Eggleston Quotes

Everything [in a photograph] works, or nothing works.

I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify.

You become technically proficient whether you want to or not, the more you take pictures.

I’ve also never had favorite pictures. Or subjects. I have this discipline of treating everything equally – I used to say “democratically.”

Photography just gets us out of the house.

Whether a photo or music, or a drawing or anything else I might do – it’s ultimately all an abstraction of my peculiar experience.

There are a lot of unseen projects. When a project is finished, I often physically, and in my mind, set it aside, intending something to happen with it, something that does or does not always happen. Now, a lot of these are being resurrected for the public.

I am at war with the obvious.

You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.

Photography Style

I want to be clear about something. The artist… if the thing is in that person to do, it will find a way out. Doesn’t matter where you plant it.

I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I’ve never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something.

I don’t have a burning desire to go out and document anything. It just happens when it happens. It’s not a conscious effort, nor is it a struggle. Wouldn’t do it if it was. The idea of the suffering artist has never appealed to me. Being here is suffering enough.

There is no particular reason to search for meaning.

I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important.

Often people ask what I’m photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best what I’ve come up with is I just say: Life today.

Whatever it is about pictures, photographs, it’s just about impossible to follow up with words. They don’t have anything to do with each other.

The immediate reviews were very hostile, but they didn’t bother me – I had the attitude that I was right. The poor guys who were critics just didn’t understand the works at all. I was sorry about that, but it didn’t weigh on my mind a bit.

Words and pictures don’t – They’re like two different animals. They don’t particularly like each other.

I don’t think that has ever changed. I don’t think I see any more or any less than I did years ago. Let’s say I have the print of a photo taken in the 1960s and one I took a month ago. I think it’s pretty difficult to tell any difference, personally.

Color Photography Quotes

I wanted to see a lot of things in color because the world is in color. I was affected by it all the time, particularly certain times of the day when the sun made things really starkly stand out.

A lot of my friends were mostly working in black-and-white-people like Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and others. We would exchange prints with each other, and they were always very supportive of what I was doing. What each of us was doing photographically was entirely different, but we were basically coming from the same place, sort of like a club.

I met and became close with John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art. He was incredibly supportive about me working in color.

[on color dye-transfer prints] It was a very old process, and used almost completely for fashion advertising, they would do the final prints and transfer – and I never heard of it being used for non-commercial or art photography, what I was doing. And I had two prints made right away, and I was astonished how good the material is.

Often very often, I have these ‘photographic dreams’. They are just one beautiful picture after another – which don’t exist. Short time later, I don’t remember them. I just remember being very happy during the dream [laughs]. Always in color.

The way I have always looked at it is the world is in color. And there’s nothing we can do about that.

Composition is important, but so are many other things, from content to the way colours work with or against each other.

William Eggleston Quotes on Technique

I have always assumed that the abstract qualities of the photographs were very obvious. For instance, I can turn them upside down and they’re still interesting to me as pictures. If you turn a picture that’s not well organized upside down, it won’t work.

A picture is what it is and I’ve never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn’t make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they’re right there, whatever they are.

I just wait until [my subject] appears, which is often where I happen to be. Might be something right across the street. Might be something on down the road. And I’m usually very pleased when I get the image back. It’s usually exactly what I saw. I don’t have any favorites. Every picture is equal but different.

I never think of [a photograph] beforehand. When I get there, something happens and in a split second the pictures emerges.

Something new always slowly changes right in front of your eyes – it just happens.

Until I see it. It just happens all at once. I take a picture very quickly and instantly forget about it.

You want to make the photograph work in every way possible. Doesn’t matter where it is in the world.

I think with being blind the one thing you would have going is that you could still feel things, see your way around so to speak. And if you had had the experience of seeing at one time in your life, then you would know what it was like and be able to function. I’ve said this before, I think I could really photograph blind if I had to.

I quite frequently don’t look through the camera, which is very close to being blind.

