Robert Mapplethorpe

I never liked photography. Not for the sake of photography. I like the object. I like the photographs when you hold them in your hand. - Robert Mapplethorpe 

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. - Robert Mapplethorpe 

I like to look at pictures, all kinds. And all those things you absorb come out subconsciously one way or another. You'll be taking photographs and suddenly know that you have resources from having looked at a lot of them before. There is no way you can avoid this. But this kind of subconscious influence is good, and it certainly can work for one. In fact, the more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer. - Robert Mapplethorpe


Robert Mapplethorpe bio on Wikipedia

Joel Meyerowitz

They [photographs] teach you about your own unraveling past, or about the immediacy of yesterday. They show you what you look at. If you take a photograph, you've been responsive to something, and you looked hard at it. Hard for a thousandth of a second, hard for ten minutes. But hard, nonetheless. And it's the quality of that bite that teaches you how connected you were to that thing, and where you stood in relation to it, then and now. - Joel Meyerowitz, Visions and Images : American Photographers on Photography by Barbaralee Diamonstein , Page: 112

Joel Meyerowitz Web Site 
Joel Meyerowitz bio on Wikipedia

More Quotes

Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing? - Robert Adams - Beauty in Photography: essays in defense of traditional values (Aperture)

Ouvre l'oeil ! - Christophe Agou

You've got to push yourself harder. You've got to start looking for pictures nobody else could take. You've got to take the tools you have and probe deeper. - William Albert Allard, Photographic Essay (American Photographer Master Series) by William Albert Allard

What we can easily see is only a small percentage of what is possible. Imagination is having the vision to see what is just below the surface; to picture that which is essential, but invisible to the eye. -  Anonymous

By knowing a person, you know yourself. You become the person you photograph. You love that person as you love yourself. - Anonymous

When I ask to photograph someone, it is because I love the way they look and I think I make that clear. I'm paying them a tremendous compliment. What I'm saying is, I want to take you home with me and look at you for the rest of my life. - Amy Arbus - On the question: "How do you get cooperation from your subjects for such wonderful portraits?" Interview with Amy Arbus - Revealing Human Nature Through Portrait Photography.

I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do -- that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse. - Diane Arbus, On Photography by Susan Sontag 

Take pictures of what you fear. - Diane Arbus

Every time I see a crowd of photographers surrounding a subject my impulse is to go in the opposite direction. - Ignacio Aronovich 

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Okay I could go on for hours. From PhotoQuotes.com 

Christophe Agou bio on Wikepedia
William Albert Allard web site
Amy Arbus web site     Amy Arbus bio on Wikepedia
Diane Arbus bio on Wikepedia