Photographed Quotes & Sayings

A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image. — John Berger

I had an early taste of fame. I was 20, going out with TV presenter Dani Behr and we'd have paparazzi chasing us. I'm not comfortable being photographed, though I accept it is part of the job. I had to ask myself, 'What comes first, being a celebrity or footballer?' — Ryan Giggs

Every time I get photographed, it's the legs. So I've insured them for a lot, for £5 million each. Is that enough? — Eliza Doolittle

I opened the other envelope. It contained a photograph of a girl. The pose suggested a natural ease, or a lot of experience in being photographed. It showed darkish hair which might possibly have been red, a wide clear forehead, serious eyes, high cheekbones, nervous nostrils and a mouth which was not giving anything away. It was a fine-drawn, almost a taut face, and not a happy one — Raymond Chandler

I think I've always been ambitious. It just looks different on me. You know, I have friends who are actresses who go to every party they possibly can to be photographed and really try to make every connection they can, and I admire that and sometimes I wish I had a little bit more of that. Sometimes I feel like I don't have enough ambition. — Jessica Pare

I learned early on that if I was to get attention, I would have to be charming. Even the models I've photographed are often like that. Some of them are not beautiful. But, if you catch them in the right light, they glow. — Ruth Bernhard

What has changed is that when I photographed, most people that I photographed didn't have the right of refusal on their work. It would take a Marilyn Monroe at her height to be able to dictate that. — Eve Arnold

A photograph is usually the photographer's subconscious attempted to possess the photographed moment. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I realize that this is not, like, boyish. I realize that properly speaking guys should only think about sex and the acquisition of it, and that they should run crotch-first toward every girl who likes them and etc. But: The part I enjoy most is not the doing, but the noticing. Noticing the way she smells like oversugared coffee, and the difference between her smile and her photographed smile, and the way she bites her lower lip, and the pale skin of her back. I just want the pleasure of noticing these things at a safe distance - I don't want to have to acknowledge that I am noticing. I don't want to talk about it or do stuff about it. — John Green

For me it is essential to understand that everyone is alone. Not in the sense of loneliness, but rather in the sense that no one can completely understand someone else. I know very well what Diane Arbus means when she says that one cannot crawl into someone else's skin, but there is always an urge to do so anyway. I want to awaken definite sympathies for the person I have photographed. — Rineke Dijkstra

Someone showed me a picture and I just laughed, dignity never been photographed. — Bob Dylan

Words are more thoughts;
the photographed images always
ends up having a romantic gloss about it
- no matter how I try to avoid it. — Robert Frank

So many times I've photographed stories that show the degradation of the planet. I had one idea to go and photograph the factories that were polluting, and to see all the deposits of garbage. But, in the end, I thought the only way to give us an incentive, to bring hope, is to show the pictures of the pristine planet - to see the innocence. — Sebastiao Salgado

He was also active in his local community, a tireless worker for the Democratic Party and, for three consecutive years, director of Chicago's annual Polish Constitution Day Parade. Through this latter activity, he was introduced to (and photographed with) First Lady Rosalynn Carter on May 6, 1978. Mrs Carter signed the photo: "To John Gacy. Best wishes. Rosalynn Carter. — Robert Keller

Let's note, that in what I consider the most disgraceful performance abroad by an American official in my lifetime - something not exampled since Jane Fonda sat on the anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi to be photographed - Mr. McDermott said in effect, not in effect, he said it, we should take Saddam Hussein at his word and not take the President at his word. He said the United States is simply trying to provoke. I mean, why Saddam Hussein doesn't pay commercial time for that advertisement for his policy, I do not know. — George Will

And it would be a bit out of character. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may have started out as a reformer, but he really enjoys being seen as a larger-than-life tough-guy figure. He doesn't go on photographed hunting expeditions, for instance. But he does have hero moments, such as when his convoy stopped in the middle of the Bosphorus Bridge and he allegedly talked down a jumper, prevented him from committing suicide. — Peter Kenyon

There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. I photograph to see what something will look like photographed. — Garry Winogrand

I know a man
who photographed the view he saw
from the window of the room where he made love
and not the face of the woman he loved there. — Yehuda Amichai