I do have a personal discipline of only taking one picture of one thing. Not two. I would take more than one and get so confused later. I was trying to figure out which was the best frame. I said, this is ridiculou – I’m just going to take one.

I only ever take one picture of one thing. Literally. Never two. So then that picture is taken and then the next one is waiting somewhere else.

William Eggleston quotes

Cameras and Film Photography

I don’t think about what camera I should use that much. I just pick up the one that looks nicest on the day.

There’s plenty of film out there, and quadrillions of cameras that use film-I don’t think it makes much sense not to use it. The thing that’s going out is the manufacturing of the paper. Incidentally, all these years my wife has told me that I’m color-blind.

I don’t think much about the digital world… because I am in the analog world!

Influences and Other Photographers

I had an old Canon and a Leica, but I didn’t know the first thing about photography. Never learnt it off anybody either. It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.

And what we called photojournalism, the photos seen in places like Life magazine, didn’t interest me either. They were just not good-there was no art there. The first person who I respected immensely was Henri Cartier-Bresson. I still do.

My friend who was also interested in photographing, one time he bought many books containing photojournalism pictures. To me they were not interesting. But then I saw this one [Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘Decisive Moment’] and oh my God, this is not photojournalism – this is great art. Compositions, obvious knowledge of painting… and the way of composing, and they’re still great.

I couldn’t imagine doing anything more than making a perfect fake Cartier-Bresson. His were the first pictures I’d seen which weren’t just straight-on pictures like everybody else’s. He had angles like Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec.

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.

The only pictures I like are the ones I’ve taken.

I don’t really look at other people’s photographs at all. It takes enough time to look at my own.

What’s your Favorite William Eggleston Quote?

Have a favorite William Eggleston quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. Also, don’t forget to share it with others through the usual channels (social media, forums, websites, etc).

To see more of Eggleston’s wonderful color photography, check out the image archive on the William Eggleston Foundation website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Visit the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

Related Quote Articles:

• Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes
• Diane Arbus Quotes
• Ernst Haas Quotes
• Street Photography Quotes

The post 47 William Eggleston Quotes on Color Photography and Technique appeared first on Photogpedia.

If you haven’t done so already, we recommend reading our Cindy Sherman master profile article to learn more about her career, photography, techniques, and much more.

Cindy Sherman Quotes

The still must tease with the promise of a story the viewer of it itches to be told.

I like making images that from a distance seem kind of seductive, colorful, luscious and engaging, and then you realize what you’re looking at is something totally opposite. It seems boring to me to pursue the typical idea of beauty, because that is the easiest and the most obvious way to see the world. It’s more challenging to look at the other side.

Nowadays, with digital printing, it’s so easy to make everything perfect, which is not always a good idea. Sometimes the mistakes are really what make a piece.

We’re all products of what we want to project to the world. Even people who don’t spend any time, or think they don’t, on preparing themselves for the world out there – I think that ultimately they have for their whole lives groomed themselves to be a certain way, to present a face to the world.

People are always trying to find the next groovy thing, and it hasn’t gone back to painting… I’d like it to go back to painting. I’m sick of all this photography and video. There’s so much of it, it’s almost annoying.

The models have always been the least interesting thing about fashion.

Being able to make a living doing something one truly loves to do – is my definition of success.

Photography and Art

I didn’t want to make what looked like art in terms of painting; I wanted to make something that looks mass-produced and I didn’t want it to have anything to do with art theory. I wanted it to look like anybody would understand it because it’s from a movie and maybe I saw that movie.

One reason I was interested in photography was to get away from the preciousness of the art object.

I didn’t have any interest in traditional art.

I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.

I think people are more apt to believe photographs, especially if it’s something fantastic. They’re willing to be more gullible. Sometimes they want fantasy. Even if they know it’s fake they can believe anything. People are accustomed to being told what to believe in.

