Berenice Abbot

If we travel with expectation, we make expected photographs.

 

Sam Abell

from Stay this Moment

A mad, keen photographer needs to get out in the world and work and make mistakes. 

I believe in the resonance and staying power of quiet photographs.

Spiritually driven work constitutes the core of photography’s contribution to culture.

The best photographs are yet to be made.

A tripod allows me to linger over a composition for more than a moment. 

Photography produces pleasure by simplicity.

Other sources

Photoshop is a dark art.  Improvement is not photography; seeing is photography.  (from a talk in NYC 2015)

Compose your picture, and wait.

Bad weather makes good pictures.

My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it.

Photography, to me, is an act of appreciation.

Photographing the idea is to show both the box and the idea that went into making the box.

Workshop in Maine 2021

Listen to yourself to determine what stops you.

Setting first, subject second.

The breath of life needs to be in a photograph.

A suggestive photograph is in the realm of poetry.

No photograph takes itself.

A photograph has to have stopping power and staying power.

A photograph has to be inevitable, not staged or lucky or tricky.

You can't make a photograph sitting in front of your computer.

Take pictures, don't create them.

Poetry lasts.  I want my work to be like a poem.

The most important part of a photo essay is to create a tone.

The viewfinder is my stage.  I'm the set director and the character director [by waiting and choosing the moment, not by directing].

A key thing for me is not to have much gear.

The biggest impediment to me getting a picture is me.

To make a good photograph you have to meet the world, and the world has to meet you.

Strive to make good photographs.  Out of that, maybe once or twice a year, arises the great photograph.

A photograph has to live up to its potential.

Often we take pictures ahead of ourselves.  If we know, believe and think truly that we're on to a fine photograph, we probably aren't.  The few truly original photographs – the few that we will take in our lives – happen out ahead of us and we only grow up later to realize it.

 

Ansel Adams

Photography makes the moment enduring and eloquent.

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.

It is important that the photographer has a clear conception of what he is aiming for in his work, and that he reduces every element of his equipment and method to the most simple and efficient degree.

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer, and often the supreme disappointment.

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

The "machine-gun" approach to photography - by which many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good - is fatal to serious results.

There are no rules for good photographs; there are only good photographs.

No one has the right to dictate what others should perceive, create, or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions, and emotions and to build confidence in the creative spirit.

The artist must have a clear and complete conception of the final effects of the print before he operates the shutter of his lens.  The photograph is completed before it is taken.

The so-called rules of composition are, in my opinion, invalid, irrelevant, immaterial.

The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.

Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.

 

Eddie Adams

Still photographs are the most powerful weapons in the world.  People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation.  They are only half-truths.

I think all war should be shot in black and white.  It's more primitive.  Color tends to make things look too nice.

The most powerful weapon in the world has been, and can be a photograph.  Military weapons can only destroy.  Cameras in the hands of photographers with hearts can capture love – hope – passion – change lives and make the world a better place.... And it only takes 1/500th of a second.  Life goes on – we photograph it.  But it's much better with love –

 

Robert Adams

Making photographs has to be, then, a personal matter; when it is not, the results are not persuasive.

Show affection for the world without lying about it.

 

William Albert Allard

(Pearls from a Leica Akademie workshop in Los Angeles, 2018)

The difference between a good picture and a really fine picture is very often a matter of inches.  It's how you're putting that space together and that's where your sense of grace and balance come in.  It's how you see.  You're responsible for every little bit of space in that picture, but it's intuitive.

Leica M6.  That's what a camera should feel like.

Pick a bird.  A hunter will miss if he fires his shotgun into a flock of birds.  He has to pick a bird.  When a subject is visually rich you have to pick a bird.

It's always around the edges where you find the most interesting things. [from a podcast (Photo Banter Jan 22, 2021) referring not to the edges of a photograph, but to the edges of life]

 

Diane Arbus

A photograph is a secret about a secret.  The more it tells you, the less you know.

 

Aristotle

The aim of art is to represent, not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

 

Eve Arnold

I didn't want to be a "woman photographer."  That would limit me.  I wanted to be a photographer who was a woman with all the world open to my camera.

 

Richard Avedon

All photographs are accurate.  None of them is the truth.

 

Francis Bacon

The contemplation of things as they are, without substitution or imposture, without error or confusion, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.

 

Brigitte Bardot

A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.

 

Bruce Barnbaum

You will make your strongest images with subject matter that means the most to you.

If it looks manipulated, the viewer loses interest.

The photograph you end up with is your creation, even though the thing you photographed had nothing to do with you.  Something attracted you, but that something was simply the starting point for your photograph, your creation, your statement, your art.

 

Miranda Barnes

I cry on every assignment.

 

Charles Beaudelaire

What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.

 

Jonas Bendiksen

How long will it take before we start seeing "documentary photojournalism" that has no other basis in reality than the photographer's fantasy and a powerful computer graphics card?  Will we be able to tell the difference?

 

Ruth Bernhard

I never look for a photograph; the photograph finds me.

 

Werner Bischof

I am trying to project myself into the mind of the Japanese and to understand their way of life from their point of view. A big story never pays, that’s right. I am precisely one of those who likes to make big essays of this kind, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop doing so because these big essays give me a sense of what a country is really like.

 

Matt Black

Always be immersed in your work.  A big part is simple discipline, to be on top of your craft and always take the time to look, and be ready to receive, ideas from your work.

When Kodak killed T-Max 3200 I transitioned to digital.  

It's more than the film or the sensor or the processing or whatever.  It's a certain kind of light that you take pictures in.  I've always loved "bad light."  Most of my pictures are taken right in the middle of the day.  

A writer would never turn over his notes to an editor and say, "Here, write my piece for me."  So, why should a photographer do that?  It's about authorship.

 

Marcus Bleasdale

For a lot of photographers the photograph is the ultimate goal, but for me it's the start of the process.  It's not the individual photograph, it's what you do with it and who you engage with it that makes it powerful.

 

Chris Boot (Executive Director, Aperture)

You've got to have a new idea.  You've got to have a new way of photographing something.  You've got to offer people something new that gets them excited.  You can't just work in the style of _____, and expect to build an audience.  There's got to be something above and beyond just, "these are good street photographs."

 

Edouard Boubat

There is no such thing as a first photo.  There are only new photos.  The light is brand new today.

I take portraits of light.

Just like the thunderbolt of first love or a first glance wipes away everything else and cretes a kind of emptiness, I swear that at the precise moment of clicking the shutter, I have no forethought, no desire, no intention, no memory.  The subject has taken hold of me: this is the impulse of acting without self interest.

 

Thierry Bounier

An image is not made by a camera, but by your soul and heart; the camera is only 5% of the image, the rest is about creativity, about us.

 

Bill Brandt

The photographer must have, and keep in him, some of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time, or of the traveller who enters a strange country.

Photography has no rules, it is not a sport.  It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.

 

Nick Brandt

Whatever happens in the real world is going to outdo anything you could create in Photoshop.

Each of us can be an incremental cog in the wheel of planetary improvement.

If you listen to music by the Beatles from the mid-1960's you can hear what a wondrous invention they created with just four tracks of analogue tape.  They didn't need 96 technically perfect digital recording tracks and software and a bank of computers.  They simply needed imagination and emotion, determination and belief.  Technique is merely the means to help convey those ideas, not the be-all and end-all.  Stating the obvious, so it can and should be the same with camera equipment.