Christmas," said Robin, with a faint grin but without apology. "I was going to put it up yesterday, but after Leonora was charged I didn't feel very festive. Anyway, I've got you an appointment to see her at six. You'll need to take photo ID - " "Good work, thanks." " - and I got you sandwiches and I thought you might like to see this," she said. "Michael Fancourt's given an interview about Quine." She passed him a pack of cheese and pickle sandwiches and a copy of The Times, folded to the correct page. Strike lowered himself onto the farting leather sofa and ate while reading the article, which was adorned with a split photograph. On the left-hand side was a picture of Fancourt standing in front of an Elizabethan country house. Photographed from below, his head — Robert Galbraith

I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps.We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves ! — Erica Jong

What is the subject matter of this apparently very personal world? It has been suggested that these shapes and images are underworld characters, the inhabitants of the vast common realm of memories that have gone down below the level of conscious control. It may be they are. The degree of emotional involvement and the amount of free association with the material being photographed would point in that direction. — Aaron Siskind

I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense ... symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller - to find out how they are. — Richard Avedon

I was so lucky that I got to meet certain people. It came through Roddy McDowall, who had become a photographer and would do these portraits of celebrities. Then he would get another well-known person to write a thing. He photographed me when I was 15 or 16, and he got Jason Robards to write the thing because he was sort of my mentor. And Roddy would invite me to these dinner parties that were insane. Like, Elizabeth Taylor and Maureen O'Hara and people that were just crazy. I still can't really believe that I met them. — Winona Ryder

In a hot second, the marshals and the FBI agents are crawling all over me. They seem to be trying to jerk my head off my shoulders. The judge has ordered that i am to be photographed, today, now, and that all the force necessary to take the pictures in the way the FBI wants to take them is to be used. — Assata Shakur

Because a real kiss, a kiss that two real people choose to give each other - it's something that can't be filmed or
photographed or drawn, or even described with words. Because a kiss isn't what it looks like or how it feels.
A real kiss happens down deep inside of two hearts at the same time. It's hidden away. A real kiss is invisible. — Andrew Clements

I liked peanut butter. Peanut butter never got another woman pregnant. Peanut butter never made me cry. Nobody cared if you were photographed in a club with a jar of Jif. — R.S. Grey

There was a mental institution near my house, and I would donate time teaching mentally ill patients how to do ceramics. I photographed them as well. So those were my first pictures. — Steven Klein

But very often (too often, to my taste) I have been photographed and knew it. Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of "posing". I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image. This transformation is an active one: I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (...). — Roland Barthes

You can't control the paparazzi. But if you go to Coachella you're going to get photographed. Whereas if you're at home, walking down the street you probably won't. It's something I've learnt to navigate my way around but I try to keep my private life private. — Ashley Greene

Even someone as photographed and aware of the camera as members of the royal family needs to feel completely comfortable if they are to look their best. — Mario Testino

I photographed rocks and trees and tide pools and nudes and all that stuff for years and years. Until 20 years ago when I found that I could do it in the studio and never have to travel. — Kim Weston

And as we sat with the cigars and liqueur, the talk turned to relations with the United States. Korneichuk had been part of a cultural delegation to the United States. On their arrival in New York he and his delegation had been fingerprinted and made to register as agents of a foreign power. The fingerprinting had outraged them, and so they had returned home without carrying out the visit. For, as Korneichuk said, With us, fingerprinting is only for criminals. We did not fingerprint you. You have not been photographed or forced to register. — John Steinbeck

I'd photographed musicians before but this was different. Syd was very charismatic, and he had the aura of a poete maudit, which made him the perfect subject for me - I realised that rock n' rollers were the modern equivalent of all the poets I was so enamoured with. — Mick Rock

I knew Marilyn over a two-year period. I met her first on a movie called 'Let's Make Love.' I photographed her at that time on and off through the time of her death. I was 22 years old and she was 34 or 35. — Lawrence Schiller

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. — Susan Sontag

Of all the men who were photographed that day, the chief's life had come closest to the American ideal, closest in observing the principles on which this nation had been founded. He was immeasurably greater than Chester Arthur, the hack politician from New York, incomparably finer than Robert Lincoln, a niggardly man of no stature who inherited from his father only his name, and a better warrior, considering his troops and ordnance, than Phil Sheridan. His only close competitor was Senator Vest, who shared with him a love of land and a joy in seeing it used constructively. — James A. Michener

The blinding Hiroshima flash ... literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became war's recording surface, its film. — Paul Virilio

When I photographed Marilyn Monroe, I mixed up my cameras - one had black-and-white film, the other color. I took many pictures. Only two color ones came out all right. My favorite picture of Marilyn hangs always on the wall in my office. It was taken on the little patio of her Hollywood house. — Alfred Eisenstaedt

