On the contrary, not all portrait photographs are great portrait photographs. In this article, find out how to capture high quality portraits with tips, fundamentals, and creativity combined.

Portrait Photography

Portrait Photography deals with capturing a person and their emotion, character, and identity in mind. It is not merely a standard point and shoot situation where a person looks at the camera and strikes a pose with a smile. This style of photography is meant to capture the being of a person by combining creativity and fundamental photography techniques.

Types of Portrait Photography

The three main types of portrait photography are Standard, Candid, and Creative. These types of portrait photography differ with the approach of capturing the subject. Some involve highly intricate setups that focus on bringing an idea to life. Others require minimal to no thought and focus on capturing the moment itself.

1. Standard Portrait Photography

Portrait Photographs in which the subject looks straight at the camera falls under Standard Portrait Photography. This type of portraits focuses on how a person’s emotion and character is seen through their facial expression. 

When doing standard portrait photography, emphasize the eyes of your subject. Make sure that their eyes look alive and full of emotion. This can be done with proper lighting techniques that cast highlights to the eyes and at the same time provide shadows on areas of the face to provide contrast. 

You can also pair outdoor photography with this type of portrait photography. Outdoor scenery together with natural lighting creates fantastic opportunities for bokeh backgrounds. Opting to use bokeh backgrounds for photography is a great way in bringing the focus to the subject.

2. Candid Portrait Photography

The Candid Portrait Photography focuses on capturing the spontaneity of a person. This type of portrait photography captures a person in their most genuine self. The subject is unaware that they are being photographed thus there is no eye contact with the camera. 

In Street Photography, the candid style is most visible. People make great subjects to photograph in scenarios where they are themselves. Here, the principal idea for candid photography is given light. 

The most important thing to look for in Candid Portrait Photography is the relationship between the person and the elements in the scene. This is opposite to Standard Portrait Photography in which the subject is given the highlight by separating them from the background. 

While the nature of candid portrait photography calls for natural lighting, you can still use creative lighting setups. In the scenario where you visualize capturing your subject in their work, you can set up lights especially if it’s indoors. 

3. Creative Portrait Photography

Lastly, the Creative Portrait Photography style caters to the photographer’s imagination and ideas. The photographer takes full control with the lighting, set up, composition, and the subject’s pose and expression. While this steers away from capturing the subject’s identity and character, it still follows the main criteria for portrait photography.

Creative Portrait Photography captures a person in a creative scene to portray an idea. This also provides the most creative freedom. This type of portrait photography also utilizes photo editing software to further deliver an abstract concept. 

Composition

The most common misconception about portrait photography is the orientation of the image. Image orientations are either portrait or landscape. While the name for the vertical orientation of photos is “Portrait”, you can still do portrait photography in both orientations.

Following the vertical orientation for portrait photography eliminates the other elements in the scene you capture. This gives you the ability to focus on the subject more and separate the background. On the other hand, using the landscape orientation gives you more freedom to play around composition. Using the landscape format in portrait photography can add more mood and emotion to your photo. 

Note that the previous orientations are just guidelines in portrait photography. These are not set of rules to be properly followed. You can also explore using different angles to add impact to your photos. Taking photos from an angle unusual to the eye level adds a sense of new perspective in portraits. This creates a more interesting look and will definitely make your photos stand out more.

Lighting

Portrait photography benefits the most in lighting setups. Every variation in lighting setups provide different effects to a person’s face and body. Lighting is a powerful tool in portrait photography to set the tone and mood of the output. 

1. Rembrandt Lighting

This lighting technique heavily draws inspiration from the Dutch painter Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. His paintings show off a gorgeous quality of light. Modern age photographers emulate this lighting in their work. A light is positioned overhead and at a 45 degree angle. This lighting technique produces a triangle shaped shadow off of the subject’s nose that connects to the shadow of the chin. 

This lighting setup produces fantastic application of contrast. The great highlight for one side of the subject’s face while casting off a rich dark shadow on the other manifests contrast. Overall, the Rembrandt lighting setup for photography provides a picturesque feel to the portrait.

2. Split Lighting

Talking about contrast, this brings the most contrast among these lighting setups. Essentially, this is the same with side lighting. The light is placed directly on the side of the subject thus producing no trace of light to the opposite half. Most of the light is concentrated on one side of the subject slowly spreading to the subject’s face. 

A clear division between the bright and dark parts of the subject can be seen. This division is equal between the nose. Similar to Rembrandt lighting, the amount of contrast in this setup is fascinating. 

3. Broad Lighting

In this lighting setup, the light source is still oriented overhead. The main difference is the point in which this hits the subject. The orientation of the light source provides luminance to the back of the subject at an angle. 

The Broad lighting setup creates a shadow for the front of the subject’s body. At the same time, the face has a dramatic mood due to the shadows casted on it. Direct your subject to tilt their head in a way where some light still touches part of their face.

4. Paramount / Butterfly Lighting

The Paramount or Butterfly lighting setup is a variation of front lighting. The light source is placed overhead directly in front of the subject. It is then angled to face downwards but still maintaining a direct impact to the subject’s face. 

A shadow forms under the nose and chin. The shadow that forms below the nose appears like a butterfly, hence the name of this lighting setup. This setup focuses on bringing forth every detail of the subject’s face and providing little contrast.

5. Loop Lighting

The setup for Loop lighting directly follows that of Rembrandt lighting but avoids creating the trademark triangle shaped shadow from the nose. At a 45 degree angle overhead the subject, this lighting technique also provides fantastic application of contrast and detail.

3 Additional Tips for Portrait Photography

During the pursuit to make more standout portrait photography, we prepared three more additional tips. These are easy to do tips and will go a long way when consistently followed. While some of these take time and experience to master, the rewards are greatly beneficial to your photos.

1. Focus

A key aspect in Portrait Photography is the focus. You should make it a point that the main focus of the photo is the person. Learn how various apertures affect the focus of your photo.

Bokeh is a popular technique used in Portrait Photography. When taking photos outside or in a studio, bokeh is often used. Bokeh is the visual quality of the out-of-focus areas of a photograph. Low f-stops bring out the bokeh effect. 

On the other hand, higher f-stops bring out sharpness in the photo. This is used if the photographer wants to highlight elements in the scene. May it be the use of props or just a cool scenic background.

2. Color

Why not try spicing up your photos with the use of colored lights? This adds a different tone and mood to your photo and is not typical in everyday scenarios. The addition of colors in your photos can be done to add highlights or fill lights for the whole face of the subject.

Popular use of colors in portrait photography are seen in neon red and blue to create a vaporwave effect. This creates a nostalgic mood since the vaporwave style is widely popular in the 1980’s to 2000’s. 

3. Editing and Post-Processing

It takes time and experience to create a distinct style to your photos. Continuous practice of editing and post-processing of your portrait photos gives you the opportunity to explore different styles. 

Some styles that are dominant in portrait photography are: Black and White, High Contrast, and Retro or Vintage.

