Infrared Photography Quotes

Vanity is by far my favorite of all sins, and the camera lens is the ultimate vanity mirror. The camera captures all moods and nuances; immortalizes the soft and silky continuum that is humanity. Those still life moments seem so fluid, so representative of continuity. They are a single moment captured, yet an eternity expressed. All your youth; all your ages, captured and expressed in a single click.

Of all the indulgences, vanity is certainly my favorite which we should otherwise resist, but are inexplicably captivated by and addicted. What other animal would spend so much time pouting and preening for its reflection? Only humanity would participate in such self-adoration.

You would think we have the most colorful feathers or softest of manes. Rather, we are a naked biped that feels incomplete without some decorative element, accessory, or embellishment of the self. We are intoxicated by the image of the body, no different than we are seduced by fine wines, foods, or mind altering elements. We devour the skin, and peel away clothes as if they were the skin of some tropical fruit, covering a colorful and juicy interior. We hunt for bodily pleasures, and collect them as prizes; show them off in social situations as if our companions were some sort of extended adornment to ourselves.

We are revealed in our sensuality. To touch beneath the surface; to connect beyond facades, that unattainable discourse between individuals is put tentatively wi ~ A.E. Samaan

The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all. ~ Susan Sontag

It's all the same. It's the same face. We always look for an idea, for the same face, for the same position. There is no such thing as a European or an African photography. It's all the same thing. ~ Malick Sidibe

Contrary to the general belief about photography, you don't need bright sunlight: the best moodiest pictures are taken in the dim light of almost dusk, or of rainy days ... ~ Jack Kerouac

Nothing is more intriguing than a still photograph in the middle of a motion picture ... Just as an accident is a cry changed into silence and not a silence after a cry, photography is speed rendered motionless ... ~ Jean Cocteau

If I could find them (assemblages) in nature I would photograph them. I make them because through photography I have a knowledge of things that can't be found. ~ Frederick Sommer

I come from a visual background. I used to work in the camera department at Warner Bros. when I was a teenager. I grew up dusting lenses and learning about photography. ~ Colin Hanks

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum. ~ John Updike

When people photograph an object, they often put a pack of cigarettes next to it to give the viewer a sense of the object's actual size, but the pack of cigarettes next to the images in my memory expanded and contracted, depending on my mood at the time. Like the objects and events in constant flux, or perhaps in opposition to them, what should have been a fixed yardstick inside the framework of my memory seemed instead to be in perpetual motion. ~ Haruki Murakami

I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.' ~ Jerry Saltz

Ideally I would like the work to be a hybrid between painting and photography. ~ John Baldessari

There are a lot of people who think celebrities shouldn't complain, that the photography is just a price to pay for having this career. I guess that's bizarre. What they don't understand is that this is all stuff that's really new. ~ Megan Fox

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. ~ William Eggleston

Sometimes, without effort, you live in the moment. You don't regret the past or worry about the future, and in that moment everything flashes before your eyes , a clear snapshot of what has to be done, and everything pauses. ~ Rebecca McNutt

[David Lean's] images stay with me forever. But what makes them memorable isn't necessarily their beauty. That's just good photography. It's the emotion behind those images that's meant the most to me over the years. It's the way David Lean can put feeling on film. The way he shows a whole landscape of the spirit. For me, that's the real geography of David Lean country. And that's why, in a David Lean movie, there's no such thing as an empty landscape. ~ Martin Scorsese

The nature that is in the location of my films can be seen in my photography, and I want my films to become closer to my photography and more distant from storytelling. It is true that these are completely separate milieus, but in my opinion, the ideal situation for me is for these two areas - photography and cinema - to become closer to one another. ~ Abbas Kiarostami

For me, the act of photography is all about discovery and finding new things. ~ Alec Soth

I am at war with the obvious. ~ William Eggleston

In 1979, I received a phone call from Ansel Adams asking me if I would be willing to consider coming to work for him. I was teaching photography in Southern California at that point. ~ John Sexton

There is a terrible truthfulness about photography that sometimes makes a thing look ridiculous. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I am a former economist. I never went to photography school to learn photography. ~ Sebastiao Salgado

For me a photograph is most successful when it doesn't answer all the questions and it leaves something to be desired. ~ Greg Gorman

The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much. ~ Annie Leibovitz

True, there are photographers who are failed artists, but so are most artists. ~ Bill Jay

A photographer needs to be a good editor of negatives and prints! In fact, most of the prints I make are for my eyes only, and they are no good. I find the single most valuable tool in the darkroom is my trash can - that's where most of my prints end up. ~ John Sexton

Yet it seems so easy to take a photograph! One forgets that, apart from the technical aspects, photography can be a mental creation and the affirmation of a personality. What is marvelous about a photograph is that its possibilities are infinite; there aren't any subjects 'done to death'. ~ Gisele Freund

Behind the lens, I found refuge and freedom, distance and connection, an intoxicating way to tame the huge, chaotic world. ~ Judith Kelman

This prolific and inventive photographer (Edward Steichen) must be given credit for virtually inventing modern fashion photography, and as the tohousands of high-quality original prints in the Conde Nast archives prove, only Irving Penn and Richard Avedon have since emerged as serious historical rivals. ~ William A. Ewing

I think probably something big can be done with cameras, I'm not saying, er, I'm saying chemical photography's finished, that means you can't have a Cartier Bresson again, you need never believe pictures. ~ David Hockney

Be in love with the moments of your life. ~ Matthew Knisely

Because I know war ... because I know the horror, I don't want to add to it ... After the war, we felt the need to celebrate life, and for me photography was the means to achieve this ... ~ Edouard Boubat

What my portraits are made of?
10% reality, 90% my philosophy. ~ Scuro Chiaro

What makes Capa a great photo journalist?" asks a reporter covering a 1998 retrospective of his work. "We see his own appetite for life, his mix of urgency with compassion . . . the artistic thrust of his photography always had more to do with its emotional pitch, which remained genuine and deeply felt." Or, in Capa's own words, a great picture "is a cut out of the whole event which will show more of the real truth of the affair to some one who was not there than the whole scene. ~ John Steinbeck

People of my generation who became photographers in the late fifties, early sixties, there were no rewards in photography. There were no museum shows. Maybe MOMA would show something, or Chicago. There were no galleries. Nobody bought photographs. ~ Duane Michals