Picture Taking Quotes

What I feel is that the picture-taking process, anyway a greater part of it, is an intuitive thing. You can't go out and logically plan a picture, but when you come back, reason then takes over and verifies or rejects whatever you've done. So that's why I say that reason and intuition are not in conflict-they strengthen each other.

Wynn Bullock

Photography, Intuition, Done

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We have become a nation of Kodachrome, Nikon, Instamatic addicts. But we haven't yet developed a clear idea of the ethics of picture-taking. ... Where do we get the right to bring other people home in a canister? Where did we lose the right to control our image?

Ellen Goodman

Photography, Home, Ideas

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Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It's like a wake. And I'm the actor made up for the laying-out.

Don DeLillo

Powerful, Mean, Past

Don DeLillo (2016). “Mao II”, p.31, Pan Macmillan

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Picture-taking is an ensemble art-like theater.

Ansel Elgort

Art, Ensemble, Theater

"Breaking Out: Ansel Elgort Goes from High School to Off Broadway in Regrets" by Liesl Schillinger, www.vogue.com. March 28, 2012.

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For me there's several components to picture-taking and it starts with my goals as an artist. It's capturing I guess the inner life of my subject and then it is giving them their idealized version of themselves.

Carol Friedman

Artist, Giving, Goal

Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. April 21, 2010.

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