I personally prefer (whether on film or digital) as simple as possible.  The less distraction, the more basic, the more I like the camera and the more connected I feel in the moment.  Maybe I'm just a technophobe, but I find all that extra stuff distracting.  

 

Brassaï

I don’t invent anything. I imagine everything… most of the time, I have drawn my images from the daily life around me. I think that it is by capturing reality in the humblest, most sincere, most everyday way I can, that I can penetrate to the extraordinary.

 

Jeff Bridges

The Wide-Lux is a fickle mistress; its viewfinder isn't accurate, and there's no manual focus, so it has an arbitrariness to it, a capricious quality. I like that. It's something I aspire to in all my work --- a lack of preciousness that makes things more human and honest, a willingness to receive what's there in the moment, and to let go of the result. Getting out of the way seems to be one of the main tasks for me as an artist.

 

Jane Brown

Printing with chemistry and using light sensitive materials has been such an important part of photographic and photomechanical history. Perhaps we will be the last generation to work with the medium in this way? It’s a thought that somewhat haunts all my work – a liminal world that’s on the threshold of change.

 

Wynn Bullock

Mysteries lie all around us, even in the most familiar settings, waiting only to be perceived.

When I photograph, what I'm really doing is seeking answers to things.

The urge to photograph comes in part from the deep desire to live with more integrity, to live more in peace with the world, and possibly to help others to do the same.

You can expand your reality by developing new ways of perceiving.

I didn't want to tell the tree or weed what it was.  I wanted it to tell me something and, through me, express its meaning in nature.

Whenever I find myself stuck in the ways I relate to things, I return to nature.  It is my principal teacher, and I try to open my whole being to what it has to say.

From Darkroom

When photographing I become so involved in what I'm perceiving that I have to force myself to think of technique.

In printing, I don't want to distort the reality of the image, but I don't want to distort the reality of my feelings for it either.

I have no qualms about altering the image by burning and dodging.  I'm not a purist in that way.  I am a purist in that I don't want the manipulation to show.  As soon as it does, the magic is destroyed.

When photographing, I'm seldom aware of why I'm attracted to something.  I intuit something I want.  I am aware of constantly rejecting things.  After I've photographed, I become aware of the ideas in the back of my head that caused me to make the picture.  They were crystalized by looking at the objects to be photographed.

 

Christopher Burkett

I push the materials to the limit of their capability, but I don't try to bend them to my will.

Don't overdo it.  More color or more saturation does not make a better image.

 

Susan Burnstine

There is nothing new in photography.  What's new is your perspective.

What is that kernel that is making you create?

 

David Butow

Most people - unless they're geniuses - start out taking pictures that are technically good, clean, easily readable, lots of symmetry.  It works on a Pop level.  And then you spend the rest of your career trying to move away from that, at least some people do.  Some people don't even need to move away from it; they start out and their work is immediately different, something about their sensibility.  

People who get to the top are not just talented.  They're working their asses off.

When I go to a [Congressional] hearings it's laid out like all these other hearings I've been to.  Can I do something that sort of reflects what it's about and make pictures that are interesting and go beyond just news pictures.  Can I illuminate the process in a way that is different?

 

Robert Capa

If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.

The truth is the best picture.

It's not always easy to stand aside and be unable to do anything except record the sufferings around one.

The war is like an actress who is getting old. It's less and less photogenic and more and more dangerous. (1944)

The desire of any war photographer is to be put out of business.

I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life.

[Capa was killed by a landmine in Viet Nam]

 

Glen Capers

Learn one lens.  Be great with one lens.  Don't sit there and play with the zoom, because chances are you will miss 90 percent of your pictures.

 

Paul Caponigro

It's one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it's another thing to make a portrait of who they are.

I want to be free enough to see every day with fresh eyes.

In order to be a good photographer, you need to work more on your emotions than your technique.

The only way a work of art can become great is for one to acknowledge that it doesn’t belong to anybody.

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.

 

Keith Carter

Just make the picture; you've got the rest of your life to figure out what it means.

 

Henri Cartier-Bresson

From The Mind’s Eye

One must always take photographs with the greatest respect for the subject and for oneself.  

I had just discovered the Leica.  It became the extension of my eye, and I have never been separated from it since I found it.

Twenty-five years have passed since I started to look through my view-finder.  But I regard myself still as an amateur, though I am no longer a dilettante.

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject.

We photographers, in the course of taking pictures, inevitably make a judgement on what we see, and that implies a great responsibility.

Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.

From Interviews and Conversations (Aperture)

Most pictures are beyond your comprehension at the time you take them - that is to say, you have no way of knowing their exact implications, when they will take on their complete meaning.

I believe photographs should be taken, and should be reproduced, for the masses, not for collectors.

I don't think you can take good pictures if you are taking them with a purpose in mind.  For instance, stylization is the sad result of a systematic approach to composition, instead of intuition.  The only art is in the humanity of your thinking, how you look at things, and the coincidence of being in a certain place at a certain time.

As long as human beings are alive and there are real problems that are vital, important, and someone wishes to express them with simplicity and sincerity, or with fun and humor, there will be a place for photographers, just as there will be for poets and novelists.

A photographer must not run but walk, tirelessly.

The subject takes on importance and the photograph takes on strength only if you succeed in forgetting yourself.

We are passive when confronted with a world in movement; and our only creative moment is this 1/25th of a second when we press the button, this shifting instant when the blade falls.

We must think before and after, but never while taking a picture.

I flee from the dangers of the anecdote and the picturesque, which are very easy and better than the sensational, but quite as bad.  To my mind, photography has the power to evoke, and must not simply document.  

The most difficult thing for me is the portrait...you have to try and place your camera between a person's skin and his shirt, which is not an easy thing to do.

You have to forget yourself - the image becomes much stronger if you get completely involved in what you are doing.

You can't go looking for a structure, shapes, patterns and all that, but you will feel a sensuous pleasure, an intellectual pleasure at the same time, when you have everything in the right place.

I find emotion in black-and-white: it transposes, it is an abstraction, it is not "normal."

The secret is to always work with the same fast film, in slightly gray weather.  Sunshine is very inconvenient in photography: it forces, it imposes.  Slightly overcast weather allows one to circle the subject freely, it is a visually malleable weather.  

I have had the same camera for years and years.  I am a very bad customer.

I have one camera and one lens; you need an economy of means in order to get the maximum.  It's intensity that counts.

When I see the amount of gear that some photographers have and then see their results, there is a bit of a discrepancy.

I own an old Leica that is indestructible.  I have another one that is faster, but the first one is quite enough.

I love my old Leica, I am completely at ease with it and anything else hampers me.  These [new] machines make me uncomfortable; I don't know how to work with them, too complicated, to many thingies.  I have the automatic reflex within me.

You have to fully live in the instant, it is the only way to be present in what you do - which explains my passion for the Leica.  It is a camera that favors the instant.  Reflex cameras on the other hand are noisy, they create a disturbance, that changes everything.

My friend Sebastiao Salgado makes extraordinary pictures that require an enormous amount of work.  They have not been conceived by the eye of a painter, but that of a sociologist, economist, and activist.  I have the utmost respect for what he does, but he possesses a messianic side that I do not have.