I didn’t really have ideas of what I wanted to do with painting. That was when I thought, “Why am I wasting my time elaborately copying things when I could use a camera?

I like the idea that people who don’t know anything about art can look at [my art] and appreciate it without having to know the history of photography and painting.

Painting was still the big thing, but I was less and less interested in it even though I started out in that department; I was into conceptual, minimal, performance, body art, film – alternatives.

I didn’t set out to establish an alternative. No one really did – expectations were a lot lower than you see with people coming out of art schools today. I did want to do something different; I was bored by what was going on in art and particularly in painting, but I didn’t think I was actually going to make a difference. We all would have been happy just to have a show somewhere.

I got nervous when my work was starting to become popular, so I started making things that would challenge someone to hang it over their sofa.

I didn’t want to make “high” art, I had no interest in using paint, I wanted to find something that anyone could relate to without knowing about contemporary art. I wasn’t thinking in terms of precious prints or archival quality; I didn’t want the work to seem like a commodity.

Sherman on Interpretation and Meaning

I am always surprised at all the things people read into my photos, but it also amuses me. That may be because I have nothing specific in mind when I’m working.

My intentions are neither feminist nor political. I try to put double or multiple meanings into my photos, which might give rise to a greater variety of interpretations…

The work is what it is and hopefully, it’s seen as feminist work, or feminist advised work, but I’m bot going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff.

I would read theoretical stuff about my work and think, “What? Where did they get that?” The work was so intuitive for me, I didn’t know where it was coming from. So I thought I had better not say anything or I’d blow it.

I don’t analyze what I’m doing. I’ve read convincing interpretations of my work, and sometimes I’ve noticed something that I wasn’t aware of, but I think, at this point, people read into my work out of habit. Or I’m just very, very smart.

The reason I wasn’t titling them besides the fact that I never felt very much like a wordsmith is… I didn’t want people to have a preconceived notion of what they’re supposed to imagine this character to be.

I didn’t think of what I was doing as political. To me, it was a way to make the best out of what I liked to do privately, which was to dress up.

Early in my career, a critic said that I needed to “explain” the irony in my work, suggesting that I needed to add text next to the images to help people understand what I was trying to say.

At first I was dismayed that I wasn’t making work with a clear enough message. That’s when I realized that that was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do – that I wasn’t responsible for a misinterpretation of my work, that there should be some ambiguity to it. They either got it, or they didn’t.

It’s amusing how far someone can stretch my intentions and make a concept that fits their theories.

The Queen of the Self-Portrait

Everyone thinks [that my photographs] are self-portraits, but they are not meant to be. If I photograph myself it’s because I can push my own limits to the extreme. I can make from each shot a work as heavy, as clumsy or as stupid as I want.

I feel I’m anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself: they aren’t self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.

People assume that a self-portrait is narcissistic and you’re trying to reveal something about yourself: fantasies or autobiographical information. In fact, none of my work is about me or my private life.

The role-playing was intended to make people become aware of how stupid roles are, a lot of roles, but it’s not all that serious, perhaps that’s more the moral of it, not to take anything too seriously.

When I was in school I was getting disgusted with the attitude of art being so religious or sacred, so I wanted to make something which people could relate to without having read a book about it first. So that anybody off the street could appreciate it, even if they couldn’t fully understand it, they could still get something out of it. That’s the reason I wanted to imitate something out of the culture, and also make fun of the culture as I was doing it.

It has nothing to do with me. I work with myself, that’s my material somehow, but the finished photograph has more to offer than reflections of my “personality”.

My photographs are certainly not self-portraits or representations of myself, though unfortunately people always keep saying they are.

I have this enormous fear of being misinterpreted, of people thinking that the photographs are about me, that I’m really vain and narcissistic. Then sometimes I wonder how it is I’m fooling so many people. I’m doing one of the most stupid things in the world which I can’t even explain, dressing up like a child and posing in front of a camera trying to make beautiful pictures. And people seem to fall for it.

Untitled Film Stills

I don’t think of it as real photography because I don’t think people who like real photography think of it that way. People who are real photo fans like the early film stills, the black and whites that seem like real vintage photography, or there are people who complain about how big they are, like, “Who does she think she is?” It’s just the medium I chose to work with.

I didn’t want to make what looked like art. Film has always kind of been more influential to me than the art world.

To pick a character like that was about my own ambivalence about sexuality – growing up with the women role models that I had, and a lot of them in films, that were like that character, and yet you were supposed to be a good girl.

Some people have told me they remember the film that one of my images is derived from, but in fact I had no film in mind at all.

I didn’t care much about the print quality. The photographs were supposed to look like they cost fifty cents.

Truthfully, I’m a little sick of these pictures [the Untitled Film Stills] – it’s hard for me to get excited about them anymore. It’s funny to see some of them now.

Throughout my life, I’ve tried to keep looking different, so my hair has been all different colors, all lengths and styles. As a result, a lot of these characters look like me in the periods of my life since I shot the Film Stills… Occasionally I’ve felt that as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to look more like some of them. It’s kind of scary – I was always trying to look like older women.

Cindy Sherman Quotes on Ideas

If I knew what the picture was going to be like, I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already… the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of.

In horror stories or in fairy tales, the fascination with the morbid is also, at least for me, a way to prepare for the unthinkable… That’s why it’s very important for me to show the artificiality of it all, because the real horrors of the world are unmatchable, and they’re too profound.

When I prepare each character I have to consider what I’m working against; that people are going to look under the make-up and wigs for that common denominator, the recognizable. I’m trying to make people recognize something of themselves rather than me.

Believing in one’s own art becomes harder and harder when the public response grows fonder.

I just got those at the Paris flea market, and I don’t know what I’m going to use them for, but it seemed like they had the potential for something. I love weird stuff; a good, weird flea market anywhere is really my favorite place to be.

I’ll see a photograph of a character and try to copy them on to my face. I think I’m really observant, and thinking how a person is put together, seeing them on the street, and noticing subtle things about them that make them who they are.

My ideas are not developed before I actually do the pieces.

I see humor in almost everything, in even the grotesque things, because I don’t want people to believe in them as if they were documentary that really does show true horror. I want them to be artificial, so you can laugh or giggle at them, as I do when I watch horror movies.

Every time you have to come up with a new body of work for a new show, you’re aware that people are just ready to rip you apart, they’re just waiting for you to fall or make the slightest trip up.

[My work is] maybe about me, maybe not wanting to be me and wanting to be all these other characters. Or at least try them on.

Cindy Sherman’s Working Process

I’m good at using my face as a canvas… I’ll see a photograph of a character and try to copy them on to my face. I think I’m really observant, and thinking how a person is put together, seeing them on the street and noticing subtle things about them that make them who they are.

I can’t work without it [music]. And it has to be the right kind, because if it’s not then I get into a bad mood. I work with a remote so that I can change CDs instantly if I need to.

It’s just me, and a mirror and a camera and a backdrop, and that’s about it. I’ve always felt that I’m able to be a little more experimental because no one is around if it doesn’t go well.

Once I set up, the camera starts clicking, then I just start to move and watch how I move in the mirror. It’s not like I’m method acting or anything. I don’t feel that I am that person. I may be thinking about a certain story or situation, but I don’t become her. There’s this distance. The image in the mirror becomes her – the image the camera gets on the film. And the one thing I’ve always known is that the camera lies.

When I’m cooking, I’m just following a recipe – I’m being told what to do. When I’m working on my photographs I have to make up my own sort of rules. Sometimes I have a vision of what I want but mostly I’m guided by what I don’t want.

I think of becoming a different person. I look into a mirror next to the camera… it’s trancelike. By staring into it I try to become that character through the lens… When I see what I want, my intuition takes over.

