Photo Quotes

I just don’t know what makes a picture, really—the thing that makes it is something unique, as far as I can understand. Just like one guy can write a sentence and it’s beautiful and another one can write it and it’s dead. What the difference is, I don’t know.

I first got excited by photography the first day I picked up a camera. However this was not until I was 20 years of age. I suddenly realized that I had an excuse to be anywhere and gaze in wonderment; the camera gave me something to hide my shyness behind. The act of pointing a camera at another human being is daunting. However, clarifying what is unfolding in front of one can give one immense pleasure. I have had a blissful life.

I didn't get truly excited about photography until my sophomore year of high school (although I actually learned photographic technique from my father much earlier). I had played around with making little (extremely bad) movies, using friends and family as actors, and rapidly realized that I did not want to work with lots of other people. I wanted to work alone. I began photographing in the streets of Brattleboro, Vermont, near the school that I attended, and in Boston, where my family lived. I discovered photographing in the street. I've been doing it ever since.

My favorite pictures have always been complex ones, pictures which ask questions and pose problems but leave the answers and solutions to the viewers. These are images with a long and evolving life, in which the photograph may transcend the subject and become the subject. Central to the strength of these images is photography's most precious and unique quality, believability: that the moment preserved on paper is true and unaltered, that it really happened and will never happen again. In my search for photographs I have come to realize that the best pictures are surprises, images I subconsciously seek but do not recognize until they suddenly appear. These are thrilling moments in a kind of photography that can be frustrating and unpredictable, with the picture often spoiled by something so minor as the momentary glance of a subject at the camera. In approaching people I prefer to be the observer rather than the observed and value the human presence, even a human shadow, as the most important element in my pictures. The flow of people in a setting, their changing relationships to each other and their environment, and their constantly changing expressions and movements all provide the photographer with unlimited choices of when to push the button. By choosing a precise intersection between the subject and the moment, he may transform the ordinary into the extraordinary and the real into the surreal.

Forget about the profession of being a photographer. First be a photographer and maybe the profession will come after. Don't be in a rush to pay your rent with your camera. Jimi Hendrix didn't decide on the career of professional musician when he learned to play guitar. No, he loved playing music and created something beautiful and that then became a profession. Larry Towell, for instance, was not a 'professional' photographer until he was already a 'famous' photographer. Make the pictures you feel compelled to make and perhaps that will lead to a career. But if you try to make the career first, you will just make shitty pictures that you don't care about.