Composition is born of chance.  I never calculate.  I have a glimpse of a structure and I wait for something to happen within it.  There is no rule.  You should not try to explain the mystery too much.  It is better to be available, with a Leica close at hand.  It is the ideal camera body.

To me, the 50 mm remains the closest thing there is to the human gaze.  You can shoot everything with it - streets, landscapes, or portraits.  When you have the eye of a painter and a visual grammar, you work with a 50 mm.

Photography is an attitude, a way of being, a way of life.  And suddenly, in front of a fleeting reality, you have an intuition.  A whole visual organization clicks into place.  It lasts for a fraction of a second.  You hold your breath... you put your heart, your head and above all your eye into it. There, it's done.

We always talk too much.  We use too many words to say nothing.  The pencil and the Leica are silent.

Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant. We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again.  We cannot develop and print a memory.

HC-B from other sources:

We must take greater care than ever not to allow ourselves to be separated from the real world and from humanity.

What is photojournalism? Occasionally, a very unique photo, in which form is precise and rich enough and content has enough resonance, is sufficient in itself - but that's rarely the case. The elements of a subject that speak to us are often scattered and can't be captured in one photo; we don't have the right to force them together, and to stage them would be cheating... which brings us to the need for photojournalism. 

It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera… they are made with the eye, heart and head.

Shooting with a Leica is like a long, tender kiss.

You just have to live and life will give you pictures.

It is the photo that takes you.

It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.

To take a photograph is to hold one's breath when all faculties converge in a face of fleeing reality.  It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.

It is putting one, head, one, eye, and one, heart on the same axis.

Think about the photo before and after, never during.  The secret is to take your time.  You mustn't go too fast.  The subject must forget about you.  Then, however, you must be very quick.

To photograph:  it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.

The pleasure is here and now, to be alive, to be present.  To feel the pulse of everything.

The 35 is splendid when needed, but extremely difficult to use if you want precision in composition. There are too many elements, and something is always in the wrong place. It is a beautiful lens at times when needed by what you see. But very often it is used by people who want to shout. Because you have a distortion, you have somebody in the foreground and it gives an effect. But I don’t like effects. There is something aggressive, and I don’t like that. Because when you shout, it is usually because you are short of arguments.

Portraiture is hard because you need to get between someone's skin and their shirt.

You don't overshoot because it's like overeating and over drinking.

Either you get it or you don't.

One should only use one camera with one lens that coincides with your angle of vision, with the same film at its normal speed. The rest is just gimmicks and hardware.

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept. (statement to Helmut Newton published in Newsweek 6/1/03)

I have made only 15 important photographs in my life, and those were made during my early surrealist period.  The rest of the time I was trying to do a good job for Mr. Luce. (quoted by Ralph Gibson in Self Exposure)

Photography is not a documentation but intuition, a poetic experience.  It's drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, then sniff, sniff, sniff - being sensitive eto coincidence.  You can't go looking for it: you can't want it or you won't get it.  First you must lose yourself.  Then it happens.

Photography implies the recognition of a rhythm in the world of real things.

 

Dickey Chapelle

The picture is your reason for being.  If you can't prove it happened with a picture, it didn't happen.

The main thing you have to always remember about covering combat is that you've got to survive, get the story and the pictures out to the world.

This is the story I have been writing, episode by episode, for 20 years: the story of men brave enough to risk their lives in the defense of freedom against tyranny.  To me it has always been the most important story in the world.

When I die, I want to be on patrol with the United States Marines.  [Chapelle died in 1965 on patrol with the United States Marines.]

 

Howard Chapnick

The invention of the camera will rank with the invention of the printing press as a dominating influence in human development... Like music, it is a language that all mankind can understand.  Photography cuts across the boundary of illiteracy that isolates much of the world's population.

Photography can light up the dark corners of a tormented and difficult world.

The twentieth century belongs to the photojournalists.  They have provided us with a visual history unduplicated by images from any comparable period of human existence.

 

Thomas Joshua Cooper

The art is in the thinking and the feeling and the seeing and the making.  Not in the medium." (told to him by Morris Graves)

See Canyon taught me several important artist's lessons.  The first was to relax into trying to see a place, be at ease if possible in the place, but attend to it well and very carefully.  Secondly, be prepared to change your mind and to see what you do not expect to see or did not want to see.

 

Jeffrey Conley

For all of us, the Earth sustains our existence.  In an otherwise inhospitable known universe, our little blue planet provides us absolutely everything. I've never understood why our societal and spiritual priorities as a species do not overwhelmingly demonstrate our gratitude by placing our planet at the pinnacle of the reverential order. (from Reverence)

Photographing nature is a very specific kind of exercise in mindfulness; to be out in nature with senses responsive, keenly aware of circumstances and completely receptive, yielding to the present. (from Reverence)

 

Joe Cornish

While the painter can scrape away and paint over his mistakes, the landscape photographer must make good decisions all the way through the process.  Camera technique must be flawless, composition well-crafted and timing immaculate.  It is the art form of good judgement, experience and clear vision.  A fusion of science, craft and art, landscape photography is an activity that draws heavily on mind, body and spirit. 

If you're a nature photographer, part of what makes a photograph believable is the rough edges and the imperfections.  The moment you start cloning all of those out or smoothing them over then you take the truth out of it and the kind of believability out of it. (from On Landscape interview with Jack Dykinga)

 

Alfredo Cunha

Photography is like breathing.  I can't stop taking photographs, I can't stop publishing.

Black and white has always been my language.  During my various attempts at polychrome photography, I realized that color distracts me from what is essential, and introduces unnecessary noise.  For me, what matters most is the form, rather than the colors.

I dream in color, unfortunately.

 

Henri Dauman

The contact sheets are the notes, just like a writer takes notes.  I take notes with my camera that eventually leads to the story.

 

Miles Davis

Sometimes it takes a long time to learn how to play like yourself.

 

Roger Deakins

I don’t take many photographs. It has to be something that grabs me and then obviously you have to able to catch that moment. There are a lot of things that grab your attention, but you can still miss the shot!

Digital has a larger palate than I can get with film.

 

Claude Debussy

Music is the space between the notes.

 

Edgar Degas

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

 

George DeWolfe

The authentic portrayal of presence produces a masterpiece.

 

Robert Doisneau

(from the documentary The B-Side)

If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time.

Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly.

 

Elsa Dorfman

When the minute comes to taking a picture I'm not thinking of that at all.  It's sort of like a reservoir that's in me that's operating, but I'm not thinking about it when I actually have the camera in my hands.  I'm really guided by my unconscious.  Sounds sort of mystical but I think I take my best pictures when my head isn't clouded with anything.

[Elsa, do you think the camera tells the truth?]  Absolutely not... That's what I love about it.  It's not real at all.

 

David von Drehle

On social media, the photograph has become a kind of existential statement: I am here!  Can you see me?  Power has shifted from the photographer to the viewer, who has an almost infinite number of images to choose from.  [I would add that power has shifted from the editor to the photographer to the viewer. -TF]

 

Frederick Douglas

The cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died.

 

David DuChemin

I have hundreds of thousands of images on my hard drives.  They are my sketches.  They are my work that gets me to the strong stuff.  

If you take less of the bad stuff, that is only going to push you to take fewer risks and to, end the end, make work that is less like you and more like everyone else.

 

Giles Duly

The photographs that really haunt me are the ones that nobody sees, the ones that for whatever reason don’t make the edit, don’t get published. Then you feel like you’ve let those people down, because they’ve entrusted you to take their photograph and it ends up in a folder somewhere.

People ask: can you change the world with your photographs and I would say, no, but maybe we can inspire the people who do.

There is no truth in photography. It’s all our interpretation. If you stick me in a room and I look in one direction and take a picture, it’s different from what’s behind me. So in a way, black and white is saying it’s not true. It’s saying, this is an artistic statement of it. When I see a lot of colour photographs of conflicts it’s saying: “This is exactly the reality.” But it’s not. A photograph is still a fake thing. It’s one second I’ve taken out of the whole day; my version of reality. Black and white for me is honest, it’s saying, this is obviously not reality.

I think we have to accept that there is no such thing as truth in photography, and that might sound strange coming from a documentary photographer.  But I don't think there is truth.  If I walk into a room, as soon as I point my camera in one direction and take a photograph, I've already put my signature on that because I've stopped taking the rest of the room.  I've made a decision.  You don't know the person I'm photographing.  Is somebody pointing a gun at them?  You don't know the context or the time of day.  You don't know anything, so how can you say that is true?  But what I do believe in is honesty in photography.  And the honesty comes from believing somebody is there to try and help you understand the story.  Somebody is trying to tell the story of the person in the image.  That can be honesty, but I think we should get rid of the notion that there is such a thing as truth.

 

Stephen Dupont

Photography is a gift.  You don't take photographs.  You're given them.

 

Jack Dykinga

From an online interview with Tim Parking and Joe Cornish of On Landscape magazine:

The only way you're going to succeed is to perfect your own vision, maintain the highest level of quality and maintain your integrity.

To me the 4x5 [camera] is like Zen.

When you're younger, any art form tends to be about you, and therefore it's immature.  Once you go down the road of being dishonest you spend the rest of your life fighting to be recognized as honest again.  

It used to be a real craft to produce a technically good photograph.

With digital photography there are so many amazing things you can do that sometimes it's difficult to resist them.

One of my big objections [of digital manipulation] is, going back to youth and sophomoric photography, when the photography becomes more about you than the place, to me that's a huge problem.  Tell the truth and honor the place.  When you do it in such a gimmicky way that it's about the photographer, I sort of question it.

If you keep it about documenting a place, there are still ways to do it.  Just look for the intricate design or deal with the negative space in the composition and make a completely impressionistic photograph.  It's always going to be your vision.

 

George Eastman

Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.

 

Albert Einstein

The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Life is like a bicycle.  To keep your balance you must keep moving forward.

The search for truth is more precious than its posession.

 

Alfred Eisenstaedt

The world we live in is a succession of fleeting moments, any one of which might say something significant.

Every professional should remain always in his or her heart an amateur.

 

Bill Eppridge

I think what makes a picture is a moment that is completely spontaneous and natural and unaffected by the photographer.

About the photograph of Robert Kennedy as he lie dying, his head cradled by Juan Romero, Eppridge said, "At a moment like that you stop being a photojournalist and you become a historian."

 

Mitch Epstein

A new camera scrapes off the aesthetic assumptions that inevitably build up over time in an artist's mind and risks calcifying his approach and the resulting work.  It isn't so much the new technical steps you must learn that revitalize your approach - though feeling like an idiot before a new machine does add a kind of irritating zest to your day.  It is the new frame that obliges you to give a harder, fresher look at things.

 

Elliott Erwitt

All the technique in the world doesn’t compensate for the inability to notice.

It's not the camera that takes the picture, it's the photographer.  You can take a picture with anything.

If it hasn’t been photographed it doesn’t really exist.

It’s about time we started to take photography seriously and treat it as a hobby.

You don't need to know much in order to be a photographer; what you need to do is simply to look.

Color is descriptive.  Black and white is interpretive.

It’s about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception.  You can find pictures anywhere.  It’s simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them.  You just have to care about what’s around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy.

It’s about time we started to take photography seriously and treat it as a hobby.

I’ll always be an amateur photographer.

I’m not a serious photographer like many of my contemporaries. That is to say, I am serious about not being serious.

Photography is pretty simple stuff. You just react to what you see, and take many, many pictures.

I have a strong attraction to the American South. People there have this marvelous exterior—wonderful manners, warm friendliness— until you touch on things you’re not supposed to touch on. Then you see the hardness beneath the mask of nice manners.

 

From Peter Fetterman interview:

The things that now seem to have value in galleries are the pictures that I took for my own interest, my own amusement, my own hobby you might say.

The gold standard in photography as far as I'm concerned is Henri Cartier-Bresson.  He is my inspiration, you might say.

I have a general interest in photography, as long as it has something to do with the human comedy you might say.  I particularly dislike conceptual photography, which seems to be on the current menu.  But I don't mind people doing it, I think it's ok.  It's just I have a narrow interest in other kinds of photography.

I see pictures when I don't have a camera.  I think those are my best pictures.

A visual sense is something you have or you don't. 

I suggest that people interested in photography find a niche, and explore that niche with relevant work.  And my wish is that it would be in black and white, relevant to the time, and printed by the photography, not digitally but in the darkroom.  I think work that's done from the beginning until the final print should be something that a photographer does or knows how to do.  And is enough of a craftsman to do it.  One of the problems with photography these days in the ease to accomplish anything.  I think things should be a little bit challenging and I think if it does, it has a future.

To me, photography is an art of observation.  It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.

I think that if you explain pictures it's like explaining jokes.  A picture has more than content, it has also a position, a style and so forth, so if you get something out of it, it's good enough.  If you get something beyond that, it's even better.

From Personal Exposures:

You don't have to fight your camera, or even reason with it.  You just get behind it, point it,... and always remember to use a long lens at sunset.

I observe, I try to entertain, but above all I want pictures that are emotional.

There's a profound difference between the simple non-reflex, direct viewing camera (such as a range-finder Leica) and a single-lens reflex.  With a reflex, you tend to make the picture in the camera; with the other, you have to see the picture and then put a frame around it. 

Photography is the moment, a synthesis of a situation, an instant when it all comes together.  That's the elusive ideal.

The very good pictures can happen anytime and anywhere.

As a free-lancer, you work twice as hard, because when you're not working you're worrying about when the next job is coming, and looking for it.

Photography is a craft. Anyone can learn a craft with normal intelligence and application. To take it beyond the craft is something else. That’s when magic comes in. And I don’t know that there’s any explanation for that.

 

Walker Evans

I do regard photography as an extremely difficult act.  I believe the achievement of a work that is evocative and mysterious, and at the same time realistic, is a great one and rare one.  And perhaps, sometimes, almost an accident.  

It's akin to hunting, photography is.  In the same way that you're using a machine and you're actually shooting something and you're shooting to kill.  You get the picture you want, that's a kill.  That's a bull's eye.

In one way the depression was good for artists, because there wasn't any commercial work to do.  I was innocent about government, about Washington, but I found that I could get a job there.  I did it so carelessly, I just photographed everything that attracted me at the time.  I rather unconsciously recorded that period.  The work piled up and the sum of it now is looked at as a record that I wasn't even thinking of making.

The work produced in the depression looks like social protest.  It wasn't intended to be.  It wasn't to be propaganda in support of any cause.  I don't think I had the purpose of improving the world.

