Top 100 The Camera Is Quotes
#2. You think the only thing looking at you is this steel thing, but behind the camera is this living, breathing person operating the camera whose job it is to watch you.
Uzo Aduba
#3. I've worked with actors who treat the first two takes like rehearsals. And that's okay. If the camera is on you and we're doing a scene where I'm off camera, I'm treating that as a rehearsal.
Alfred Molina
#4. Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
Susan Sontag
#5. Photographs are the results of a diminution of solar energy, and the camera is an entropic machine for recording gradual loss of light.
Robert Smithson
#6. Shame works like the zoom lens on a camera. When we are feeling shame, the camera is zoomed in tight and all we see is our flawed selves, alone and struggling.(page 68)
Brene Brown
#7. The camera is one of the greatest liars of our time.
John Gunther
#8. Photography is the act of "fixing" time, not of "expressing" the world. The camera is an inadequate tool for extracting a vision of the world or of beauty.
Daido Moriyama
#9. I've dealt with a few method actors, and I don't know if should say this, but I think it's a bunch of nonsense. I think it's film acting and you just have to be on when the camera is rolling.
Natalie Portman
#10. The whole thing about working in front of the camera is to make people laugh when they're not supposed to.
Zach Galifianakis
#11. Being on stage was all about the palpable energy of a rapt audience hopefully buying into a life onstage. The immediate connection with the audience was the best part for me. The camera is not as fun, but your work is preserved forever. There's immortality to it.
David Walton
#12. The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.
Janet Malcolm
#13. If the guy behind the camera is not good, the pictures are bad. It's still you, and it's the same lines and everything, but it doesn't work.
Vincent Cassel
#14. The camera is a fluid way of encountering that other reality
Jerry Uelsmann
#15. I'm very in love with the fact that the camera is revolted by acting and loves behaviour.
Ben Kingsley
#16. I'm not one of these actresses like, 'Okay, where's the camera? Is it here? Is it here?' I don't even ask the questions because I don't really want to know. I like not performing for a camera but giving it my best every single time whether you're close or whether you're far.
Halle Berry
#17. Being behind the camera is where I feel comfortable. I've found something that I feel I, as 'Michael,' can be as confident in as 'Johnny' was on the stage. It's great being part of the creative process. You're right at the start of an idea, and you get to see it all the way through till the end.
Johnny Vegas
#18. The camera is not merely a reflecting pool and the photographs are not exactly the mirror, mirror on the wall that speaks with a twisted tongue.
Lee Friedlander
#20. I don't like to watch playback. But being on the set, watching the way the camera is being moved and the way the light is being used, you do get an idea of it.
Christopher Eccleston
#21. Photography through the camera is an instrument of detection. We photograph not only what we know, but also what we don't know.
Lisette Model
#22. The camera is the least important element in photography.
Julius Shulman
#23. In terms of so-called fly-on-the-wall documentaries, there's a claim that the camera is a transparent window into a pre-existing reality. What really is happening is that the film crew and the subjects are collaborating to simulate a reality in which they pretend the camera is not present.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#24. A good trick I learnt early on is not to immediately look at playback because once you know the shot, you can see when the camera is on you. It's best to stay 'in it' all the time, and just if it's on you, it's on you, and if it's not, it's not. It's the easiest way.
Aidan Turner
#25. The hand of the painter is incurably mechanical: his technique is incurably artificial ... The camera ... is so utterly unmechanical.
George Bernard Shaw
#26. The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.
Berenice Abbott
#27. The camera is interested in what you are thinking as opposed to just what you are doing or saying.
Ajay Naidu
#28. 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
#29. The camera is just a machine, which records with impressive and as a rule very cruel faithfulness.
James Agee
#30. It is clear enough by now to most people that the camera never lies is a foolish saying. Yet it is doubtful whether most people realize how extraordinarily slippery a liar the camera is.
James Agee
#31. 'Scandal' has been, for me, the most consistent time I've ever logged in front of a camera. I grew up in the theater, and I feel very confident and comfortable on the stage and in front of a live audience, but the camera is a very different medium.
