Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The unusual wins out over the usual.
Essentially what photography is is life lit up.
I would like to go to Antarctica. That's about all.
Richard Prince's most famous photograph was made by me.
A very big part of the life of a photograph is the afterlife.
Aboriginal Australia is a tough place to work, rough and tough.
Increasingly, it's people not interested in National Geographic.
I was known as a 35-mm photographer with a view-camera mentality.
Editorial photography has to be energetic and visually competitive.
I now want to be a photographer of my time, and our common culture.
Photographs that transcend but do not deny their literal situation appeal to me.
A mad, keen photographer needs to get out into the world and work and make mistakes.
My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it.
[ My time and our common culture] it's what I'm photographing, and I'm very involved with that.
The best lesson I was given is that all of life teaches, especially if we have that expectation.
The longer we lived with it the more we wanted something less about process and more about life.
It matters little how much equipment we use; it matters much that we be masters of all we do use.
I'm very involved in photographing America now, so I don't think of faraway places, as I did when I was young.
There's a great quote about Virginia Woolf, she had the same spiritual stake in her diaries as she had in her writing.
Teaching has never been far from my life. It's the most natural thing I do. Apparently, as I said, I cannot not do it.
That's who comes to my workshops. I jokingly tell my students that the class could be called "Your photographs: Better."
It's more difficult now, to be a Geographic photographer, than it was when I came along. And it wasn't easy at that time.
I wanted life to be episodic. I wanted to be a magazine photographer and I was willing to do what it took to become that.
Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.
What I'm interested in is modern American history. I'm taken with the changes that have occurred in America in my lifetime.
There isn't an aspect of book creation I don't enjoy, and there has always been a book in my life to dream about or work on.
I had a book come out several years ago, when there were no blogs. This is a mark to me about how the environment has changed.
I had luck, but I worked hard and I suffered. It's not just photography I'm talking about. It's about whatever dream you want it to be.
For sheer majestic geography and sublime scale, nothing beats Alaska and the Yukon. For culture, Japan. And for all-around affection, Australia.
For example, in my dorm, at the University of Kentucky, I had the only camera. I don't think anyone came to college with a camera, other than me.
My connection to Santa Fe is very closely, and continuously a connection with Reid. I believe in him and his philosophy of photographic education.
My dad had been an ardent amateur photographer, and he taught me to compose a photograph from the back to the front, and then populate the picture.
We know that photographs inform people. We also know that photographs move people. The photograph that does both is the one we want to see and make.
People say to me, "Who's your favorite kind of photographer?" Or "Who would be your favorite photographer to have in a workshop?" And I always say, "My Dad."
Actually, ambition won't get you that far. You'll shift gears. You'll see something that's shinier. But if you believe... then you're the long-distance runner.
Typically I see it with photographers who go to a place like India or Nepal, and everything's so colorful and exotic and they think, therefore, a picture's been taken.
My least favorite photographer to have would be myself. Someone who wanted a career at National Geographic. Because it's almost mathematically impossible to achieve that.
Life rarely presents fully finished photographs. An image evolves, often from a single strand of visual interest - a distant horizon, a moment of light, a held expression.
Even though I teach with 35mm, my method takes people by surprise, because it isn't fast, and it isn't about hardware or software, or even great results. It's about great process.
[In the late 80's] that's the first time I heard about that astonishing idea [that most photographs would be taken on telephones]. And now I've been watching the tsunami of images.
My father taught me photography. It was his hobby, and we had a small darkroom in the fruit cellar of our basement. It was the kind of makeshift darkroom that was only dark at night.
It actually has transcended my career at the Geographic, so that when my career there ended, I had momentum as a teacher, and a belief in photographic education at the workshop level.
This might seem off the track, but an interesting thing to me that others could talk about better than I, but one of the growth areas in photographic education has been the so-called slow photography.
As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.
I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I've always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.
In almost every photograph I have ever made, there is something I would do to complete it. I take that to be the spirit hole or the deliberate mistake that's in a Navajo rug to not be godlike, but to be human.
Exotic novelty. My statement to [people] is always, well, set this picture in your home town, is it still an interesting picture? Or is it just exotic? Would I care about this same picture minus its exoticism?
...just like some people's instinct to photograph is triggered by vacation... assignments might be that to me and that's why I've built my life around assignments. That was the way to live the photographic life.
There are things that I teach, about building photographs, and that's why people come to my workshops. When people come to the workshops, they're consumed with seeking the subject, and I teach seeking the setting.
I was giving a lecture and I said, that's enough about The Photographic Life, meaning my biography, now let's talk about the life of a photograph. And in that one instant I got the title for a potential next book.