 

Harold Feinstein

If your jaw drops, take the picture.

 

Peter Fetterman

A great photo to me, is one that changes me.  I'm one person before I see it, and I'm another person afterwards.

 

Larry Fink

If you don't take a chance you don't get a chance.

 

David Fokos

I’ve been photographing for 30 years and I have 60 photographs in my portfolio.

Photography is not about the equipment, so anything you can do to minimize the amount of time you spend thinking about it and fiddling with it, the better. For example, I use only one lens. If I had more than one lens I would have to stop to choose which one to use – I would be thinking about the equipment. When you have too many choices it’s possible to be paralyzed by indecision. Ironically, giving up choice actually gives me more freedom.

Choose one subject and explore it deeply.

 

Martine Franck

It is important for me to try and catch the person when they are listening or when they are in a pensive mood or have forgotten my presence. I rarely ask a person to pose for me as I prefer they reveal themselves as they wish. For me the eyes and the hands are most important and when possible I try to use natural light.

 

Robert Frank

Black and white are the colors of photography.  To me, they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.

 

Stuart Franklin from The Documentary Impulse

Photographs form part of a complex surfacing of knowledge that inspires politicians, diplomats and cultural luminaries to lead action.

While photographers in the field may take a view about what is happening somewhere in the world, that view may become radically altered when editors assembling the material in London, New York or Paris wish to paint their own picture of events.

The only clear space where documentary photographers have felt free to set out their own stories  - as authors - is in making photobooks, which is why photobooks have become, over time, the heart and soul of documentary practice.

 

Gianni Berengo Gardin

I believe in the ‘decisive moment’, but I don’t think it exists in the situation that is being photographed. It’s you, as the photographer, who decides when it is the decisive moment. And that moment depends on each individual’s point of view. Everything depends on the photographer, because after all it is their reality that they choose to interpret and show to other people. (Gardin was a great admirer of H C-B)

I see myself more as an artisan. I don’t feel like an artist. I’m a photographer; I document my time and the things I see around me.

My personal opinion is that photography should be exclusively about communication rather than art.

Humans are at the centre of everything. I realised that when I was photographing factory workers on the production line in the 1960s. I did it to tell their story, but underneath it all was a basic need to defend their dignity. That’s what really interests me. When Carla Cerati and I took some photos inside psychiatric hospitals, I learned how mental illness can humiliate people and rob them of their dignity.

I find digital to be too perfect if that’s possible. It’s not something I’m looking for in my photographs. I believe that film is still more flexible and, crucially, it generates a negative – something tangible that can be archived and will stand the test of time.

In today’s world, I may seem like I’m anti-digital, but it’s not something I’m against per se; it’s more some of the bad habits that digital photography has created, like excessive and disproportionate reliance on post-production. So many people take photos casually or half-heartedly because they know than always touch them up on Photoshop. I believe a photo should be created immediately, right from the moment you look through the lens.

I love telling a story – it’s something Koudelka taught me. He and Salgado are great friends of mine, and while he taught me that a photo should always have a story to tell, Salgado taught me that content should go hand in hand with form.

If you cut me open, I would bleed black and white.

My artistic eye is black and white.  I'm used to seeing and visualizing in black and white and have only one way of taking pictures.

Great images do not need a commentary or a context to elucidate them. As a matter of fact, it is the greatness of the images themselves that gives a meaning to the context.

 

Helmut Gernsheim

Neither camera, nor lens, nor film determine the quality of pictures; it is the visual perception of the man behind the mechanism which brings them to life.  Art contains the allied ideas of making and begetting, of being master of one's craft and able to create.  Without these properties no art exists and no photographic art can come into being. (1942)

 

Andy Gibbs

We have this vision of what Nature should be, and people are producing those images, but it's not like that at all.  As time goes on and more of us are getting disconnected from the natural world, we have this false sense of what nature is and I don't think we're doing her any favors at all. (on a podcast regarding extreme post-processing of landscape images)

 

Ralph Gibson

Every image has to be part of an ongoing project.  Otherwise, you don't have a body of work, you just have a box of photographs.

A visual signature is a combination of a number of intensely personal ingredients, which takes some time for the photographer to understand.  What is it we are trying to express?  If you want to be a landscape photographer you are assuming a role in the oldest history of photography in American art, and you are making variations on a previously announced theme.  This is what landscape photography is.  But the photographers we admire most intensely are the ones who have kicked open a door and announced their own personal theme, as opposed to making variations on previously announced themes.

I see the Leica as my Stradivarius.  I will never get to the end of the capability of this instrument.  Deciding in 1961 that the Leica was going to be my camera for the rest of my career was one of the best decisions I ever made.  I continue to learn new moves with the camera.  

Focal length is the grammar of photography.  It's how we determine what we want to say, and how it's going to look once we say it.

Once you have something you want to say, you will find a way to say it.

Reality is to photography, what melody is to music.  You can take away melody and you just have sound.  You can take reality away, and it might be a photograph, but reality is one of the most defining characteristics of the medium. 

I wanted to make a kind of photograph that was reflecting my own personal concerns, and in pursuit of a kind of imagery that fulfill my requirements I found myself moving closer to the subject.  A big aspect of the way I would see things had to do with what is not in the frame as much as what is in the frame.

Visual tension is something I strive for in all my compositions.  

I really don't like wide-angle lenses because they show don't do anything except show everything, with no particular reference.  It's the ideal modernist idea of composition.

Perhaps I have a visual signature, which means that whatever lens or medium I am using my point of view comes through, my way of seeing.  My need to understand what I'm looking at is essentially what I'm photographing.  

Ambivalence is my old friend, because if I'm not ambivalent I'm repeating myself.  And if I'm repeating myself it means I know what I'm doing.  And I believe that any artist who knows what he or she is doing is a fraud.

I'm not the music, I'm the radio.  I'm something through which photography speaks.  I just get to share in the making of these photographs.

It's always been the photograph that educates me.  I don't inform the photograph; the photograph informs the photographer.

The photograph is better than the photographer.

Photography is like electricity.  We know how to use it, but we don't know what it is.

Art is always discussed in conventional terms of form and content.  Content is what it says, form is what supports it.  If you can see what it says, the form was sufficient enough to hold it... You cannot have content without form.

The less you know about Photoshop, the better, because the better you get at Photoshop, the more it leads you to that same conclusion that you see in all those galleries with the big, razor sharp pictures of canyons.  Those are people who are really good at Photoshop.  Whatever you do, don't get good at Photoshop because you'll wind up at that same place.  The dogmatic aspect of it is that it sends you to its preferred conclusion.

From Darkroom

Rather than take a photograph to document an event, I try to make a statement that happens to be, among other things, a photograph.

Quite often [when photographing], because of the speed of the shutter, the speed of the film, etc., I will have momentary peaks of awareness.  Sometimes it is difficult to raise my perceptions to where they were in that fraction of a second.  Darkroom work forces me to do so.  In this way, I learn many things about how I see.  I've learned a great deal about how I perceive things from my time in the darkroom.

You have to incorporate your life into the picture.

When I print, I think of the will of the negative and how I should respond to it.

While the image is fixed, the light can be manipulated.

I could never give anybody else my negatives to print, because they wouldn't make the same decisions.

Making a tremendous effort in the darkroom both helps to perfect one's vision and to extract the maximum content from a given negative.