Katie Lowes
#32. What's troubling is that because the camera is 3D, the northern part of the screen isn't necessarily north anymore. So the jungle transforms into the true meaning of a jungle. For someone with no sense of direction like myself, I get lost in the caves every time.
Hideo Kojima
#33. The camera is, in a sense, both a way to get close, and to break free. It is a testimony to independence as well as a new way to relate to the world
Elinor Carucci
#34. The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#35. I can remember the moment when I suddenly felt that the camera was a living partner. I suddenly felt this is art, and the camera is a co-operative living person. After that I was extremely happy to act in films.
Erland Josephson
#37. You know, the camera is not meant just to show misery.
Gordon Parks
#38. What very often happens when people make films about rich people, the camera is quite mesmerised by the opulence and quite theatrical in fact.
Tilda Swinton
#39. In the theater you rehearse in order to do the performance. And in the movies the rehearsal and the performance are kind of the same thing. You're figuring it out and hopefully the camera is pointed at you when you're doing it.
Christopher Walken
#40. There's just such a premium on hurrying, and the camera is the be all and end all, and the actors had better hurry up and get it right and get it done.
Mary Steenburgen
#41. Where you point the camera is the question and the picture you get is the answer to decipher.
Robert Polidori
#42. Photography is a source of raw materials as I believe the camera is never perfect and will never be able to express in full what I see and feel.
Nikolay Semyonov
#43. Live television drama was like live theater, because you moved without thinking about the camera. It followed you around. In film you have to be more aware of what the camera is doing.
Louise Fletcher
#44. 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
#45. Being behind a camera, in front of the camera, is my own little deconstructionist niche.
Joshua Leonard
#46. The most important piece of equipment after the camera is a good pair of shoes.
David Hurn
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. If the photographer isn't going to pay attention to the picture he is making, that if he thinks the camera is just a machine and not an avenue of expression, then he has no business asking anyone for anything, let alone their time and interest. Don't show the world, he said, invent the world.
Whitney Otto
#51. The camera is more than a recorder, it's a microscope. It penetrates, it goes into people and you see their most private and concealed thoughts.
Elia Kazan
#52. The actors feel very free. The actor, he doesn't need to think about where the camera is, he just has to focus on what he's doing and forget the camera. The camera is never in the perfect position, and I think this is what keeps this feeling of reality. The frame is not perfect.
Fernando Meirelles
#53. I think the camera is a wonderful machine, don't you? And not to take photographs in this century is crazy.
Peter Beard
#54. Writing, directing ... anything behind the camera is what I want to do.
Dylan Penn
#55. When you are younger, the camera is like a friend and you can go places and feel like you're with someone, like you have a companion.
Annie Leibovitz
#56. I don't really believe in the mystery of cinematography - what happens in the camera is what the cinematographers create and all that nonsense.
Roger Deakins
#57. I feel exposed. The camera is my nemesis. Right up there with mirrors.
Donna Cooner
#58. The camera does not like acting. The camera is only interested in filming behaviour. So you damn well learn your lines until you know them inside out, while standing on your head!
Ben Kingsley
#59. I feel as though the camera is almost a kind of voyeur in Mr. Bean's life, and you just watch this bizarre man going about his life in the way that he wants to.
Rowan Atkinson
#60. I am against great themes and great subjects ... You can't film an idea. The camera is an instrument for recording physical impact.
Jean Renoir
#61. The camera is a remarkable instrument. Saturate yourself with your subject, and the camera will all but take you by the hand and point the way.
Margaret Bourke-White
#62. The photogram, image formation outside the camera is the real key to photography,it embodies the essence ... that allows us to capture light on light sensitive material without the use of any camera.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#63. In a strict sense photography can never be abstract, for the camera is incapable of synthetic integration.
Ansel Adams
#64. Musicals and horror films can be very non-verbal and very pure cinema with movement. The camera is justified in being a character. It can really move and tell a story, and literally direct you to look here or there.
Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
#65. Life as it unfolds in front of the camera is full of so much complexity, wonder and surprise that I find it unnecessary to create new realities. There is more pleasure, for me, in things as-they-are.
David Hurn
#66. I am a man of very many anxieties but doing strange things with the camera is not one of them.
Lars Von Trier
#67. The camera is my tool. Through it I give a reason to everything around me.