When I do work, I get so much done in such a concentrated time that once I’m through a series, I’m so drained I don’t want to get near the camera.

The way I see it, as soon as I make a piece I’ve lost control of it.

I’d never even thought about compromise when I worked in my studio. The major distinction is in the priority of who I ultimately wanted to please: myself or the audience.

While I’m working I might feel as tormented as the person I’m portraying.

What’s your Favorite Cindy Sherman Quote?

Have a favorite Cindy Sherman quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. Also, don’t forget to share it with others through the usual channels (social media, forums, websites, etc).

To learn more about Cindy Sherman’s photography, we recommend reading our Cindy Sherman master profile article. To see more of her remarkable photography, check out the Cindy Sherman image archive on the MoMA website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Check out the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

More Quote Articles:

• Gregory Crewdson Quotes
• Man Ray Quotes
• Julia Margaret Cameron Quotes
• What Makes a Good Photograph Quotes

The post 56 Cindy Sherman Quotes to Inspire the Creative Photographer in You appeared first on Photogpedia.

If you haven’t done so already, we recommend reading our Hiroshi Sugimoto master profile article to learn more about his unique conceptual photography, working methods, cameras and much more.

Hiroshi Sugimoto Quotes

Photography is like a found object. A photographer never makes an actual subject; they just steal the image from the world… Photography is a system of saving memories. It’s a time machine, in a way, to preserve the memory, to preserve time.

When people call me a photographer, I always feel like something of a charlatan – at least in Japanese. The word Shashin, for photograph, combines the characters sha, meaning to reflect or copy, and shin, meaning truth, hence the photographer seems to entertain grand delusions of portraying truth.

People have been reading photography as a true document, at the same time they are now getting suspicious. I am basically an honest person, so I let the camera capture whatever it captures whether you believe it or not is up to you; it’s not my responsibility, blame my camera, not me.

Photography is making a copy of reality, but when it is photographed twice it goes back to the reality again. That is my theory.

Hiroshi Sugimoto Quotes

Sugimoto Quotes on Art, Creativity and Ideas

I try to never be satisfied; this way I will always be challenging my spirit.

Art resides even in things with no artistic intentions.

When I wake up I just make it happen. My dreams come true- that is the artistic practice.

Art is technique: a means by which to materialize the invisible realm of the mind.

I didn’t want to be criticized for taking low-quality photographs, so I tried to reach the best, highest quality of photography, and then to combine this with a conceptual art practice. But thinking back, that was the wrong decision [laughs]. Developing a low-quality aesthetic is a sign of serious fine art – I still see this.

It was my goal to visualize the ancient layer of human memory with means of photography.

I imagine my vision then try to make it happen, just like painting, (…). The reality is there, but how to make it like my reality.

Black and White Photography Quotes

I live in the shadow… I like shadows, that’s why I became a black and white photographer.

Credibility is better in black and white than in color.

Quotes on Projects

If I already have a vision, my work is almost done. The rest is a technical problem.

My method is different from the one most photographers use. I do not go around and shoot. I usually have a specific vision, just by myself.

One night I thought of taking a photographic exposure of a film at a movie theater while the film was being projected. I imagined how it could be possible to shoot an entire movie with my camera. Then I had a clear vision that the movie screen would show up on the picture as a white rectangle. I thought it could look like a very brilliant white rectangle coming out from the screen, shining throughout the whole theater. It might seem very interesting and mysterious, even in some way religious.

Before the invention of movies was the invention of photography. To make a movie, you have to sew single-shot photographic images together to make it look like a movie. It is all an illusion to the human eye.

The stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake. Yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. I’d found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.

Quotes on Seascapes

The sea reminds me that within my blood remains traces of human evolution over hundreds of thousands of years.

Whenever I stand on a cliff looking at the sea, I envision an infinite beyond. The horizon lies within bounds and the imagination stretches to infinity.