Black and White is dominant in portrait photography because it brings the focus not only to the subject’s appearance but also their emotion. It creates an emotional depth in the photo that people around the world surely appreciate. You can never go wrong with a black and white portrait!

On the other hand, High Contrast editing is extremely useful to enhance color in your portrait photography. This adds a great difference between the hues of your choice as well as the shadows and highlights of your photos. This editing style creates a great visual impact for your audiences!

Lastly, the Retro or Vintage editing style gives off a much more nostalgic feel to your portraits. It evokes a mood that is not typical with most portrait photographs. Explore the different vintage looks available, maybe mix and match editing styles, and surely you’ll fall to a distinct editing style.

Conclusion

Portrait Photography captures not just persons but also their identity, emotion, and character. This photography niche combines creativity and photography fundamentals to portray a story with just a subject. 

There are three main types of portraits. Each has a different focus or goal in terms of bringing a mood or emotion to a photo. Their likelihood falls with the use of photography fundamentals such as lighting and composition.

Lastly, remember that there are no set of rules for portrait photography. Focus on bringing out emotion and telling a story in your photos and you’re all set. Paired with application of fundamentals with lighting, composition, and post-processing; your photos will surely be mesmerizing. 

The post Guide to Portrait Photography appeared first on Photogpedia.

White’s work is characterized by its simplicity, deep feeling for nature, and love for abstract photography. His haunting images are often described as mystical or ethereal and are filled with metaphors that challenge us to think about our world differently.

White’s photographic style was formed during his exchanges with Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, and Ansel Adams. His conversations with Stieglitz, in particular, spurred his “meditations” about photography as a way to translate visual form into what he called the “suprasensual.”

For White, the photograph was a “mirage” and the camera was a “metamorphosing machine.”

White was also a founding member and editor of Aperture magazine, and from 1953 to 1957 he was the curator of exhibitions at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House.

Below, we have listed 40 of our favorite Minor White quotes to inspire and help advance your photography skills.

Minor White Quotes

Photography is a language more universal than words.

I’m always mentally photographing everything as practice.

I asked if I could be a photographer, and [Alfred] Stieglitz said: ”Well, have you ever been in love?” and I said: “Yes,” and he said: “Then you can be a photographer.”

The spring-tight line between reality and photography has been stretched relentlessly, but it has not been broken. These abstractions… have not left the world of appearances; for to do so is to break the camera’s strongest point – its authenticity.

When I look at pictures I have made, I have forgotten what I saw in front of the camera and respond only to what I am seeing in the photographs.

At first glance a photograph can inform us. At second glance it can reach us.

Camera Quotes

Let the subject generate its own photographs. Become a camera.

How astounding is camera! With its unique ability to register continuous value or tone, camera can sanctify even the ugly and the dead, clarify the ordinary, and, in a moment, turn a hundred-and-eighty degrees to play iconoclast.

When gifts are given to me through my camera, I accept them graciously.

Camera and eye are together a time machine with which the mind and human being can do the same kind of violence to time and space as dreams.

Minor White on Nature

I have often photographed when I am not in tune with nature but the photographs look as if I had been. So I conclude that something in nature says, ‘Come and take my photograph.’ So I do, regardless of how I feel.

Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts.

I seek out places where it can happen more readily, such as deserts or mountains or solitary areas, or by myself with a seashell, and while I’m there get into states of mind where I’m more open than usual. I’m waiting, I’m listening. I go to those places and get myself ready through meditation. Through being quiet and willing to wait, I can begin to see the inner man and the essence of the subject in front of me… Watching the way the current moves a blade of grass – sometimes I’ve seen that happen and it has just turned me inside out.

Creativity and Spirituality

To see through, not merely with, the eye, to perceive with the inner eye, and by an act of choice to capture the essence of that perception. This is the very core of the creative process.

The state of mind of a photographer while creating is a blank… For those who would equate “blank” with a kind of static emptiness, I must explain that this is a special kind of blank. It is a very active state of mind really, a very receptive state of mind, ready at an instant to grasp an image, yet with no image pre-formed in it at any time. We should note that the lack of a pre-formed pattern or preconceived idea of how anything ought to look is essential to this blank condition. Such a state of mind is not unlike a sheet of film itself – seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second’s exposure conceives a life in it. (Not just life, but “a” life).

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.

While we cannot describe its appearance (the equivalent), we can define its function. When a photograph functions as an equivalent, we can say that at that moment, and for that person the photograph acts as a symbol or plays the role of a metaphor for something that is beyond the subject photographed.

No matter how slow the film, spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen.

To get from the tangible to the intangible… a paradox of some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the visual facts upon which he is utterly dependent, a paradox is the only possible tool. And the talisman paradox for unique photography is to work ‘‘the mirror with a memory’’ as if it were a mirage, and the camera a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor… Once freed of the tyranny of surfaces and textures, sub-stance and form can use the same to pursue poetic truth.

When the photograph is the mirror of the man, and the man is the mirror of the world, then the Spirit might take over.

Photo Sequence and Montage

A sequence of photographs is like a cinema of stills. The time and space between photographs is filled by the beholder, first of all from himself, then from what he can read in the implications of design, the suggestions springing from treatment, and any symbolism that might grow from within the subject itself.

Before he has seen the whole, how unusually perceptive and imaginative the person must be to evolve the entire sequence by meditating on its single, pair, or triplet of essential images.

Sequences originate for me from some hidden place. Though I habitually play photographs against each other, or words against images in pairs, triplets, or rows of four with expectations of magic, sequences originate from within. And I prefer to let them. In fact I cannot seriously do otherwise than photograph on impulse and let whatever words will, flow spontaneously.

To engage a sequence we keep in mind the photographs on either side of the one in our eye.

In putting images together I become active, and excitement is of another order – synthesis overshadows analysis.

It is curious that I always want to group things, a series of sonnets, a series of photographs; whatever rationalizations appear, they originate in urges that are rarely satisfied with single images.

Before he has seen the whole, how unusually perceptive and imaginative the person must be to evolve the entire sequence by meditating on its single, pair, or triplet of essential images.

The Photo as a Self-Portrait

When I looked at things for what they are I was fool enough to persist in my folly and found that each photograph was a mirror of myself.

…all photographs are self-portraits.

Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence.

The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.

The camera is first a means of self-discovery and a means of self-growth. The artist has one thing to say – himself.

Quotes for Better Photography

There’s no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class. I’m always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don’t give a damn how it got made.

…innocence of eye has a quality of its own. It means to see as a child sees, with freshness and acknowledgment of the wonder; it also means to see as an adult sees who has gone full circle and once again sees as a child – with freshness and an even deeper sense of wonder.

Creativity with portraits involves the invocation of a state of rapport when only a camera stands between two people… mutual vulnerability and mutual trust.

The photographer has the power and the talent to make his model come to life. In his creative state he works with, not from the model. In his creativity he is, and when he is, his model can be.

Very often I try to find something that matches a feeling I have. On the other hand, a lot of times I photograph with nothing specific in mind. I just play it as it comes. If it’s good, fine. I find ‘letting it happen’ relaxing, a playful vacation. Stimulating pictures almost always result.