It is easier to go around making photographs than it is to print and understand them.  Photographers who do their own darkroom work come to understand certain things about the nature of the medium.

I prefer to work with the Leica.  I have enjoyed relating to it for many years.  I like the way the image looks through the viewfinder, and I'm familiar with the translation.  The picture comes out the way I saw it, which is the big thing in photography, to get what you see, however at the moment the camera shutter clicks there is a tremendous unknown.

I like to think of my photographs as being their own source of light.  I want them to radiate light, not necessarily reflect it.

If you're working as an artist you need those endorphins that, making a strong work provides.  One of the things that drives me to continually work is to put a new picture up on my studio wall on a regular basis.  I need to see myself reflected in those works.

Great artists are able to access their creative source on a regular basis.

From Self Exposure

I believe that youthful passion and innocence characterize the first mature works of a young artist, but the real challenge is to remain fresh and curious throughout one's entire career.

Destined for perpetual motion, the eye mature through decades of life, and searches ever more inward.  With this introspection comes a greater understanding of reality, and from purity of sight, one learns clarity of thought.

I am only as good as my next photograph.

A photograph is not the object itself, rather the sensation it produces.

 

Ashley Gilbertson

Be in the moment.

Photography isn't so much a job as much as a life.

Photography can turn every day into an adventure.

 

Bruce Gilden

You have to find out who you are, and then go forward with that.

If you photograph yourself you're on the right track.

If you just starting out, young or old, and you love it, then do it.  Don't let anyone derail you from doing it.

 

Robert E. Gilka

The photographer must make an image unpredictable, exciting, something more than even a seasoned editor expects.

For him [Sam Abell] the photograph is made in the mind.  The camera, the lens, and the film are to be used in unadulterated form.

The camera has an insatiable appetite for creativity.

 

Vincent van Gogh

A feeling for things in themselves is much more important than a sense of the pictorial.

Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation.  By persistent I mean in the first place continued labour, but also not abandoning your approach because of what someone else says.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

 

Andy Gotts

I do not trust myself with editing as Photoshop can not only make a bad shot look good... it can make a good shot look bad!

I try to capture the essence of what makes people ‘them’, not try to make them look beautiful or iconic.

 

Ted Grant

When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes.  But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls.

 

Marco Grob

The human face seems to me like a book, it's pages engraved over the time in the form of marks, scars, wrinkles and skin.  The face is our first and most direct form of communication.  It shows how we have lived our life, whether in happiness or despair, conveys our present, and even more so our past.  Still, the face is, and always will be, a mystery.    

My strategy to getting a good portrait is to be close and fast.  The attention span for most people is often very short.  For some it is two minutes, for others ten.  That's it.  It seems to me it's almost like a candle flame exposed to wind, which we have to protect from being extinguished.  It ultimately will go out.  We have to be prepared, so that when someone has something to give we are ready to take it.

People's fear and defense is usually an arms length away to someone else.  When I photograph, I ususally choose a short lens instead of a long one, and willingly enter this sphere, so close that I almost can hear them breathe.  We have an idea of who we are and who we want to be.  And the, there's reality.  Often, the sheer closeness reveals exactly that - the reality.  

The process of reduction is in my eyes one of the most important steps in any creative work.  You have to learn to kill your own darlings.  (discussing the editing process)

I truly believe that from the moment you carry a camera, you carry a responsibility. There are so many stories out there to be told, locally or globally, and a camera is an extremely powerful weapon.

Photography is very incomplete. Photography itself is a form of edit. You decide what is important based on a single moment.

It is so important for my craft to have something tangible at the end of the day, something you can touch, smell, and feel. These days, everyone is a superstar on the internet, not that many people print their artwork, which is a shame because you see things in print that you cannot on a screen.

 

René Groebli

Being by nature romantic, I take pictures of moods and emotions, reinforcing them, if necessary, through manipulation in the darkroom.

 

Ernst Haas

You are what you see.

The limitations of your photography are in yourself.

The best pictures differentiate themselves by nuances, a tiny relationship – either a harmony or a disharmony – that creates a picture.

There is only you and your camera.  The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.

You don't take pictures; the good ones happen to you.

A picture is the expression of an impression.  If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?

We can write the new chapters in a visual language whose prose and poetry will need no translation.

Living in a time of the increasing struggle of the mechanization of man, photography has become another example of this paradoxical problem of how to humanize, how to overcome a machine on which we are thoroughly dependent. the camera.

Bored with obvious reality, I find my fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view. Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself–less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive; less prose, more poetry. (Magnum website).

I really think that the strength of photography lies in that it is undefinable. That means that you go into a state almost like a kind of sleep.  You become things, you become an atmosphere.  Which means you can put this feeling into a picture.  And that I would call dreaming with open eyes.

I would shoot in color whenever I felt pure joy.

As children we learn everything.  We learn to walk, we learn to read, we learn to write, but we really never learn to see, to be aware of our surrounding realty.  To observe with delight.

Beware of direct inspiration. It leads too quickly to repetitions of what inspired you.

You can see when you dream, which is a kind of unaware, unconscious vision.  But you can also dream while you see with open eyes.

Cultivate this sense of seeing.  Look around, and you will find many worlds to discover, everywhere.

I want to be remembered more by a total vision than a few single pictures.

Style has no formula, but it has a secret key.  It is the extension of your personality.

Don't ever try to arrive.  Arrival is the death of inspiration.

I still do not understand all these problematic discussions about color versus black and white. I love both, but they do speak a different language within the same frame. Both are fascinating.

Color does not mean black and white plus color. Nor is black and white just a picture without color. Each needs a different awareness in seeing and, because of this, a different discipline. The decisive moments in black and white and color are not identical.

There are three different factors which have to be realized and balanced: form, content, and color. The last does not always benefit the composition. It can even go against it, in which case it has to be overcome. To translate a world of color into black and white is much easier than to overcome the color, which so often runs contrary to its subject matter. There are black and white snobs, as well as color snobs. Because of their inability to use both well, they act on the defensive and create camps. We should never judge a photographer by what film he uses – only by how he uses it.

I also still believe that the normal development of a photographer should go from black and white to color. One should be able to do both well, in the same way as painters still learn to draw as well as to paint.

Personally, I don’t even believe so much in the value of a single picture anymore. I don’t really photograph for the wall. To compete with the painter is not really our destiny; we are on the way to speaking our very own language. With it we will have to create our own literature. you will have to decide for yourself what kind of works you want to create. Reports of facts, essays, poems—do you want to speak or to sing?

It is the photograph’s frame that keeps the fluid border between what we want and don’t want; it also keeps the balance between values that we think we have found. We select and change through the frame with one eye, which really means that we identify ourselves with the lens. We search with both eyes, but we work and correct on what we have found with one eye.

Ask yourself if you would do it [your art] if nobody would ever see it, if you would never be compensated for it, if nobody ever wanted it. If you come to a clear “yes,” in spite of it, then go ahead and don’t doubt it anymore.

For me, photography became a language with which I have learned to write both prose and poetry.  Important is the end result of your work: the opus.  Therefore, I want to be remembered much more by a total vision than a few perfect single pictures.

Photography is a bridge between science and art.  It brings to science what it needs most, the artistic sense, and to art the proof that nothing can be imagined which cannot be matched in the counterpoints of nature.