I always took photographs. I photographed a lot of trees, by the way, which is another image I used often in my work, the tree image. — Robert Barry

Having photographed the landscape for a number of years and specifically working with trees and in the forest I found, without consciously thinking about it, that it was a great learning experience for me in terms of organizing elements. — John Sexton

I have been photographed to death — Marlene Dietrich

I think what's interesting about the whole paparazzi thing is that unless you're Brad Pitt or Madonna, you can pretty much avoid it. You know when you're going to an opening that you will be photographed, so that's fine. And you know the restaurants that have paparazzi, so you don't go to them. — Annette Bening

When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me-some of them more than sixty years ago-I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives. If the person in the photographs were living in this world today, she would be quite a different person-but it doesn't matter-Stieglitz photographed her then. — Georgia O'Keeffe

The 5,500-squarefoot house was custom built with a Mediterranean decor. It was the exact opposite of the dingy hotel rooms he stayed in when he was on the road. This house was very open with high ceilings, so even giant-like friends like Kevin Nash could hang out with no issue...
Shawn conducted a class as I photographed away. Students Lance Cade, Bryan Danielson (Daniel Bryan), Brian Kendrick, Paul London and others did calisthenics and other exercises. After an hour or so they got into the ring to do some falls and learn a few holds....
Here I was face-to-face with Shawn Michaels, and he asked me, "What do you want to do?" My mouth spewed words faster than I could think, as I whispered so the students wouldn't hear, "Shoot me into the ropes. When I come back on the rebound I will give you a flying dropkick and then put you in the figure-four leglock for the win. — Bill Apter

I started out on photography accidentally. A policeman came to a stop at the end of my street, and a guy knifed him at the end of my street. That's how I became a photographer. I photographed the gangs that I went to school with. — Don McCullin

It's nice to always make an effort when you get photographed. — Rita Ora

It's true to say that I'm a budding young actor. But I'd rather get my name out there because of my acting rather than who I'm being photographed with. — Josh Bowman

I'm nearly 50. I'm past being photographed falling out of bars. — K.d. Lang

There's something incredibly sexy about sand and sweat and dunes photographed like women's backs. — Kristin Scott Thomas

How many times have I photographed this glorious seascape? . . . The late-afternoon rusted tones of the Saudi Arabian mountains on the opposite side of the Red Sea; the view from the Devil's Head, which is eternally splashed by crashing waves. Like an arrow pointed toward Saudi Arabia's unexplored secrets, the cliff stands erect just before me. — Linda Ruth Horowitz

Watch a good movie sometime without reference to what's happening but only with attention to how it was photographed; you'll see the change of focus - zoom in, pan out, close-up on face, fade to black, open from above - easily. You want to do that in what you write; it's one of the things that keep people's eyes on the page, though they're almost never conscious of it. — Diana Gabaldon

Some people in Nigeria photographed us together and are threatening to publish the pictures, but that's not news to anyone. — Paulo Coelho

Which brings us to a little book that may provide a clue to the cure. My wife got it as a gift from a friend. It is titled Porn for Women. It's a picture book of hunks, photographed in all their chiseled, muscle-bound, testosterone-marinated, PG-rated glory. Lots of naked chests and low-cut jeans, complete with tousled hair and beckoning eyes. And they are ALL doing housework. There's a picture of a well-cut Adonis, and he's loading the washing machine. The caption reads: "As soon as I finish the laundry, I'll do the grocery shopping. And I'll take the kids with me so you can relax." There's another hunk, the cover guy, vacuuming the floor. A particularly athletic-looking man peers up from the sports section and declares, "Ooh, look, the NFL playoffs are today. I bet we'll have no trouble parking at the crafts fair". Porn for Women. Available at a marriage near you. — Anonymous

All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed. — Doris Lessing

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed. — Ansel Adams

Being photographed was dead time for the soul. Can the head think, while it does the same half smile under the same light frown? If this was all true, then Richard's soul was in great shape. No one photographed him any more, not even his wife. When the photographs came back from an increasingly infrequent holiday. Richard was never there..an elbow or earlobe on the edge of the frame, on the edge of life and love.. — Martin Amis

After I'd drawn the grasses, I started seeing them. Whereas if you'd just photographed them, you wouldn't be looking as intently as you do when you are drawing, so it wouldn't affect you that much. — Martin Gayford