The secret, the catch, and power lies in being able to use the forms and shapes of objects in front of the camera for their expressive-evocative qualities… the ability to see the visual world as the plastic material for the photographer’s expressive purposes.

Sometimes we work so fast that we don’t really understand what’s going on in front of the camera. We just kind of sense that, ‘Oh my God, it’s significant!’ and photograph impulsively while trying to get the exposure right. Exposure occupies my mind while intuition frames the images.

What’s your Favorite Minor White Quote?

Have a favorite Minor White 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 Minor White’s photography, visit his archive on the Princeton website.

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

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• Edward Weston Quotes
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The post 40 Inspirational Minor White Quotes on Intuition and Found Photography appeared first on Photogpedia.

Anton Corbijn is a photographer, film director and music video director. Born in the Netherlands in 1955, he made his first inroads in the world of professional photography in the mid-’70s. This was thanks to his work photographing the band Herman Brood & His Wild Romance, which served the mutual purpose of rocketing the band to fame and increasing the exposure of their photographer.

His success enabled Corbijn to segue into a high-profile career with the British magazine NME (New Musical Express), which gave him a chance to photograph some of the most distinctive and iconic performers in the world.

The crisply stylish and moody appearance of his black and white photography work perfectly encapsulated the look and feel of the post-punk cultural movement of the 1980s. He became particularly associated with the bands Depeche Mode and U2, directing a number of live concert films for the former and several music videos for the latter. But he has also brought his distinct brand of directorial and photographic flair to music videos for bands as diverse as Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Coldplay, Danzig and Nirvana.

Though Anton Corbijn’s success has transcended the medium of photography, throughout his film work recurs the theme of the power of black and white imagery, as well as the exquisitely subtle composition of his photographs, the sharp juxtaposition of light and shadow.

Below we’ve listed 45 of our favorite quotes from the legendary rock photographer which are guaranteed to inspire and help improve your photography.

Anton Corbijn Quotes

Photography has taken me from isolation.

I believe that photography is a very simple affair. I meet people – and the camera is only something like a recording machine. My work has nothing to do with the circus that other people create, although of course that can also result in an excellent photo.

My way in for photographing people is really their work. I’m always interested in what people make, and then I photograph the person. Sometimes the person is a disappointment. But that’s the risk. It informs me a lot about the character of a person if I know their work first.

My biggest fear always is that I’ll photograph an idea rather than a person, so I try to be quite sensitive to how people are.

I’ve done an incredible amount of painters. It’s an area, for me, where there’s more mystery left. I’ve photographed so many musicians, I’ve been in studios so often, I know the whole process. The mystery’s gone from it. I think it’s important to keep mystery into our lives. There’s a longing connected with it.

I have always felt that if you take a picture of a person, the picture not only has to say something about that particular person, but also say something about the photographer. Why else would you have one photographer take the picture and not the other? So the challenging part is taking a photograph that stands out, and also producing an end result that doesn’t resemble anything you’ve ever seen before.

As an artist, you say something about yourself in your work. That is what distinguishes your own work from that of others.

If you make something with love and, you know, passion and you tell a real story, I think it will always find an audience somehow, you know.

Corbijn on his Career

My start as a photographer was very simple and not based on any knowledge of it or wanting to create a masterpiece. I was obsessed with the music world and tried to find a way to be part of it. By borrowing my dad’s camera once, and taking it to a free daytime concert in our town, where I took a few shots, I became convinced that this was my calling. Only then did I start to have an interest in photography itself, but for a long time musicians were my only subjects.

For me N.M.E. was a very big thing. When I first came to the United Kingdom I started taking pictures for them and I became their main photographer for five years, and that’s really been the basis of everything I’ve been doing since.

In England, I’m already labeled a rock photographer, which is a little insulting, because I’m not a rock photographer at all.

[On being called the greatest Rock photographer] It narrows the way you judge a photograph – I really try to take photos that go beyond a person’s notoriety, and although I don’t always succeed, of course, it is what I aim for, and that way we can relate to a fellow human instead of a celebrity in the photograph. But if you already label the photo a certain way, it will be looked at a certain way. That is why I call myself a portrait photographer. In any case, I have, for the last thirty-plus years, done series on painters, actors, and others. The world in front of my camera is a lot broader than just music – that is more the past, I’d say.

I never really enjoyed getting a portfolio together then sending it out whereas putting up the website is quite an enjoyable experience. The net’s just a much faster and more modern way to distribute things and you have to embrace it.

… yes, I’ve become a little more professional – which I don’t really want to be but I can’t help it at some point.

Now I’m on my fifth period. I take a lot of photographs of painters like Lucian Freud and Richard Prince.” Why? “I’m a frustrated painter. You’re totally your own boss. You don’t have to travel.

I have never understood models. I find it really hard to find beauty in that or to discover beauty because the beauty was so obvious. I have never understood models. I find it really hard to find beauty in that or to discover beauty because the beauty was so obvious.

Everybody is a photographer now, so it’s very democratic in a sense. There’s an imagery overload, so it’s really hard to get any message across in photography these days. And anything can be manipulated, so the ideal of the camera being the truth teller is also gone. If I were young today, I’m not sure I would have chosen the same career path. I would probably have been a painter instead.

Music Video Quotes

Apart from photography and music videos, I also do graphic design.

There’s only one music video that had an emotional impact on me, and that’s ‘Hurt’ by Johnny Cash. That’s exceptional. There is no music video I can think of apart from that one that really reaches you inside.

My photography changed from being more documentary-like to arranging things more, and that came into being partly because I started doing music videos, and I incorporated some things from the music videos into my photography again, by arranging things more.

When I started doing music videos in the early 80’s, the videos would look like a photographer making a film because the camera never moved, but in the end, the videos became much more filmic. Simultaneously, the experience of making videos worked back into my photography. I started to use stylists and props, and I became much more actively involved in what happened in front of the camera.

The Transition to Filmmaking

I’m not educated as a filmmaker, so it’s quite a jump for me.

Directing film is the hardest thing I have ever done.

[on finaning his first film] Well I actually had to sell the house afterwards. I thought I was going to get the money back but it didn’t work out. I didn’t have an agent so I took the worst contract you could imagine. [Laughs] Quite a few people made money on it but I didn’t. So that was a lesson learned.

I wanted to make a film as an artist, and it’s going to have to find an audience, you know. I don’t know how big the audience will be.

For many years I wanted to do a film, but I never had the courage to clear my desk and say, ‘OK I’ll take a year off and do a film.’

I wanted to do a film for a while, but I never found a script that I felt I was going to be the right person for; because if you’ve never made a film, you’re not taught how to make a film, and you feel like you lack skills.

A lot of scripts that I was given I didn’t feel were right for me, because I didn’t feel anything for them – I didn’t feel like I was going to change in life and start directing.

I don’t want to knock photography, and I don’t feel that film is up there but photography isn’t. I think they’re next to each other really, you know. There’s an incredible strength to a still picture. Or there can be an incredible strength to a still picture that can outlive you. That can outlive a film.

