"I have always stood in the awe of the camera. I recognize it for the
instrument it is, part Stradivarius, part scalpel."
"A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart,
leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word,
effective."
"We don’t call them shoots here. We don’t shoot people. It’s really a love affair."
"A fashion picture is a portrait just as a portrait is a fashion picture."
"I don’t think photography has anything remotely to do with the brain. It has
to do with eye appeal." - Horst P. Horst
"The first 10,000 shots are the worst!"
"I always kept my equipment down to a minimum: two cameras, each with three
lenses, a flash that would clip onto the camera body, and one assistant. I
did not want to spend time thinking about hardware; I wanted that time to
concentrate on the girl and the world around her." - Helmut Newton
- On Equipment, American Photo
"Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in
photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already." - Helmut
Newton
"A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion
or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an
opinion .... All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." -
Richard Avedon
"Photography has always reminded me of the second child, trying to prove
itself. The fact that it wasn’t really considered an art, that it was
considered a craft, has trapped almost every serious photographer." -
Richard Avedon
"And if a day goes by without my doing something related to photography,
it's as though I've neglected something essential to my existence, as though
I had forgotten to wake up. I know that the accident of my being a
photographer has made my life possible." - Richard Avedon
"Photography is a medium of formidable
contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly
difficult." - Edward Steichen
Steichen took over 1,000 exposures of a single white
teacup and saucer against a graduated scale of tones from pure white to
black velvet. While this redundancy may seem obscure, in A Life in
Photography, Steichen stated that, "The experiment was to a
photographer what finger exercises are to a pianist." - Edward
Steichen
"I never photograph reality." - Sarah Moon
"Very often I say to myself: I would like to make a photo where nothing
happens. But in order to eliminate, there has to be something to begin with.
For nothing to happen, something has to happen first." - Sarah Moon
“A good fashion photograph makes a promise it can never keep.” - Chris
Von Wangenheim
"I realized that getting my picture was more important to me than the
disconfort of someone not understanding or someone's opposition to my
goals." - Chris Von Wangenheim
"Photographers are often transformed by their own work. They should look at
themselves every now and again to make sure they haven't become some kind of
beast. If they have, they should understand they still have to look at that
beast in the mirror every day." - Sheila Metzner
"I was an amateur - I am an amateur - and I intend to stay an amateur. To me an amateur photographer is one who is in love with taking pictures, a free soul who can photograph what he likes and who likes what he photographs."-Erwin Blumenfeld
"All aspects of photography interest me and I feel for the female body the same curiosity and
the same love as for a landscape, a face or anything else which interests me. In any case,
the nude is a form of landscape. There are no reasons for my photographs, nor any rules; all
depends on the mood of the moment, on the mood of the model." - Jeanloup Seiff