Develop your photographic skills
Quotations
The purpose of art is to raise people to a higher level of awareness than they would otherwise attain on their own.
If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already.. the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of.
I was very fortunate in starting my career as a painter. When first confronted with a camera, I was very much intimidated. So I decided to investigate. But I maintained the approach of a painter to such a degree that I have been accused of trying to make a photograph look like a painting. I did not have to try, it just turned out that way because of my background and my training. Many years ago I had conceived the idea of making a painting look like a photograph! There was a valid reason for this. I wished to distract the attention from any manual dexterity, so that the basic idea stood out. Of course there will always be those who look at words with a magnifying glass and try to see 'how', instead of using their brains and figure out 'why'.
A good photograph is like a good hound dog, dumb, but eloquent.
Photography helps people to see
There is no such a thing as artistic photography. In photography, like in all things, there are people who can see and others who cannot even look
The easy bit is picking up a camera and pointing and shooting. But then you have to decide what it is you’re trying to say and express.
Emotion, if you are worthy of it, will be felt before the smile of a child returning home with his school books, a tulip in a vase touched by a ray of sunlight, or the face of a beloved woman.
I just walk around, observing the subject from various angles until the picture elements arrange themselves into a composition that pleases my eye.
You become things, you become an atmosphere, and if you become it, which means you incorporate it within you, you can also give it back. You can put this feeling into a picture. A painter can do it. And a musician can do it and I think a photographer can do that too and that I would call the dreaming with open eyes.
I can be an artist a posteriori, not a priori. If my pictures tell the story, our story, human story, then in a hundred years, then they can be considered an art reference, but now they are not made as art. I'm a journalist. My life's on the road, my studio is the planet.
I have two pairs of eyes – one to paint and one to take photographs.
Photography cannot change the world, but it can show the world, especially when it changes
While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.
The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.
Choosing a project can be ironic. Everybody’s got irony. You can’t avoid it. It’s in the structure, the detail, the significance...What I mean is, I would never choose a subject for what it means to me. I choose a subject and then what I feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold.
A photogapher is first and foremost a witness. I feel close to people like Doisneau or Salgado, close to photojournalism too: I tell story, I describe the world, and I try to analyse it, to make it more accessible. My photographs bear witness before being works of art. Whereas the artist modifies reality, I try to show it as it is.
There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.
You push the button, we do the rest - 1888 after the development of Kodak camera.
A picture is worth a thousand words
If you take photographs, don’t speak, don’t write, don’t analyse yourself, and don’t answer any questions.
One of these days, I'm going to publish a book of all the pictures I did not take. It is going to be a huge hit.
Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.
All photos are accurate. None of them is the truth.