Humans have changed the landscape so much, but images of the sea could be shared with primordial people. I just project my imagination on to the viewer, even the first human being. I think first and then imagine some scenes. Then I go out and look for them. Or I re-create these images with my camera. I love photography because photography is the most believable medium. Painting can lie, but photography never lies: that is what people used to believe.

The Seascapes are before human beings and after human beings. The Seascapes were there before our presence, and when our civilization is over, seascapes will still exist. Our presence is temporary. Civilization is only 5,000 to 6,000 years. The history of ours, the material history of consciousness, is rather short.

Mystery of mysteries, water and air are right there before us in the sea. Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.

Sugimoto on Capturing Time

To me photography functions as a fossilization of time.

Fossils work almost the same way as photography… as a record of history. The accumulation of time and history becomes a negative of the image. And this negative comes off, and the fossil is the positive side. This is the same as the action of photography.

A sense of time is a very important factor in early human consciousness. I’m going backward; people are going forwards. The gap between me and the world is getting bigger and bigger. But I don’t care. I just do what I want to do.

The Empire State Building on Manhattan island – it probably won’t survive for more than 200 or 300 years. The age expectation of concrete is probably 100, 200 years old. It will deteriorate. Through my collection, I get a sense of time, the passage of time, the history, the meaning of history. I just want to feel it through the object.

We need to have nature back in our atmosphere. There might be a turning point of going backward – within a few thousand years we are going back to the Stone Age! There are many scenarios [with] the robot technologies: Humans no longer need to walk; machines can produce products and food and everything. You might not be able to recognize what’s false and what is real.

I’m inviting the spirits into my photography. It’s an act of God.

Hiroshi Sugimoto Quotes

What’s your Favorite Hiroshi Sugimoto Quote?

Have a favorite Hiroshi Sugimoto quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. Also, don’t forget to share it with others through the usual channels (social media, forums, websites, etc).

If you would like to learn more about Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photography, we recommend reading our Hiroshi Sugimoto master profile article. To see more Sugimoto’s work, check out the image archive on his official website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Check out the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

More Quote Articles:

• Cindy Sherman Quotes
• Gregory Crewdson Quotes
• Man Ray Quotes
• What Makes a Good Photograph Quotes

The post 30 Hiroshi Sugimoto Quotes on Conceptual Photography and Time appeared first on Photogpedia.

If you haven’t done so already, we recommend reading our Man Ray master profile article to learn more about his innovative photography, rayograph technique, cameras and much more.

Man Ray Quotes

Everything is related to photography, because it all has to be photographed in the end.

I have finally freed myself from the sticky medium of paint, and am working directly with light itself.

It was my goal to visualize the ancient layer of human memory with means of photography.

One of the satisfactions of a genius is his will-power and obstinacy.

Reality is fabricated out of desire.

Man Ray Quotes on the Work

My works were designed to amuse, annoy, bewilder, mystify and inspire reflection.

Were it not for the fact that photography permits me to seize and to possess the human body and face in more than a temporary manner, I should quickly have tired of this medium.

I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive.

I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.

There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love.

Don’t put my name on it. These are simply documents I make.

A book was once published of twenty photographs by twenty photographers, of the same model. They were as different as twenty paintings of the same model. Which was proof, once and for all, of the flexibility of the camera and its validity as an instrument of expression. There are many paintings and buildings that are not works of art. It is the man behind whatever instrument who determines the work of art.

Photography Process and Techniques

A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.

I worked fast. As soon as they walked in the door the camera would start clicking. No one knew how I did it. When they asked me I gave them wrong information.

An effort impelled by desire must also have an automatic or subconscious energy to aid its realization.

I was a great retoucher. A retoucher is an esthetic surgeon.

Just as I work with paints, brushes, and canvas, I work with the light, pieces of glass and chemistry.

Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.

Quotes on Creativity, Inspiration and Ideas

It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them.