I’m used to depending on my gut feeling in photography, and it’s a very low-key and quick way of working. With film-making you pretty much have to put aside a whole year of your life. That can be tough, but the great thing is that you may end up creating something that a lot of people will see.

My learning process in photography has stagnated, but with film-making, I have had to learn how to tell a story, and I’m sure this new knowledge will be beneficial for my photography in the end.

Corbijn on Photography Technique

I work using the Brian Eno school of thinking: limit your tools, focus on one thing and just make it work… You become very inventive with the restrictions you give yourself.

I’m a very, very basic photographer. The main strength of my pictures, I guess, is the mood and feel I get out of the people that I meet. But technically I don’t think I’m very advanced. That never interested me.

I don’t have lights, I don’t have assistants, I just go and meet somebody and take a photograph. That’s really basic, and that’s how I used to work when I was 17 or 18 in Holland.

I take my work seriously, but there is also a lot of fun involved in these pictures. People dress up or do silly things. It’s partly because I don’t arrive with a big team. I just go around with a camera and maybe I have my assistant with me, but that’s it. So it doesn’t feel like I’m invading much of their world or threatening them.

The blurriness and the grain that I use, for me, is close to life. I find things that are very static and very sharp and very well-lit and all that is not how I experience life.

My work is not quite perfect. Perhaps it still contains something of life. Because perfection often prevents the work from breathing.

I feel the imperfection is much closer to how life is than perfection.

A photo doesn’t need to be perfect to fascinate.

I don’t crop my images and I always shoot handheld. By doing that I build in a kind of imperfection and this helps to emphasize reality.

Analog Photography and Digital

Analog is more beautiful than digital, really, but we go for comfort.

I still work in analogue. There are some elements of digital photography that I don’t really like, such as the fact that you see the results immediately. I’ve always thought photography was a bit of an adventure so to come home with the film, develop it then look at the results has more of a sense of excitement. Digital changes your end results because if you think it’s not totally there then you are going to shoot it differently – you get the perfect image but that kills it for me as I like the imperfection.

I am always wondering why people throw away film and go for video when they want video to look like film. It’s like if you want your CD to sound like vinyl, why throw away the vinyl? With photography I like a lot of the post-process to be digital but I like to shoot on film. So it’s the best of both worlds for me.

For square format I use a Hasselblad and for 35mm I use a Leica – they’re both beautiful cameras.

Photoshop is a different matter as it’s post-production really. It’s like an extension of your darkroom so I have no problem with it – although you do see many examples of it being used badly. I’m trying to get to grips with it. With the whole digital thing I sometimes feel like everyone’s been driving cars and I’ve been taking the bus. Inevitably, I’ll have to change at some point as I feel that companies are investing more in digital technology now so you’re left with paper and film that are no longer as good. I took a beautiful picture of Nelson Mandela recently, which we worked on for a week in Photoshop until it ended up a perfect picture, but it had lost all the soul … so we printed the original.

What’s your Favorite Anton Corbijn Quote?

Have a favorite quote from the list? Know any other Anton Corbijn quotes that would make a great addition to 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.

To learn more about Anton Corbijn’s photography head over to his official website or follow him on Instagram.

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

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The post 45 Anton Corbijn Quotes on Rock Photography, Mystery and Imperfection appeared first on Photogpedia.

Sir Cecil Beaton (1904 – 1980) was one of the leading portrait and fashion photographers of the early twentieth century. He was also the official court photographer for the British royal family.

Beaton was renowned for his images of elegance, glamour, and style and became Vogue’s first star photographer. He took his first pictures for the magazine in 1924 and continued to work with them for over 30 years.

Although he’s best known for his photography, Beaton was also a successful set and costume designer for stage and film productions, most notably My Fair Lady (1956) and Gigi (1958).

Below we’ve listed 14 quotes from the master photographer to inspire, motivate and help take your photography to the next level.

Cecil Beaton Quotes

You can’t teach people photography, they’ve got to learn how to do it the best way possible for them. They can learn from looking at pictures… but they don’t really get intimate with the medium until they’ve made a few bad shots.

Perhaps the world’s second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.

All I want is the best of everything and there’s very little of that left.

[on Henri Cartier-Bresson] His cherubic, almost simpleton, appearance is most disconcerting – for it gives no indication of the far from simple character of this somewhat twisted artist of the secret, prying lens.

There is always something dramatic about the job of permanently recording the features of a human being, it is the theatre bought to everyday life; the ordinary routine of existence is broken and the tension is heightened.

I want to make photographs of very elegant women taking the lipstick off their teeth.

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.

Beaton on Portraits and his Famous Subjects

Photography has provided me with a passport into many fields of interest which would otherwise have remained unknown. It has enabled me to meet, even if only once, a large number of famous people. Many an afternoon I have enjoyed in isolated intimacy with some personage whose path, but for my profession, I might never have crossed. Sometimes I was never to see them again; but photography has also been the means of discovering lifelong friend.

The telephone rang. “This is the lady-in-waiting speaking. The Queen wants to know if you will photograph her tomorrow afternoon” … In choosing me to take her photographs, the Queen made a daring innovation. It is inconceivable that her predecessor would have summoned me – my work was still considered revolutionary and unconventional.

I was able to bring out many of my familiar tricks, and also deciphered how easy, in comparison to photographing beautiful women of the world, it is to photograph men. The photographer of men has chosen an easy life.

Mrs Woolf’s complaint should be addressed to her creator, who made her, rather than me.

Cocteau says, I am Malice in Wonderland and I have succeeded in spending my life in an unreality made up of fun, so much too much fun and my interests are limited to the joys of certain superficial forms of beauty.

I soon found I had fallen so much under Picasso’s influence that I was seeing the world with eyes other than my own, with Picasso’s eyes in fact. I began to realize that many ordinary objects, pieces of cork, metal and paper, even ordinary boxes of matches – yellow, blue and black – which one sees every day, when seen in his company, look as if they are the creation of the master himself.

What’s your Favorite Cecil Beaton Quote?

Have a favorite Cecil Beaton 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 Cecil Beaton’s wonderful photography, visit the Huxley Parlour and Victoria and Albert websites.

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

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The post 14 Cecil Beaton Quotes on Portraits and Imaginative Vision appeared first on Photogpedia.

Imogen Cunningham was a pioneering female photographer who strove to capture reality through her lens. Her remarkable portrait, nude and still life photography helped establish the medium as an art form.

Below we’ve listed 30 of the best Imogen Cunningham’s to inspire, motivate and help advance your photography.

Imogen Cunningham Quotes

Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.

Once a woman who does street work said to me, ‘I’ve never photographed anyone I haven’t asked first.’ I said to her, ‘Suppose Cartier-Bresson asked the man who jumped the puddle to do it again – it never would have been the same. Start stealing!’

I don’t talk about success. I don’t know what it is. Wait until I’m dead.

My interest in photography has something to do with the aesthetic, and that there should be a little beauty in everything.