The challenge of photography is to show the thing photographed so that our feelings are awakened and hidden aspects are revealed to us — Emmet Gowin

I think everything can be painted because painting can change reality; but everything cannot be photographed and the photographer often comes home empty-handed, with images which (often) have a documentary interest, but which rarely go further than that. One has to be completely available, very tenacious and admit that many subjects won't give any results ... and a miracle sometimes happens, without warning. — Martine Franck

Many people have noted the contrast between the hysterical 'hurt' professed by Muslims and the readiness with which Arab media publish stereotypical anti-Jewish cartoons. At a demonstration in Pakistan against the Danish cartoons, a woman in a black burka was photographed carrying a banner reading 'God Bless Hitler'. In — Richard Dawkins

One afternoon, on my way to the campus - I was majoring in political science at Nairobi University - a photographer by the name of Peter Beard stopped me in the street and asked me if I'd ever been photographed. — Iman

To not be photographed daily, even by oneself, to not be recorded and videoed and dispersed into the turbulent winds of the net, was to court nonexistence. — David Cronenberg

I've photographed everybody from Matisse to Isamu Noguchi. — Carl Van Vechten

The photographer discovers himself/herself being photographed and we can guess he is uncomfortable. Unsuccessfully he/she tries to recompose his posture and to look like a photographer taking photos. But no, he is and continues to be a spectator. The momentous fact of being photographed leads him to becoming an actor. And, as always, actors must assume a role, which is only an elegant way of avoiding to say they must choose sides, choose a faction, take an option. — Subcomandante Marcos

Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don't quite mean they're my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. — Diane Arbus

A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory, Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit, she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors' homes, in galleries, on the walls of auction houses, and off the walls, in museum storage. — Jerry Saltz

Having people wait outside of my house sort of gives me a panic attack. I'm a believer in the concept that people should not be followed and photographed everywhere. — Nikki Reed

I'd like to briefly state the accomplishment that we expect from a photographer. He must make the person being photographed forget that he has eaten from the tree of knowledge. — Albert Renger-Patzsch

If you don't want to have your private life splashed everywhere, why go to the restaurants and the places you know you're going to be photographed? — Marina And The Diamonds

The person who has been photographed, not the total person, is dead, dead for having been seen. — Christian Metz

Marseilles isn't a city for tourists. There's nothing to see. Its beauty can't be photographed. It can only be shared. It's a place where you have to take sides, be passionately for or against. Only then can you see what there is to see. And you realize, too late, that you're in the middle of a tragedy. An ancient tragedy in which the hero is death. In Marseilles, even to lose you have to know how to fight. — Jean-Claude Izzo

The mere notion of photography, when we introduce it into our meditation on the genesis of historical knowledge and its true value, suggests the simple question: Could such and such a fact, as it is narrated here, have been photographed? — Paul Valery

I'm just trying to not be in stupid gossip magazines, basically, and I think the best way to do it is never be photographed ever. As I get older, I just get more and more and more self-conscious about getting photographed. I don't know why. I've done it too many times and now I feel like everyone can see through me. — Robert Pattinson

It was Ernie Haller, who had photographed Bette Davis in Jezebel and Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, who was solely responsible for the visuals in Mildred Pierce, said Crawford. "Ernie was at the rehearsals. And so was Mr. [Anton] de Grot, who did the sets. I recall seeing Ernie's copy of the script and it was filled with notations and diagrams. I asked him if these were for special lights and he said, 'No, they're for special shadows.' Now, that threw me. I was a little apprehensive. I was used to the look of Metro, where everything, including the war pictures, was filmed in blazing white lights. Even if a person was dying there was no darkness. But when I saw the rushes of Mildred Pierce I realized what Ernie was doing. The shadows and half-lights, the way the sets were lit, together with the unusual angles of the camera, added considerably to the psychology of my character and to the mood and psychology of the film. And that, my dear, is film noir." "Mildred — Shaun Considine

You know, the Chinese don't like to be photographed because they believe that a part of their life is being taken away by the photographer. And in a way, they're right. The photographer is trying to get the prettiest moment of a life in his camera. — Bert Stern

When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm. — Marina Warner

I have this table in my new house. They put this table in without asking. It was some weird nouveau riche marble table, and I hated it. But it was literally so heavy that it took a crane to move it. We would try to set up different things around it, but it never really worked. I realized that table was my ego. No matter what you put around it, under it, no matter who photographed it, the douchebaggery would always come through. — Kanye West