Every one of us wants to take beautiful, striking, extraordinary pictures.  Every one of us is struggling with his own style.

I am not interested in shooting new things.  I am interested to see things new.

Every face has a secret, and a good photographer is in search of it. (from Afterword in New York in Color)

 

 

Phillippe Halsman

It can't be done by pushing the person into position or arranging his head at a certain angle. It must be accomplished by provoking the victim, amusing him with jokes, lulling him with silence, or asking impertinent questions which his best friend would be afraid to voice. [regarding revealing the sitter's character for a portrait]

 

Ted Hammond

For environmental portraits, choose your background first, and avoid vertical lines coming out of the subject's head.

 

Charles Harbutt

A photograph is a collision between a person with a camera and reality. The photograph is typically as interesting as the collision is.

This has always struck me as somewhat amazing: That magic little box enables one to leave, in a small way and for a short while, one’s own time and space and to occupy, maybe only superficially, another time and space: a then and there that really existed as well as a here and now. Photographs are both real images and imaged realities.

Photography is the result of a balancing act of film, lens, shutter, and light bouncing off something. The photographic image derives directly from, in fact is caused by, whatever objects are in front of the lens. But by this very act, a lens sometimes distorts the lines of the object. And even without this distortion, the lens makes an image which has a separate physical reality from the real object which caused it. So, at the same time, a photograph is an experience in and of itself and can preserve some aspects of the direct perception of reality and in fact of reality itself. Photography is the only two-dimensional visual medium that simultaneously has this inherent relationship between thing made and thing in reality, and its uniqueness springs from the tension between image and reality.

Photography is a reality high. It comes from that impulse which makes one turn and say: “Hey, did you see that?” On one level, it is the photographer’s experience of reality speaking directly to his viewer’s experience of reality. Art is the imagination of the artist speaking directly to the viewer’s imagination.

Photography is not art. Atget had the right idea when he refused to exhibit his photographs in an art gallery. He had a little sign on his door saying, “Documents pour artistes.” Although photography freed painting from its need to depict reality and so unleashed art’s century-long exploration of itself, photographers adopted the standards and strictures of the French Academy. When that style became passé, photographers began their pell-mell, helter-skelter, Keystone Kops chase of artists down through art history: through romanticism, impressionism, dadaism, futurism, abstractionism, pop, op and now into conceptualism. We’ve had shows of photography as printmaking and as sculpture, as eggs and as tacos. Unfortunately, the “art” photographers are suspiciously behind the painters by a few years. This “me-too” approach is not only undignified, not only visually and morally bankrupt, but antiphotographic in a very deep way.

Photographs come from that moment in the process of cognition before the mind has analyzed meaning or the eyes design and at which the experience and the person experiencing are fully, intuitively, existentially there.

The moment of creation in photography is similar to a state of consciousness very much sought after in yoga. Or Gestalt therapy. It is to be at the exact center of one’s being, where an awareness of everything going on inside oneself — in fantasy, memory, emotions and thought — is balanced by sensitivity to what is happening outside the person and what it means and feels and is. If a photographer can become sufficiently aware of this continuum and have the energy to push a shutter when inside and outside click together, that camera might produce some very fine photographs indeed.

Photography is a unique visual language that cannot be expressed in words.  As a matter of fact, if it can be expressed in words, then it probably isn't worth photographing.

Great photographs exist not so much where image and reality meet and balance, but in the electric tension between real and unreal.

I don't take photographs, photographs take me.

 

Misan Harriman

Most of photography has very little to do with technical capability and everything to do with understanding what your voice can and should be.

Our ancestors are whispering to use every time we press the shutter.  It is so much more than making something that looks good after some Photoshop and Lightroom.  The history of who you are, who your parents were, what has made you, what has forged you into the person you are today has to come through in your image.  It has to.

I see light as a human being, as a person that I am forever courting, taking this person to dinner.  It's a sort of celestial being that floats through life.  I see light as a woman with ungodly powers, that we should yield at a glance, and at a glance this woman of lights can start or end a war.  As image makers we hope she gazes upon us, even momentarily, so that we can see the fidelity that light brings to all of us.

The universe has a way of listening to you when you're truthful.

I shoot in black and white because there are nuances between the highlights and the shadows that are universes in themselves.

You can't defend yourself against a good black and white image.  It gets into the parts of yourself that you threw the key away a long, long time ago.

 

David Alan Harvey

Don't shoot what it looks like.  Shoot what it feels like.

Squeeze the lemon, squeeze the lemon, until there's no more juice.  And then, there's always another drop.

One camera, one lens, one film.  You really have to put yourself in a position of danger to be creative.

The late, great Eddie Adams said, "It's never too late to be the photographer you could have been."

 

Victor Hasselblad

I certainly don't think we will earn much money on this, but at least it will allow us to take pictures for free.

A photo should not be complicated; it should reflect reality.

 

Ernest Hemmingway

Write the truest sentence you know.

 

William Henry

The eyes shout what the lips fear to say.

 

Tim Hetherington

As anyone who has experienced it will know, war is many contradictory things. There is brutality and heroism, comedy and tragedy, friendship, hate, love and boredom. War is absurd yet fundamental, despicable yet beguiling, unfair yet with its own strange logic. Rarely are people 'back home' exposed to these contradictions — society tends only to highlight those qualities it needs, to construct its own particular narrative.

 

Paul Hill

I can understand the satisfaction of producing these wonderful photographs of waterfalls and streams etc., but It’s a bit like painting by numbers. There’s nothing essentially wrong with that, but what you tend to get is another lot of the same pictures. What you really need, to use a cliched photographic word, is exposure to other ideas.

Photo enthusiasts are always being told to be creative but most people seem to think that means photoshop.

What you point your camera at is, of course, crucial but it is only the starting point on what could be a journey of self discovery, rather than an exercise in making decorative clichés.

The problem with a lot of conceptual work is that you have to have a certain education, not only to produce it, but also to understand it.  Many times the idea may have been great, but the visual representation of that idea is not very engaging.

 

Lewis Hine

While photographs may not lie, liars can photograph.

Photography can light-up darkness and expose ignorance.

Photography is an empathy towards the world.

 

Fan Ho

There must be humanity in art.  If you feel nothing when you click the shutter you give the viewer nothing to respond to, and you have nothing to convey.

I used the lens to write, instead of a pen.  It changed my whole life.

I will not click the shutter if it does not touch my heart.

Don't throw away your old negatives.  You may find some treasure from your past.  When you are older your philosophy of life may change.  You may change your viewpoint.  You may change your understanding of the world.

Photography is my passion; I enjoy playing with it.

Sometimes I push reality a certain distance and leave the viewers some space for imagination.

Light is the soul of a photograph.

 

Denis Hocking

For me, it is an irrelevant question and a fruitless exercise to try and attach a label to the type of photography I do.  The important question is: "What type of person am I?"  

 

Thomas Hoepker

You are lucky if you take one, maybe two good pictures in a year.

I am not an artist.  I am an image maker.

 

Earlie Hudnall, Jr.

I seldom ask someone to pose.  I just try to take the situation that's presented to me.  Each day that I wake up, I'm just trying to photograph life as I see it.  You have to walk around and respect what is about to happen in front of the camera.  It's a sacred moment.