I never divide photographers into creative and uncreative, I just call them photographers. Who is creative? How do you know who is creative or not?

Everybody who does anything for the public can be criticized. There’s always someone who doesn’t like it.

Cunningham on Subjects

[My] taste lay somewhere between reality and dreamland.

I photograph anything that can be exposed to light. The reason during the twenties that I photographed plants was that I had three children under the age of four to take care of so I was cooped up. I had a garden available and I photographed them indoors. Later when I was free I did other things.

I’ve tried my best to sell people on the idea that I photograph anything that can be exposed to light.

I never stopped photographing. There were a couple of years when I didn’t have a darkroom, but that didn’t stop me from photographing.

You know, a documentary is only interesting once in a while. If you look at a whole book of Dorothea [Lange]’s where she has row after row of people bending over and digging out carrots – that can be very tedious. And so it’s only once in a while that something happens that is worth doing.

I don’t like landscapes. I never had had the time to run out when the weather was right. You know, always I would be getting dinner for somebody, when it was sunset time, when you can do a nice landscape. Or, crack of dawn, I’m not there. So, I’ve very seldom have done anything that could be called a landscape. But I do things in a landscape.

I’m still sticking with people more than things and I don’t walk around the city as much as I did. I don’t know why. Telephone. All the other agonies of life, keep you from doing what you really think you should do.

I was invited to photograph Hollywood. They asked me what I would like to photograph. I said, Ugly men.

Portrait Photography Quotes

The thing that’s fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.

So many people dislike themselves so thoroughly that they never see any reproduction of themselves that suits. None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.

A woman said to me when she first sat down, You’re photographing the wrong side of my face. I said, Oh, is there one?

I turn people into human beings by not making them into gods.

Related: 150+ Portrait Photography Quotes

Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don’t know.

When you do portraits professionally it’s not a desire, it’s for money.

One must be able to gain an understanding at short notice and close range of the beauties of character, intellect, and spirit so as to be able to draw out the best qualities and make them show in the outer aspect of the sitter. To do this one must not have a too pronounced notion of what constitutes beauty in the external and, above all, must not worship it. To worship beauty for its own sake is narrow, and one surely cannot derive from it that esthetic pleasure which comes from finding beauty in the commonest things.

Ansel [Adams] once said to somebody that I [Cunningham] was versatile, but what he really meant was that I jump around. I’m never satisfied staying in one spot very long, I couldn’t stay with the mountains and I couldn’t stay with the trees and I couldn’t stay with the rivers. But I can always stay with people, because they really are different.

Cunningham Quotes for Better Photography

I just believe in working. I’m not one of those romantic explainers of my own individual point of view.

I don’t think there’s any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.

I wasn’t very ambitious. I think that’s the solution. I just took things as they came. I wouldn’t say I didn’t have any problem, but I didn’t care. I didn’t think I was going to save the world by doing photography as some of these people do. I was just having a good time doing it, and so I still had a good time no matter what I had to photograph.

There are too many people studying it [photography] now who are never going to make it. You can’t give them a formula for making it. You have to have it in you first, you don’t learn it. The seeing eye is the important thing.

…I can’t recreate my feelings about how I happened to do this or that, because a lot of my stuff was done without any motivation, more than just what I call having a good time fooling around.

I made a lot of mistakes, and I still do. But, I try not to worry about it, because I never will be the perfectionist, and I never tried to be, I guess. Just so they didn’t come out all, mussed up. I don’t think anyone knows his own work. We always make mistakes about what we like and what we don’t like. One can never tell, I’ve done so many things that I’ve no idea about how to evaluate them.

The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.

What’s your Favorite Imogen Cunningham Quote?

Have a favorite Imogen Cunningham 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 Imogen Cunningham’s photography, head over to the image archive on the Imogen Cunningham Trust website.

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

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The post 30 Imogen Cunningham Quotes to Advance your Photography appeared first on Photogpedia.

Bruce Weber Quotes

I’ve always been shy and that’s partly why I chose a life behind the lens. I like people to look at my work and hopefully it speaks for itself.

I am someone who wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks about the things that I hope for. I end up putting those things in my films and my photographs and my books.

I like to start out each day from the beginning. I’m always learning things.

I think it’s not such a good idea to be so caught up in that fame game kind of thing as a photographer because what’s wonderful is that you can go out in the world and people don’t really know you.

You know, my dad wasn’t a photographer or filmmaker by profession, but on Sundays, he would take pictures of me and my family or his pals horseback riding, and it was a means of communication and affection, a means of not being so dysfunctional with each other.

… I knew how to imagine it. I think any good photographer or director has to have that – a fantasy life other than their own.

[on Instagram] I do feel encouraged however by anything that makes people want to go out and take pictures. I’ve always felt that photography is kind of a tool of democracy.

I always felt that I took pictures for somebody in my family or somebody I was in love with.

Bruce Weber on Style and Influences

Sometimes, with black and white you can explore things a little more. But I like them [b&w and color] both equally. I still shoot film and some of the emulsions in color have changed a lot. For instance, when I first started shooting, I shot in Kodachrome 25 and it was the most gorgeous emulsion. I remember when I had some of it, could afford to buy the film, I just loved using it. I would never use black and white, I would always use Kodachrome 25.

I don’t think it’s so much about what I’m using. When I take photographs I still use film. My assistants, I buy them old cameras to take photographs with film. To do both – I think that’s the healthiest. I’m just from a different time.

I guess if I had to choose something that has really inspired me for my work, it is words and reading.

I always found it great, at least for myself, in books and reading. I’ve tried to show that a little bit, that fantasy world that you get from reading. And you have this vision image, you know.

I don’t really think about what other photographers are doing. I do look at photographs in a way of appreciation. I love to have a lot of photographs around me, so I have a big collection. But I don’t reference how other people do pictures or how they live or where they stay.

Weber on Fashion Photography

When people hire me to photograph for them, I think about the person I’m working for, not the company.

Like, for instance, when I first started working for Calvin Klein, Calvin was out all the time at clubs and parties, he had this really glamorous New York life. In a sense, that’s what I was photographing – his desire, the passion he had to live like that.

When I started working for Ralph, I got to know his family and it really started with family photographs. Ralph and I had a lot of common interests – in cars, old clothes – so I was photographing his world. It wasn’t my world, but it was his world. And that was the fun part of it, to go into these other worlds.

On a lot of my shootings now we also make films, because you have to do that now for magazines. We made a lot of shorts recently. I think this year we made, like, 40 shorts. I really enjoyed it. I like that I have more time to take my pictures. And now – years ago when I used to have a job, I used to go away for a week to do ten pages. Now you go away for a day and a half to do ten pages. So, it’s kind of crazy, but, I can keep up with it. I’m proud that I can do it.

I think that a lot of people, especially people who work for fashion magazines, feel that their photographs at times are really pretty much discarded or thrown away immediately because when you work for a magazine people today really don’t save magazines like they used to. I just think that as long as one can work and have a good time at it and at least learn something then you’re not discarding what you do. You go out and do a photograph. It should be all about getting onto another photograph.