I never knew what I was doing until I was done.

A certain amount of contempt for the material employed to express an idea is indespensable to the purist realization of the idea.

I would photograph an idea rather than an object, a dream rather than an idea.

The streets are full of admirable craftsmen, but so few practical dreamers.

I do not photograph nature. I photograph my fantasy.

Some of the most complete and satisfying works of art have been produced when their authors had no idea of creating a work of art, but were concerned with the expression of an idea.

Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art.

I believe in the relation between photography and music; And thats my inspiration.

I have been accused of being a joker. But the most successful art to me involves humor.

An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvellous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.

Man Ray on Camera Equipment

I am not going to be dictated to by the size of the camera. I use everything from an 8 x 10 to a 35-mm. But I don’t use these modern cameras which break down all the time.

[What type of camera he prefers to work with] None! I have to modify them all. My cameras are all of my own design. I take lenses apart and put them together again and put them on cameras that were not meant for them.

You don’t ask a writer what typewriter he uses.

Painting vs Photography

There are purists in all forms of expression. There are photographers who maintain that their medium has no relation to painting. There are painters who despise photography, although many in the last century have been inspired by it and used it. There are architects who refuse to hang a painting in their buildings maintaining that their own work is a complete expression.

[Do you prefer the brush over the lens for certain tasks? Or vice versa?] I am an economic person; I judge the amount of work involved with the amount of worth attained.

A photograph is to a painting what an automobile is to a horse. A rider on his horse is a beautiful thing, but I prefer a man in an airplane.

However rapidly I could paint, it was still drudgery after the instantaneous act of photography.

l paint what cannot be photographed, and l photograph what l do not wish to paint. lf it is a portrait that interests me, a face, or a nude, I will use my camera. It is quicker than making a drawing or a painting. But if it is something I cannot photograph, like a dream or a subconscious impulse I have to resort to drawing or painting.

To express what I feel I use the medium best suited to express that idea, which is also always the most economical one. l am not at all interested in being consistent as a painter, and object-maker or a photographer. I can use several different techniques, like the old masters who were engineers, musicians and poets at the same time.

I have never shared the contempt shown by painters for photography: there is no competition involved, painting and photography are two media engaged in different paths. There is no conflict between the two.

Is photography an art? There is no point in trying to find out if it is an art. Art is old-fashioned. We need something else.

I was very fortunate in starting my career as a painter. When first confronted with a camera, I was very much intimidated. So I decided to investigate. But I maintained the approach of a painter to such a degree that I have been accused of trying to make a photograph look like a painting. I did not have to try, it just turned out that way because of my background and my training.

Many years ago I had conceived the idea of making a painting look like a photograph! There was a valid reason for this. I wished to distract the attention from any manual dexterity, so that the basic idea stood out.

To me, a painter, if not the most useful, is the least harmful member of our society.

Critics, Experimentation and the Future

When I saw I was under attack from all sides, I knew I was on the right track.

All critics should be assassinated.

In the same spirit, when the automobile arrived, there were those that declared the horse to be the most perfect form of locomotion.

I like contradictions. We have never attained the infinite variety and contradictions that exist in nature. Tomorrow I shall contradict myself. That is the one way I have of asserting my liberty, the real liberty one does not find as a member of society.

A creator needs only one enthusiast to justify him.

The tricks of today are the truths of tomorrow!

What’s your Favorite Man Ray Quote?

Have a favorite Man Ray quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. Also, don’t forget to share it with others through the usual channels (social media, forums, websites, etc).

If you would like to view more Man Ray photos, then check out his profile at MoMA or visit the Man Ray Trust 

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Check out the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

More Quote Articles:

• Cindy Sherman Quotes
• Gregory Crewdson Quotes
• Bill Brandt Quotes
• The Best Art Quotes From Master Painters

The post 46 Classic Man Ray Quotes on Photography and Art appeared first on Photogpedia.