A man with a camera was always suspected of being a spy. Moreover, the Jews did not want to be photographed, due to a misunderstanding of the prohibition against making graven images (photography had not been invented when the Torah was written!). I was forced to use a hidden camera ... — Roman Vishniac

My one regret was that I never photographed the bat before we drank it. — A.S. King

BROWSED this far into the magazine, you've likely noticed something unusual about this issue: it has three consecutive covers. Why? Good question. The theme of The Atlantic 's annual Ideas Issue this year is creativity - which is a hard concept to define, let alone to illustrate. We could have gone with an illuminated lightbulb, or photographed Brad Pitt painting at an easel, but those options didn't seem very ... creative. — Anonymous

I was extremely irritated being photographed for a long time, then I gave up caring. Photography is a nauseating cliche, but there is a lot to it. You can tell so much about a person from it. You are exaggerating the consciousness. It's life-thickening, photography. — Peter Beard

For celebrities, privacy is utterly nonexistent. You are asked intrusive questions about your personal life. You can be photographed at any moment. — Roxane Gay

Through photography and image I have been afforded the privilege of sharing the stories and myths of people's lives with others. The process for me became self-revelatory. It was a process of soul-making, something all humans are engaged in, no matter their endeavor. I saw a part of myself in each person I photographed. I came to realize, through the alchemical process of living, that each life is important, no matter how little that life seems to offer. — J. Don Cook

In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of 'reality' - and no longer through the elaborations of the text, whether fictional or poetic, which itself is never credible down to the root. — Roland Barthes

The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow. — Italo Calvino

A photographer is defined as much by what he or she decides not to photograph as by what is photographed. — Jack Dykinga

The liturgy of the Eucharist is best understood as a journey or procession. It is the journey of the Church into the dimension of the Kingdom. We use the word 'dimension' because it seems the best way to indicate the manner of our sacramental entrance into the risen life of Christ. Color transparencies 'come alive' when viewed in three dimensions instead of two. The presence of the added dimension allows us to see much better the actual reality of what has been photographed. In very much the same way, though of course any analogy is condemned to fail, our entrance into the presence of Christ is an entrance into a fourth dimension which allows us to see the ultimate reality of life. It is not an escape from the world, rather it is the arrival at a vantage point from which we can see more deeply into the reality of the world. — Alexander Schmemann

of Place and the rest of her Hollywood oeuvre. Ferring had won two Emmys for Lakeview, the Jeffersons look-alike series she'd starred in. She'd been photographed at one White House gala with President Clinton and another — Sara Paretsky

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past. — Berenice Abbott

I've been going through photos of my mother, looking back on her life and trying to put it into context. Very few people age gracefully enough to be photographed through their aging. — Jamie Lee Curtis

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks. — Richard Avedon

Photography is linked with death in many different ways. The most immediate and explicit is the social practice of keeping photographs in memory of loved beings who are no longer alive. But there is another real death which each of us undergoes every day, as each day we draw nearer to our own death. Even when the person photographed is still living, that moment when she or he was has forever vanished. — Christian Metz

I was shooting all this time. And there was only one guy who helped to pull him. And I had to think whether I was going to keep shooting or help the guy. And so I kept shooting and then they put him in this little clinic, and I photographed through the window while they had to amputate his leg. And I felt very strange because I didn't - I felt I could have helped, but I didn't help. But then I also felt elated that I was getting a shot that would be important to the film. — Haskell Wexler

Ever since I began working with toys, I have been intrigued with the idea that these seemingly benign objects could take on such incredible power and personality simply by the way they were photographed. I began to realize that by carefully selecting the depth of field and making it narrow, I could create a sense of movement and reality that was in fact not there — David Levinthal

I've photographed just about everyone in the world. But what I hope to do is photograph people of accomplishment, not celebrity, and help define the difference once again. — Richard Avedon

Any photographed human being is always a photograph. — Luigi Ghirri

As my sons went into teenagehood, they started to look like some of the groups of people that I had photographed previously. They started to become like my old subjects. As if, as a photographer, you come around to the same visual points. — Ari Marcopoulos

What self-respecting male wanted a job being photographed? — Jude Deveraux

Pictures are an escape. They should be bigger than life. In the same way, celebrities provide an escape from the mundane. They are photographed so we can worship them - so they are worthy of our worship. — David LaChapelle

Pictures can be devastating. Who allowed John Kerry to get himself photographed windsurfing in a flowered swimsuit? Anyone in the real world in that operation? — Jack Germond