Documentary and Short Film Projects

When you make documentaries or short films, you have to have eyes and ears in the back of your head and on the sides and all around you. I like that in my films.

I really use each of them as a school for the other, within itself too. By that I mean that because I photograph at the beginning of my films and all the time through, I kind of felt that my pictures got freer because you couldn’t control it so much.

You could have somebody sit here but when they move around they might not look the way that they did when they sat for you. So, it’s exciting to me. I want to make films like a photographer. I was always proud that I was a photographer.

People, at first, when I first did my first film, Broken Noses, they were really tough on me because I did fashion photographs. I stood up to it; I was really proud of it. I laugh now because all the actors and actresses, they all wanted to be fashion models, which is really weird. I laugh at it.

Sometimes you meet somebody, you think, “I want to make a film about this person. That would be fun, even a short film, five minutes.” But then the more you start getting into it, the more you know you don’t want to do it. Because you have to give up so much, you know? I think all these films, for any filmmaker, whether it’s a feature or a documentary – labels aren’t important – I think you have to give up a lot of your inner life to do it.

Weber Quotes for Better Photography

You have to fight for your work – everybody has to. You have to be able to get knocked down and stand back up. You can’t let it stay on your shoulders. I see a lot of photographers who do their thing and put their soul in it and in the end it is all changed, but their name is still on it. So I do what Dick Avedon told me once and I just go out on each job and take pictures for myself. I’ll photograph trees or if I meet a really handsome guy or girl I’ll take their picture, even if they’re not part of the set. I’m going to try to learn something. Even if a picture is not so good, at least I can go back to bed at night and think: “Wow, did I learn something today?”

I had the great chance of meeting and getting to know Diane Arbus, and she always said to me something like, “Hey, don’t let those things cut you – your mistakes or your triumphs, if there are any.”

I always tell my assistants who are young photographers that they should have a strong life, have a viewpoint. Go out in the world and live!

What’s your Favorite Bruce Weber Quote?

Have a favorite Bruce Weber 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 learn more about Bruce Weber’s photography, head over to the official Bruce Weber website.

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

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The post 23 Bruce Weber Quotes on Fashion Photography and Inspiration appeared first on Photogpedia.

Jacques-Henri Lartigue Quotes

Photography is something you learn to love very quickly. I know that many, many things are going to ask me to have their pictures taken and I will take them all.

I have never taken a picture for any other reason than that at that moment it made me happy to do so.

It’s marvelous, marvelous! Nothing will ever be as much fun. I’m going to photograph everything, everything!

Photography is a magic thing. A thing that has mysterious odors, a little strange and frightening, something one quickly grows to love.

As a whole, I am interested in the symbolic, rather than the literal use of the camera.

One of my basic feelings is that the mind, and the heart alike, of the photographer must be dedicated to the glory, the magic, and the mystery of light. The mystery of time, the magic of light, the enigma of reality – and their interrelationships – are my constant themes and preoccupations.

The mystery of light [and] the enigma of time form the twin pivots around which all my work revolves. In addition… my work attempts to create a mythology for our contemporary world.

Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.

Jacques-Henri Lartigue on Art

Photography and writing are marvelous distractions from painting. I might even have found movies more interesting than photography. I tried it a bit, but not enough.

What’s so incredibly amusing with photography is that while seemingly an art of the surface, it catches things I haven’t even noticed. And it pains me not to have seen things in all their depth.

I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost- that is important. If they are art objects at the same time, that’s fine with me.

..dissatisfaction with one’s self and dissatisfaction with the world – is necessary – it is one of the prime things that keeps the artist going on – that drives him – happiness, as such, must come in between times, as best it can.

I frequently attempt to show in my work, in various ways, the unreality of the “real” and the reality of the “unreal.” This may result, at times, in some disturbing effects. But art should be disturbing; it should make us both think and feel; it should infect the subconscious as well as the conscious mind; it should never allow complacency nor condone the status quo.

I have two pairs of eyes – one to paint and one to take photographs.

Lartigue Quotes for Better Photography

One shouldn’t be only two photographers but thousands.

I did not start out as a photographer but, instead, as a writer. Whether for good or ill, this fact has inspired and colored many of my concepts … Through photography I have also tried to tie together and further my active interests in painting, in poetry, in psychology, and in architecture. Whatever value my photography has, it is only because of these other interests.

I attempt, through much of my work, to animate all things – even so-called “inanimate” objects – with the spirit of man. The creative photographer sets free the human contents of objects; and imparts humanity to the inhuman world around him.

In all my work I have been animated with three convictions:

1) That there is no essential reason why the creative imagination cannot work with a ray of light acting upon a sensitized surface as effectively as it can with a brush laden with pigment.

2) That photography is one of the most authentic and integral modes of expression possible in the particular kind of world in which we live.

3) That in photography, as in the other arts, the quality of a man’s imagination is the only thing that counts – technique and technical proficiency mean nothing in themselves.

How can one not be moved by the harmony of colours nature offers us? As long as neither is too harsh nor too sharp, colour photography seems to me, because of a certain blurriness, to best be able to express charm and poetry – a poetry that can very well accommodate a touch of humour.

I think just about everything has been tackled, but it may be that things will be done again, only better and differently.

[Lartigue’s advice to Photographers:]

1) Never, never be lazy.
2) Know how to eat well; the right foods in small quantities.
3) Know how to sleep well; the sleep that comes after a good day’s work.
4) Know how to appreciate, really appreciate, any good art.
5) Know how to enjoy silence, as well as good music.
6) Open your ears to the ideas and suggestions of God.
7) Love God.

The golden rule is “work fast.” As for framing, composition, focus – this is no time to start asking yourself questions: you just have to trust your intuition and the sharpness of your reflexes.

Learning to Look and Imagination

Learn how to look, how to love. It’s the same with painting and writing.

I quite agree with you that the photographer who produces a photograph which is merely technically good, owes more to the discoveries of the laboratory technicians than to himself. However, the imagination transcends all technical perfection, and sometimes even converts a technical disadvantage to a further advantage.

Everything that I see must become personal; otherwise, it is dead and mechanical. Our only chance to escape the blight of mechanization, of acting and thinking alike, of the huge machine which society is becoming, is to restore life to all things through the saving and beneficent power of the human imagination.

You don’t go out to accidentally find something that’s going to make a good picture, but [instead you find it] in yourself, knowing already what you want to do… at least subconsciously if not consciously; you find the thing in so-called nature or so-called reality which corresponds to this preconceived, this pre-sensitized, concept, which is hidden somewhere in your imagination or your subconscious… You go out and find what you are prepared to see.

What’s your Favorite Jacques-Henri Lartigue Quote?

Have a favorite Jacques-Henri Lartigue 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 learn more about Lartigue’s photography and to look at his remarkable photo albums, visit the Lartigue Foundation website.

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

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The post 25 Jacques-Henri Lartigue Quotes on the Magic of 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.

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

Duffy, along with David Bailey and Terence Donovan, revolutionized fashion photography and helped define the visual style of the Swinging Sixties.

