Photographing Quotes

Women are more sympathetic creatures in jeopardy, plus they`re more interesting to photograph. I`d rather photograph a woman walking around with a candelabra than a guy. It`s as simple as that. Somebody once said that the history of cinema was made photographing women, and I think one could truthfully say that.

I don`t think there`s any kind of preparation for sudden celebrity. I think you almost have this slight nervous breakdown when that kind of media attention happens. I mean, you`re doing the same kind of thing that you do all the time, only you have to make these weird adjustments. Like, you`re buying a slice of pizza and somebody`s outside photographing you which is weird - that`s not normal! It`s very uncomfortable.

The devil is seductive, and so guns are glorious in the culture. I understand there`s a case to be made. For instance, Spike Lee said something like this, that you can`t have a scene with drugs in a film that doesn`t secretly make you want to do drugs. In the same vein, it`s hard to make a movie that`s anti-violence because the very nature of photographing violence eroticises it. But I`m not so sold that that`s true.

I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.

When we talk about violence, we`re talking about the destruction of the human body, and I don`t lose sight of that. In general, my filmmaking is fairly body-oriented, because what you`re photographing is people, bodies. You can`t really photograph an abstract concept, whereas a novelist can write about that. You have to photograph something physical. So that combination of things suggests to me a particular way to deal with violence. And it`s not a bad thing that people really understand what violence is. It`s not, however, a politically correct thing I do. I`m not a big fan of political correctness. It`s very detrimental to art in general. An artist`s responsibility is to be irresponsible. As soon as you start to think about social or political responsibility, you`ve amputated the best limbs you`ve got as an artist. You are plugging into a very restrictive system that is going to push and mold you, and is going to make your art totally useless and ineffective.

Sometimes I enjoy just photographing the surface because I think it can be as revealing as going to the heart of the matter.

I`m not photographing anything naked these days. I haven`t been concentrating on bodies recently.

My career was 100% different from what I intended to do. I thought I`d photograph nature and landscapes but I wound up photographing the changing of the times.

Red light cameras can help communities enforce traffic laws by automatically photographing vehicles whose drivers run red lights. A nationwide study of fatal crashes at traffic signals in 1999 and 2000 estimated that 20 percent of the vehicles involved failed to obey signals. In 2004 alone, more than 900 people were killed, and an estimated 168,000 were injured, in crashes that involved red light running. About half of all deaths in red light running crashes are pedestrians and occupants in other vehicles who are hit by the red light runners.

What I mean by photographing as a participant rather than observer is that I`m not only involved directly with some of the activities that I photograph, such as mountain climbing, but even when I`m not I have the philosophy that my mind and body are part of the natural world.

The first day at the power plant I found myself photographing some steam vents on the roof of the structure. And I remember consciously thinking that they were just like trees but they were metal.

I started questioning myself: `What`s going on here?` I`m photographing power plants and Anasazi sites, yet I still love photographing the landscape.

I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don`t find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges.

The trouble with photographing beautiful women is that you never get into the dark room until after they`ve gone.

I just think it`s important to be direct and honest with people about why you`re photographing them and what you`re doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul.