Top 83 Camera Eye Quotes
#1. The camera eye is the one in the middle of our forehead, combining how we see with what there is to be seen.
Wright Morris
#2. Photography is light-writing, the language of images. Less abstract than written or spoken language, it selects images from the existing world of appearances and arranges them in patterns. The camera-eye doesn't think, it recognizes. It shows us what we already know, but don't know that we know.
David Levi Strauss
#3. The common ancient ancestor of mulluses and chordates could not possibly have possessed a camera eye, so quite clearly they have evolved independently. The solution has been arrived at by completely different routes.
Simon Conway Morris
#4. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#6. When I was starting, I was very much influenced by the straight up, eyes to camera style of August Sander. He is really the only one. Had I known then the work of people like Ken Russell, Vivian Maier, Helen Levitt, and Steven Berkoff, they would undoubtedly have influenced me too.
Derek Ridgers
#7. Before the days of video village a director should stand right next to the camera, look with his naked eye and if he sees something that is real to him, he'd look up at the [camera] operator and if he gives the look to indicate he'd seen it to, then you print and you'd move on.
Matt Damon
#8. Let's face it, the human eye is clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible when compared to the camera's eye.
Robert Smithson
#9. Your most important gear is your eye, heart and soul.
Marius Vieth
#10. Behind the camera, I was invisible. When I lifted it up to my eye it was like I crawled into the lens, losing myself there. and everything else fell away.
Sarah Dessen
#12. We used the camera only as a means of expression and as a visual medium that offers possibilities found in no other artistic technique, possibilities that the eye cannot catch in their totality. We tried to establish a characteristic vision of photography.
Piet Zwart
#13. I am certain that if I have any merit, it is knowing how to make good use of my eyes, to guide the camera in its task of capturing not only colors, lights and shadows, but the movement of life itself.
Gabriel Figueroa
#14. I knew if I continued to look around it would be difficult for me to contain my own emotions. So I turned away from the red eyes of the crowd and looked only at the red eye of the camera, talking to all the nation.
Richard M. Nixon
#15. For the spectator does not see space, he sees the objects and events; he does not perceive the coordinates with the same cyclopean eye of the camera. With his entire body, desires, and fantasies, he perceives the existential dimensions by which the world is organized.
Mikel Dufrenne
#16. Our perceptions take on richness and depth as a result of all the things that we learn. The eye is not a camera that objectively takes a photo of the "world out there." Rather, what the eye sees is determined by what the brain has learned. This suggests a short mantra: learn more, see more.
Richard Restak
#17. The camera is an eye that sees and records the lives of filthy people. Its pictures are hung in museums and published in thick books that future generations can see how horrible life was.
David Shrigley
#18. I learned quickly at Columbia that the only eye that mattered was the one on the camera.
Gene Tierney
#19. On stage you can get away with a lot more in the sense of emotion and truthfulness. But the camera is the eye of God. It sees everything.
Cindy Busby
#20. Do not be afraid of mistakes. They will be with you always,every time you put a camera to your eye. [If you] shoot safe, and don't at least occasionally court disaster, you are not trying. Time to hang up the camera.
Joe McNally
#21. This is a whole new world to explore as a developer to go in and learn these new gameplay mechanics, to learn what it's like to actually control a character from a top-down, 'God's eye' view, and to figure out how the game camera can be controlled by the player's head.
Brendan Iribe
#22. When I began to photograph nudes, I let myself be guided by this camera, and instead of photographing what I saw, I photographed what the camera was seeing. I interfered very little, and the lens produced anatomical images and shapes which my eyes had never observed.
Bill Brandt
#23. The first really important book I read about filmmaking was The Film Technique by Pudovkin. This was some time before I had ever touched a movie camera and it opened my eyes to cutting and montage.
Stanley Kubrick
#24. It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera ... they are made with the eye, heart and head.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#25. One time I told this lady to give me all her money, she said no. So I cut her and pulled her eyes out. I would do someone in and then take a camera and set the timer so I could sit them up next to me and take our picture together.
Richard Ramirez
#26. I look very different on camera compared with how I do in real life. On camera, I look my best when everything is enhanced, especially my eyes - I like a smoky eye. In real life, I like myself best in tinted moisturiser, lip balm and mascara.
Martine McCutcheon
#27. It's my job to play this role that I'm cast in to the very best of my ability, the same as any other actor. You can't possibly be yourself in the public eye. All the little things that make us human don't stand up under the scrutiny of the camera. [on being a public figure]
Adrian Lamo
#28. My eyes has been my camera taking pictures of the world and my songs has been my messages that I tried to scatter across the back sides and along the steps of the fire escapes and on the window sills and through the dark halls ...
Woody Guthrie
#29. When you grow up on camera and in the public eye, you feel you have to put forth this image. I just took that to the extreme and there was a lot of pressure on me.
Shannon Miller
#30. Things seem more obvious behind the camera. Like the way Corgi keeps one eye on the game and the other on Happy. The way Yelp's hands are shaking and his eyes are shadowed, and the way Jorge watches him without seeming
Dot Hutchison
#31. A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
Orson Welles
#32. Realism and superrealism are what I'm after. This world is full of things the eye doesn't see. The camera can see more, and often 10 times better.
Andreas Feininger
#33. We've got a nation of people who have one eye looking out for the next speed camera, another looking for a speed limit sign and another looking at the speedometer - which is a bit of a shame, when you only have two eyes.
Paul Smith
#34. Photojournalism has its tremendous rewards and it's wonderful work. In what other work can you wander aimlessly with a camera around your neck, armed only with your personal interest and your eyes?
Larry Towell
#35. It is inescapable that Ringo was the catalyst for the others. He certainly completed the jigsaw and The Beatles, with Ringo, became a magnet for the great camera artists of the world, a target for the jaded, lately hostile eyes of people who had hardly known that popular music existed.
Brian Epstein
#36. I never had a "project." I would go out and shoot, follow my eyes ... I tried to capture with my camera, for others to see.
Helen Levitt
#37. I try to tell my story as simply as possible, with the camera at eye level.
Howard Hawks
#38. [The camera] may be said to make a picture of whatever it sees, the object glass is the eye of the instrument - the sensitive paper may be compared to the retina.
Henry Fox Talbot
#39. When you are a photographer, you work all the time, because your eye is the first camera.
Patrick Demarchelier
#40. Kurt Cobain, when he did his videos, you look into his eyes and he couldn't even face the camera; he was in pain and I'm angry about Kurt. This guy didn't have to die.
Steven Tyler
#41. I may even show up behind the camera. I love to put things together; I love to give direction. I have a great eye for pace.
J. B. Smoove
#42. I don't take the camera out with me. My eyes are the camera for me every day.
Patrick Demarchelier
#44. The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?
Edward Weston
#45. I make the woman look at the camera as a symbol of all the eyes that will see the picture I am making.
Philippe Halsman
#46. The camera has an uncanny ability to capture the world as it is, to seize events as they happen, and also to conjure visions of the future. But by the time the image reaches the eyes of the viewer, it belongs to the past, taking on the status of something retrieved.
A.O. Scott
#47. If there were lies to photography, I figured, there was truth too, truths we'd never see if not through the dispassionate glass eye of a camera.
Richard E. Gropp
#48. Your camera is the best critic there is. Critics never see as much as the camera does. It is more perceptive than the human eye.
Douglas Sirk
#49. A camera is wild in just about anybody's hands, therefore one must set limits. But cameras have a life of their own. Cameras care nothing about cults or isms. They are indifferent mechanical eyes, ready to devour anything in sight. They are lenses of the unlimited reproduction.
Robert Smithson
#50. He tried to make each painting capture that gently fuzzed qualit the camera gave everything, as if someone had patted away a top layer of clarity and left behind something kinder than the eye alone would see.
Hanya Yanagihara
#51. Once there was a man who filmed his vacation./He went flying down the river in his boat/with his video camera to his eye, making/a moving picture of the moving river/ ... [At the end of his vacation,]/With a flick of the switch, there it would be./But he would not be in it. He would never be in it.
Wendell Berry
#52. Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time.
V.S. Pritchett
#53. Having an eye patch actually makes it easier to look through a camera - I don't have to close one eye like everyone else.
Brian Selznick
#54. To me photography can be simultaneously both a record and a mirror or window of self-expression the camera is generally assumed to be unable to depict that which is not visible to the eye and yet, the photographer who wields it well can depict what lies unseen in his memory.
Eikoh Hosoe
#55. She was the best model because she not only had perfect facial features, but a great body and wasn't ashamed to show it. It was impossible to take a bad photo of her. Bettie Page was always ready for the camera's eye.
Bunny Yeager
#56. I enjoy traveling and recording far-away places and people with my camera. But I also find it wonderfully rewarding to see what I can discover outside my own window. You only need to study the scene with the eyes of a photographer.
Alfred Eisenstaedt
#57. By this Yoshida explains that 'when we look at the actual conditions of this world through the camera's lens, we must deny the random movements of the human eye and restrain the eye's constant movements in order to focus on one point.
Isolde Standish
#58. What the human eye observes causally and incuriously, the eye of the camera notes with relentless fidelity.
Berenice Abbott
#59. Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.
Susan Sontag
#60. On my iPad, and I'm quite a fool for this, but I use Post-It notes to cover up the camera. It's just weird with that little eye there and sometimes it'll be green and I know I didn't turn it on. It's very spooky.
Taraji P. Henson
#61. My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea.
Edward Weston
#62. Think about it; the quicktank is given a job most of us would laugh out of town. Build a sophisticated camera capable of full 3-D input and peripheral pickup, using only water and jelly.
Build an eye.
Warren Ellis
#64. I can use the camera to make a place or landscape; the camera to a greater extent projects rather than takes in or reproduces. The camera, or, rather, the eye, produces the impression of the place: I as a photographer am not passively taking in; I am active as a subject generating the object.
Olafur Eliasson
#65. The camera is not your eye, and it's not the eye of the audience. I don't think it's my eye, either. It belongs to the film.
Claire Denis
#66. A Leica camera is a camera we can keep both eyes open. You can look for the free eye that doesn't look to viewfinder and in all directions. It's like backwards - and sometimes also backwards, and you can look for the viewfinder and see your picture.
Horst Faas
#67. I am the camera's eye. I am the machine that shows you the world as I alone see it. Starting from today I am forever free of human immobility. I am in perpetual movement. I approach and draw away from things-I crawl under them-I climb on them-I am on the head of a galloping horse.
Dziga Vertov
#68. I once got a little camera to use for details of architecture and so forth but the photo was always so different from the perspective the eye gives, I gave it up.
Edward Hopper
#69. It is probably well on the conservative side to estimate that during the past ten to fifteen years the camera has destroyed a thousand pairs of eyes, corrupted ten thousand, and seriously deceived a hundred thousand, for every one pair that it has opened, and taught.
James Agee
#70. We cannot improve the making of our eyes, but we can endlessly perfect the camera.
Dziga Vertov
#71. But now the train had finally begun to move, and Albie had switched the fearless truth-telling eye of his camera lens from his untied laces to the walls of the tunnels under east London, because you can never have enough pictures of dirty concrete.
David Nicholls
#72. I know those kinds of lenses, said Tuppence. By the time you've adjusted the shutter and stopped down and calculated the exposure and kept your eye on the spirit level, your brain gives out and you yearn for the simple browning.
Agatha Christie
#73. Camera and eye are together a time machine with which the mind and human being can do the same kind of violence to time and space as dreams.
Minor White
#74. When I start a film, I can sort of shut my eyes, sit somewhere quiet and imagine the movie finished. I can imagine the camera angles, I can even imagine the type of music. Without knowing the tune, I can imagine the type of music it needs to be.
Peter Jackson
#75. THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA(1929) the 'honesty' of documentary as compared with fiction film, the 'perfection' of the cinematic eye compared with human eye.
Steven Jay Schneider
#76. If you stare into its cold dead eye, the camera always mocks you with the truth.
Gregory David Roberts
#77. Two men with a camera, thoughtfully observing the visual cacophony of one major thoroughfare and the complicated interplay of its history, its present, and the certainty of change, have laid the groundwork for a dialogue and a vision that reaches farther than human eyes can see.
Vicki Goldberg
#78. The key is to not let the camera, which depicts nature in so much detail, reveal just what the eye picks up, but what the heart picks up as well.
Paul Caponigro
#79. On Laurence Olivier as Hamlet in a 1948 film: Olivier's idea of introspection was to hood his eyes, dentalize his consonants and let the camera circle his blondined head like a sparrow looking for a place to deposit its droppings.
Robert Brustein
#80. I have spent too much time with my eye glued to the viewfinder and ended up missing both the image of the mind and that on film.
Doug Peacock
#81. Creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#82. Hyperrealism is more about objectifying ... how an object can be portrayed when it is seen through a camera's lens ... all my paintings are about an object being viewed through human eyes.
Liu Dan
#83. The difference in 'seeing' between the eye and the lens should make it obvious that a photographer who merely points his camera at an appealing subject and expects to get an appealing picture in return, may be headed for a disappointment.
Andreas Feininger
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