Andre Kertesz
#68. When I work, I really try to get absorbed in the character. Unless I want to do something playful with the camera, I'm not too worried about where the camera is or positions.
Nicolas Cage
#69. It's also important to remember that no one is "the bad guy" or "the best friend" or "the whore with a heart of gold" in real life; in real life we each of us regard ourselves as the main character, the protagonist, the big cheese; the camera is on us, baby.
Stephen King
#70. The key to a frittata," Mike told the camera, "is to use a really hot pan. Because that, my friends, is what makes it" - he paused dramatically - "fluffy.
Diana Peterfreund
#71. The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don't belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation.
Susan Meiselas
#72. The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.
Brooks Atkinson
#73. For me, the camera is like an entrance to the private lives of other people. And if you are curious like me, it is a fantastic tool.
Anders Petersen
#74. What can one do with one's hands when the camera is interested in other things?
Dave Eggers
#75. On 'Y Tu Mama Tambien,' we started exploring shots that are longer, where the camera is moving around the actors, and there are no cuts, and you feel like you're there.
Emmanuel Lubezki
#76. I want to continue working in Mexico, but I'd also like to work in other countries eventually, too. Working behind the camera is interesting for me, too.
Stephanie Sigman
#77. I just [take pictures] because the camera is something to carry around in my pocket.
Andy Warhol
#78. As an actor, if you're just sitting and staring and you don't know who you are in your own mind, it's vacant. And sometimes the camera is an X-ray machine, it can pick it up.
Albert Brooks
#79. The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.
Orson Welles
#80. You see what you understand, You have to be prepared to see the world. The moment of clicking the camera is almost irrelevant. What is really important is what happens before and after you take the picture.
Gabriel Orozco
#81. When you shoot a movie, the camera is always taking, taking, taking and not giving anything back.
Rodrigo Santoro
#82. Obviously, from the experience you get from making videos, you understand where the camera is and how some of the actual technicalities work and so on and so forth.
Shirley Manson
#83. Well, getting behind the camera is something I've always wanted to get involved with. Ever since I was doing movies like 'Zathura' I was very interested in all the different jobs on set and kind of soaking all the information up like a sponge.
Josh Hutcherson
#84. With Altman, he does discuss everything with you, but then leaves you to it and gives you full rein and lets you improvise and create a character while the camera is rolling.
Vincent D'Onofrio
#85. A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
Orson Welles
#86. The camera is the instrument that brings the inner passion and the outward event into harmony with one another, this linking, or, rather, this coincidence, is successfully brought about, then we find one of the things that no image-making medium can accomplish to the same degree.
Edward Lucie-Smith
#88. The camera is an extension of yourself ... Your story treatment may be subjective, but it is important to remain objective as to truth.
Cornell Capa
#89. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
Dorothea Lange
#90. I'm sure that the camera is part of European art.
David Hockney
#91. The camera is first a means of self-discovery and a means of self-growth. The artist has one thing to say - himself.
Minor White
#92. The camera is objective. When it records a face it can't make any hierarchical decisions about a nose being more important than a cheek. The camera is not aware of what it is looking at. It just gets it all down.
Chuck Close
#93. For me, the brand of the camera is not the most important thing. I think you can take good pictures with the camera on your phone.
Anja Niedringhaus
#94. The camera is as much a part of my everyday life as talking or eating or sex.
Nan Goldin
#95. For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#96. I work primarily for the camera-it's not something I really talk about a lot, but it's part of the way I am as a movie actor. The camera is my girl, as it were.
Terence Stamp
#97. I'm a narrative-minded actor. I'm thinking of the story. I'm not worried about whether the camera is on the right side of my face, or where the camera is. I'm just going for the story.
Mark Duplass
#98. The camera is a natural attraction for a politician. And if a camera is here, we're going to be here. And we're going to say something, even if we have nothing to say.
Thad Cochran
#99. The camera is a mirror with a memory, but it cannot think.
Arnold Newman
#100. My urge to photograph is activated by an almost biological instinct for preservation from disorder. The camera is a mechanical apparatus that extends my natural ability and desire for meaningful organization. I need it to survive.
Arthur Tress
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