John Loengard Quotes

If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.

Perishability in a photograph is important in a picture. If a photograph looks perishable we say, "Gee, I'm glad I have that moment."

A Ming vase can be well-designed and well-made and is beautiful for that reason alone. I don't think this can be true for photography. Unless there is something a little incomplete and a little strange, it will simply look like a copy of something pretty. We won't take an interest in it.

When I go to photograph somebody, they say, "What do you want me to do?" Those are the most frightening words in the English language. I want to say, "Please, go over into good light and do something unusual.

In a painting no one complains that the subject is posed, but everybody complains about what looks posed in a photograph. Except, I've found that if I go very close in to the face, then the posed expression no longer exists. The face becomes a landscape of the lakes of the eyes and the hills of the nose and the valley of the cleft of the chin.

Working alone on stories, I began to feel the anonymity of motels on interstate highways reached by jet planes and rental cars. It was hard to have a good time, and the only way I could make the loneliness excusable was by taking pictures I thought were very good, even valuable.

Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture's true beauty.

I was photographing the photographer Brassaï. He had very prominent eyes, like a frog's. As I focused my lens, he brought his hand up and pretended to focus his eye. It was a joke, but it added mystery to the picture. There's a sense of action in a very small world. Or with Allen Ginsberg there were people smoking cigarettes and in the smoke there's a sense of motion. It makes much out of very little.

In my head I think, There is a beautiful picture here and by God, short of murder, I'm going to get it. So shut up and hold still! But what I say is: You look wonderful. It'll just take a minute. It's marvelous. We're doing something very special.

Usually I think if there is something imperfect in a photograph it makes the picture more real. Photographs that are slick, smooth, and imperfect seem less honest to me.

Teachers don't work in the summer, and photographers don't shoot in in the middle of the day.

There are two kinds of photographs: mine and other people's. I never think of what I might do myself when I look at someone else's pictures... there is no subject in the world I have ever wanted to photograph. It's the picture, not the object, that is important to me.

The fact is that the camera is literal if anything, which gives it something in common with a thermometer... Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture's true beauty. There is sleight of hand in photography... you make the viewer think he's seeing everything while at the same time you make him realize he's not. I try to make my pictures seem reasonable and then, at the last minute, pull the rug from beneath the viewer's feet, very gently so there's a little thrill.

When I teach a class I often give the assignment: Photograph someone you love. I ask people to do this so they have a subject about whom they have feelings, a subject that is more than a model, or an object, or a shape, or an idea. In this way, they can judge the result not only by its technical success, but also by how well it describes their feelings.