He wasn’t just a remarkable fashion photographer though, he was also known for his innovative advertising work (long before the days of photoshop) and was a master portrait photographer too. He even shot the Pirelli calendar on two separate occasions.

Then at the height of his fame in 1979, Duffy did the unthinkable: he put away his camera and walked away from photography for good.

Below, we’ve put together a list of our favorite 30 Duffy quotes to inspire and help take your photography to the next level.

Brian Duffy Quotes

The thing about the photographs is that there is no smell or sound and in a sense it tells the truth and yet it is a lie.

One of the great problems with photography is that any twat you give a camera to can take a photograph – what that does to the photographer is immediately create an inferiority complex within him because anyone can do it, which of course they can. I worked this out very early on.

I can show anybody how to take a photograph, but I’m not sure how to show somebody how to take a Duffy photograph.

I never used a lot of film – it’s like boxing; perfect boxing is 11 seconds: one second to get to the centre of the ring and 10 seconds to keep your hands up, but they were all done in camera – with absolutely no retouching.

I never wanted to be famous. Artists are always talking drivel, including moi, because the work is the statement.

[On how he’d like to be remembered, Duffy replied:] He wasn’t as steady as a tripod.

Duffy on Getting Started in Photography

I could paint and draw, but in my group were artists like Frank Auerbach, Joe Tilson, Bernard Cohen and Len Deighton – they were all my contemporaries and I realised that all these bloody people were geniuses. So I thought I’d knock that on the head. And the most attractive girls were doing dress design, so I moved to the fashion department, which had some lovely girls in it. You had to do fashion drawing, design dresses and make them, and it turned out I was an absolute bloody genius!

I was doing fashion drawings for Harper’s Bazaar, and I was in the office of the art director, a woman called Gill Varney, and I saw sheets of contact photographs that all looked alike to me. I asked Gill why the photos were all the same, and she explained they were all slightly different.

I thought, ‘Gawd this looks dead easy compared to the drawing lark. I’ll give this a whiz. Take up photography as an easy way to make money. Just my sort of thing – women, gadgets, clothes – I must have a go at it.’

Brian Duffy Quotes on Fashion Photography

When I arrived at Vogue [in the late 1950s] it was virtually full of non-talented people, right the way through from top to bottom. These were people with s – taste; they were all phonies. You have to remember in those days it was very class-ridden. The girls on reception nearly always had double-barrelled names. It was very elitist – Lady Jemima Fawcett-Green, -Blue or -Pink – girls with fruitcake voices and thick legs, quite sweet, but not very bright, girls with pin-sized brains.

In all my time at Vogue I only did four trips. Other people did trips all the time – they wouldn’t let me out of the cage, probably rightly so.

I wanted to make women look good. That really intrigued me. To make a model look as though she owned the clothes.

The Black Trinity

Most of the photographers of that period [the late 1950s] – Parkinson, John French, Dickie Dormer – had a slightly effeminate approach, and that was the way they got through. The way to be a successful photographer was to be tall, thin and camp – you were seen to be inside the tent, and we [Duffy, Terence Donovan, David Bailey] were not. I’m not saying they were all homosexuals but a lot of them were. I can never remember Terry calling someone darling, it might have been ‘Oi, you, missus!’

Before 1960, a fashion photographer was tall, thin and camp. But we three are different: short, fat and heterosexual.

Bailey, Donovan and other photographers just didn’t have that slightly feminised view; we would just talk to the girls and make them laugh. We probably said, ‘Would you mind moving your hair back off your face?’ or, ‘All right love, hold your Bristols up more. That looks good.’ Before that it would all have been obsequious toadyism, but our way seemed to work, and we were backed up by people who liked it.

We were great mates but also great competitors. We were fairly chippy and if you wanted it you could have it. We would not be told what to do.

Duffy on Working for Elle France

I went over to Paris and worked for Elle in 1961, while I was still at Vogue , and I fell in love with them, hatefully of course. The French are the most dreadful people on earth – well, the Parisians – and I must have had some masochistic attraction to them. They were like a drug to me, and I just adored working for them. You never got anything right as far as they were concerned.

As soon as you did something, there was a dreadful, long, intellectual discussion, always a long pause, and a scratching of the head. They were never negative to the point of putting you down – some people look for negativity, but the Frogs always looked for the positive.

If all the photographs were out of focus the Brits would think, ‘Oh God, he doesn’t know what he’s doing,’ whereas the Frogs would think, ‘Mmm, that’s interesting. I wonder if this is an attempt to express visual perception in a different way?’ And then of course they’d say, ‘Well, it could be a broken camera!’ But that’s the difference.

David Bowie’s Album Aladdin Sane

The photograph was a die transfer, which I oversaw and it was all actual, no retouching.

Tony DeFries, his [then] manager, wanted to make the most expensive cover you could possibly get a record company to pay for. He couldn’t have come to be a better con artist than my good self.

Dye transfer is a genius method of being able to spend the most amount of money to get reproduction from a colour transparency on to a piece of paper. And we went to Switzerland, the most expensive place to get a plate made.

Bowie was interested in the Elvis ring which had the letters TCB [taking care of business] as well as the lightning flash. I drew the design on his face. We used lipstick to fill in the red.

To me, it [the cover] was competent, very competent, but I wouldn’t take it much beyond that.

I drew the zigzag onto his face. It was the trademark for National Panasonic – a red and blue zigzag that I took from a rice cooker. It also came from Elvis Presley, who had a ring with a lightning flash on it.

The Final Curtain

Photography was dead by 1972. Everything had been resolved between 1839 and 1972. Every picture after ‘72, I have seen pre-‘72. Nothing new. But it took me some time to detect its death. The first person who twigged was Henri Cartier-Bresson. He just stopped – and started painting and drawing.

Ninety-nine per cent of my work was advertising and crap. The people who were hiring me I didn’t like. Keeping a civil tongue up the rectum of a society that keeps you paid is an art which I was devoid of. I had nothing more to say in photographs. I’d taken all the snaps I needed to take. Maybe I didn’t think I was good enough.

In the end I guess I was the ultimate prostitute. It felt like I was on the game, because I had no respect for the people who were giving me work. If you don’t have any respect for them and you think they’re a bunch of toerags, you’d hardly have any respect for yourself, so it’s cyclical in the way that you think about yourself.

The Last Straw

I came into work, and an assistant said, ‘We haven’t got any lavatory paper, bog paper – you know, toilet paper,’ and I said, ‘Oh yeah,’ and he said, ‘We haven’t got any.’ I thought, ‘I am either going to kill this bloke or I am going to kill somebody.’ I realised in a flash that I’d ended up commander-in-chief, managing director, senior partner in charge of the toilet bloody paper.

Not only was I the senior stockholder, managing director, chairman of the board and top dog, I was now expected to get the toilet paper – the whole thing imploded. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

And that’s when I decided to knock it on the head, and that I would never take another picture. During the course of the morning I decided to burn all my negatives in the garden. Bailey happened to come round and could see what I was doing, and he stood there like a spare d – at an Italian wedding and said, ‘I could look after those for you,’ but I said, ‘Don’t bother,’ and he went.

