Quote

Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.

In all our perceptions, from vision to hearing, to the pictures we build of people's character, our unconscious mind starts from whatever objective data is available to us - usually spotty - and helps to shape and construct the more complete picture we consciously perceive.

Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.

The two sensibilities, the visual and the verbal, have always been linked for me - in fact, while reading a particularly evocative passage, I will imagine what the photograph I'd take of that scene would look like, even with burning and dodging notes. Maybe everyone does this.

Looking into the camera creates a special eye and soul contact.

Fortunately, I've never been very conscious and inhibited of what I have to do. The camera's my soul mate.

And only the photographer himself knows the effect he wants. He should know by instinct, grounded in experience, what subjects are enhanced by hard or soft, light or dark treatment.

You must photograph where you are involved; where you are overwhelmed by what you see before you; where you hold your breath while releasing the shutter, not because you are afraid of jarring the camera, but because you are seeing with your guts wide open to the sweet pain of an image that is part of your life.

Italian cameramen grow up immersed in an awareness of light. It is part of their mythology.

One gets into a strange psychological, almost hypnotic, state of mind while on the firing line which probably prevents the mind's eye from observing and noticing things in a normal way.