I felt everything I had to do and say in photography had been done. Later I wished I’d kept some negs. Looking back on odd things we’ve found, I’d love to have known the sequence of prints, only from an historical point of view.

You make decisions in one period that you wouldn’t necessarily make in another. But it’s stimulating to try something new, it’s interesting to be crazy. The one thing I’ve never done is make a wrong decision as a single entity. They’ve all been wrong.

What’s your Favorite Brian Duffy Quote?

Have a favorite Brian Duffy 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 Brian Duffy’s photography, check out his images on the Duffy Archive website. His fashion and portrait work is incredible. We also recommend watching the documentary, Duffy: The Man Who Shot the Sixties (opens in new tab).

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

Related Quote Articles:

• David Bailey Quotes
• Terence Donovan Quotes
• Norman Parkinson Quotes
• The 100 Greatest Photography Quotes

The post 30 Brian Duffy Quotes on Fashion Photography and the Sixties appeared first on Photogpedia.

Walker Evans Quotes

I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered I didn’t need to. If the thing is there, why, there it is.

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

Experience is very important. It comes only with time. I have time behind me so I venture to teach and say to students, “I don’t really know a hell of a lot more than you do except I’ve been around longer and I do have experience and if I can articulate it some of it will rub off and do you some good.” When I didn’t have experience that’s one thing I learned, that I needed it. It comes – talking to an experienced man is something; it’s not the same as having it but it’s better than not.

The meaning of quality in photography’s best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system; … our overwhelming formal education deals in words, mathematical figures and methods of rational thought, not in images.

Good photography is unpretentious.

With the camera, it’s all or nothing. You either get what you’re after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don’t think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.

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

Walker Evans Quotes

Walker Evans on Photography Style

As a boy I had a cheap little camera and I had gone through the hobby photography experience developing film in the bathroom and so on. And I think it came from painters. Several of my friends were painters. And I had a visual education that I had just given myself.

When I first made photographs, they were too plain to be considered art and I wasn’t considered an artist. I didn’t get any attention at all. The people who looked at my work thought, well, that’s just a snapshot of the backyard. Privately I knew otherwise and through stubbornness stayed with it…

I began to wonder – I knew I was an artist or wanted to be one – but I was wondering whether I really was an artist. I was doing such ordinary things that I could feel the difference. Most people would look at those things and say, ‘Well, that’s nothing. What did you do that for? That’s just a wreck of a car or a wreck of a man. That’s nothing. That isn’t art.’ They don’t say that anymore.

I think I was photographing against the style of the time, against salon photography, against beauty photography, against art photography. I was doing non-artistic and non- commercial work. I felt – and it’s true – I was on the right track. I sensed that I was turning new ground. At least I though I was mining a new vein, sort of instinctively knowing it but not in any other way aware of it.

Detachment, lack of sentimentality, originality, a lot of things that sound rather empty. I know what they mean. Let’s say, “visual impact” may not mean much to anybody. I could point it out though. I mean it’s a quality that something has or does not have. Coherence. Well, some things are weak, some things are strong…

First of all, I tell [students] that art can’t be taught, but that it can be stimulated and a few barriers can be kicked down by a talented teacher, and an atmosphere can be created which is an opening into artistic action. But the thing itself is such a secret and so unapproachable.

It is easy to imagine fantasy as physical and myth as real. We do it almost every moment. We do this as we dream, as we think, and as we cope with the world about us. But these worlds of fantasy that we form into the solid things around us are the source of our discontent. They inspire our search to find ourselves.

Lettering and signs are very important to me. There are infinite possibilities both decorative in itself and as popular art, as folk art, and also as symbolism and meaning and surprise and double meaning. It’s a very rich field… I think in truth I’d like to be a letterer. And then broadly speaking I’m literary. The sign matters are just a visual symbol of writing.

Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

Walker Evans Quotes

Technique and Process

I work rather blindly. I have a theory that seems to work with me that some of the best things you ever do sort of come through you. You don’t know where you get the impetus and response to what’s before your eyes.

[On composition] I don’t think very much about it consciously, but I’m very aware of it unconsciously, instinctively. Deliberately discard it every once in a while not to be artistic. Composition is a schoolteacher’s word. Any artist composes. I prefer to compose originally, naturally rather than self-consciously. Form and composition both are terribly important. I can’t stand a bad design or a bad object in a room. So much for form. That way it’s placed is composition… when you stop to think about what an artist is doing one question is, what is the driving force, the motive?”

Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

It’s easy to photograph light reflecting from a surface, the truly hard part is capturing the light in the air.

I don’t believe in manipulation, if that’s what you mean, of any photographs or negatives. To me it should be strictly straight photography and look like it; not be painterly ever.

…nature photographs downright bore me for some reason or other. I think: ‘Oh, yes. Look at that sand dune. What of it?’

Photography is not cute cats, nor nudes, motherhood or arrangements of manufactured products. Under no circumstances it is anything ever anywhere near a beach.

I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.

Documentary Photography

I’m sometimes called a ‘documentary photographer’ but… a man operating under that definition could take a sly pleasure in the disguise. Very often I’m doing one thing when I’m thought to be doing another.

Documentary: That’s a sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear… The term should be documentary style… You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless.

The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative. By their fewness, and by the importance of the reader’s eye, this will be misunderstood by most of that minority which does not wholly ignore it. In the interests, however, of the history and future of photography, that risk seems irrelevant, and this flat statement necessary.

… that’s always been true with anything, whether there’s any technical need or not. For example, we’re all taught to write, and anybody can sit down and write something. Not everybody can sit down and write something that’s worth writing.

Interviewer: Do you think it’s possible for the camera to lie?
Walker Evans: It certainly is. It almost always does.

What I believe is really good in the so-called documentary approach to photography is the addition of lyricism. This quality is usually produced unconsciously and even unintentionally and accidentally by the cameraman.

Incidentally, part of a photographer’s gift should be with people. You can do some wonderful work if you know how to make people understand what you’re doing and feel all right about it, and you can do terrible work if you put them on the defense, which they all are at the beginning. You’ve got to take them off their defensive attitude and make them participate.

I never took it upon myself to change the world. And those contemporaries of mine who were going around falling for the idea that they were going to bring down the United States government and make a new world were just asses to me.

It’s too presumptuous and naïve to think you can change society by a photograph or anything else… I equate that with propaganda; I think that’s a lower rank of purpose.

Die knowing something. You’re not here long.

Walker Evans Quotes

What’s your Favorite Walker Evans Quote?

Have a favorite Walker Evans 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 Evans’s incredible photography, check out the Walker Evans image archive at the Museum of Modern Art.

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

Related Quote Articles:

• Robert Frank Quotes
• Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes
• Mary Ellen Mark Quotes
• Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Quotes

The post 34 Walker Evans Quotes on Documentary Photography and Visual Poetry appeared first on Photogpedia.