 

David Hurn

A photograph is capable of showing something that is iconic, so much so that the pictures stands as a kind of symbol of more than just the thing that you are photographing.

 

Mick Jagger

You can't have a light without a little shadow.

 

Brooks Jensen (from his extensive writings and podcasts)

Precision in the craft is simply not the same challenge that fueled so much of my early efforts in photography.  A shift in priorities might be useful.  Perhaps the great challenge in photography today is not the precision required to make a great print, but rather the precision required to make a meaningful one.

If the purpose of artwork is to connect with other people then fine art photography is about understanding people.

 

Dewitt Jones

I’ve photographed all my life with everything from a 4x5 camera to an iPhone. This is what I’ve learned: The experience is always more important than the photograph. It’s the experience that exposes our soul; that changes our vision.  It’s our vision, not the camera, that makes the image extraordinary. 

 

Frida Kahlo

I paint flowers so they will not die.

 

Nadav Kander

When one makes a portrait, it's totally original to the two people involved.  So I stand there with my 50 or so years of background that has made me the person I am.  And the person who I ask to be in the photograph stands there with all their life's experience.  And when we come together, how we communicate, how I light, all the decisions we make together to make that photograph are incredibly important and will never be matched again.  And then enter the third person, the viewer, who recognizes something in themselves.  It's the viewer who becomes the author of the work.

We always think of photography as the capturing of an event.  But it's not only that.  It's much, much more.

I'm quite scared of really finding out how I work.

I think there is a lot of correspondence and communication between two human beings that goes on without one's mouth moving, and that's in body language and in brain waves.  I think we really connect, and it's often quite a heightened moment for the sitter because they have somebody quite near them with a camera pointing at them, and I think in those heightened moments you communicate even better.  That's what I trust.  That's the moment that a picture becomes a portrait.

I always think about the viewer even more than I do the sitter.  

How I work on a computer now is very similar to how I worked in the darkroom, where I try things and see how I respond to them, make changes and changes.  The only difference to me is that you can be far more accurate on the computer.  I really see it as quite smooth and very similar.  What is different is the taking of the photograph.  Photographing on film is much more of a question.  With film you tend to stay nervous longer and never be sure what you have, so you try things you would never try with digital.  With digital you see what you have on the screen, so you lose that edge of nervousness.  I don't think I've ever produced as well when the nervousness has left me.

 

Yousuf Karsh

The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.

The trouble with photographing beautiful women is that you never get into the dark room until after they’re gone.

 

Andreas Kaufman

Photoshop is where photography ends.

As a photographer, we always come back to the M.

When you have a Leica M in your hand you are connecting with the history of photography.  That can be a burden, but on the other hand it's not a burden.  You try to capture the moment the way you'd like to capture the moment.

 

Michael Kenna

Nothing is ever the same twice because everything is always gone forever, and yet each moment has infinite photographic possibilities.  

Sometimes the most interesting visual phenomena occur when you least expect them.

Confining myself to one particular area or one particular time period is, I think, self-limiting.

Art is essentially indefinable.  Who is to say that one image is better than another?

We reflect our inner being while documenting what we might consider to be an exterior scene.

The presence of absence is an integral aspect of my work.

Essentially, I become a hunter of images and try to extract simplicity from complication.

I find that I work best when there are no time limits, nobody watching or asking questions, no phone calls or emails to answer.

When I go to a location I don't know if I will be there for five minutes or five days.

Inspiration depends on many factors including light, atmosphere and a personal response.

Being creative often means following a lead, working on half chances, fragmented thoughts, coming up to dead ends and re-tracking.

Being creative implies an attempt to photograph in ways that might seem ordinary at the time but which may turn out to be extraordinary later.

Being creative also demands an openness to just wait and listen, and pay attention to what comes from both within and without.

The usual combination of hard work and good luck, combined with a bit of talent, sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.

I enjoy slowly setting up, considering, observing and thinking before I photography.  I love the long exposures where I wait and contemplate.

I am satisfied with always being unsatisfied while I photography, as I don't yet know the results.  This makes me experiment and explore even more.  I am very happy to wait to see the results weeks or months later.  After all these years, the negatives never fail to surprise me.

My images are quite intimate. They are not there to impress or awe people. They don’t describe details.

I find B & W to be more malleable and mysterious than color; it is more an interpretation of reality than a reflection of reality. I am not interested in describing and copying what I see. I am interested in a collaboration with the subject matter. Color for me is too specific. We see everything in color all the time. I look at color photographs and they don’t appeal to me. I also print the negatives myself in a traditional darkroom, so I can work with an image when it’s B & W. I have found the B&W medium to be an integral part of my creativity over the years.

If we strive for perfect, digitally processed images and prints, the further away we might get from our own fallibility and accident-prone humanity.

It is not necessary, or even desirable, to fill a rectangle with details.

Photography records and describes, but also interprets and invites.

From the Frames podcast (Episode 1, March 18, 2020):

One of the keys to photography generally is that we don't want to get too comfortable.

I often feel that the camera has very little to do with one's photographic journey.  

I don't think one's passion for photography has much to do with the camera.  I think it has much more to do with one's inner drive: to discover, to be curious, to be constantly investigating and exploring.  I can see using the same camera for the next 200 years and finding sufficient material to keep me motivated for many lifetimes.

Life is so amazing.  The journey is so amazing.  There are so many fantastic places to go photograph that it's difficult for me to understand a kind of lack of inspiration, a lack of drive.  I think there's so much out there.

When it comes down to the instrument you're using it has to be a part of your body almost, a part of your creative function.

I have no interest in the gadgetry as such.

I have a proclivity towards the monochromatic spectrum.  Most of the artwork I appreciate is monochromatic.  It's just a personal thing.  We see in color all the time, that's our world.  When you reduce something to black and white it means it becomes more of an interpretation, it's a little more mysterious, more calming.  For me it's more meditational.  

I prefer my work to be more of a haiku poem, with just a few elements, a lot of simplicity but a great amount of suggestion.  As opposed to an encyclopedia with huge amounts of facts and description.  That is not what I'm interested in doing.

I just find black and white allows you to use your imagination much more than color, but that's a personal thing.

You strive for perfection all the time but hopefully you never reach it.  Because if you reach perfection the image probably wouldn't be that interesting.  The reason I resist the digital revolution is that it's so easy to make things so perfect, so clean so tidy that (sigh) they kind of lose their ability to evoke a reaction, to evoke emotion.  It becomes a little antiseptic, I think.

When I'm out and I see something, I think, "This is going to be amazing; this is going to be the best photograph I've ever made," it's often predictable, somehow.  It doesn't quite translate the emotion I felt when I was photographing.  And often it's the photograph I made a little bit before or a little bit after that turns out to be more interesting than the one that I predicted would be the best one.  So, I've come to fill myself with doubt at all times when I'm photographing.  I never accept that I've got a good photograph or the best photograph or the best that I could do.  I continue to work through something to the point of exhaustion almost, because I always realize the best photograph may be around the corner.

It's usually at the times of greatest crisis that you have the greatest breakthroughs.  You just have to work through it.

I try not to make conscious decisions about what I am looking for. I don’t make elaborate preparation before I go to a location.  Essentially, I walk, explore, discover and photograph.

I often think of my work as visual Haiku.  It is an attempt to evoke and suggest through as few elements as possible, rather than to describe with tremendous detail.

 

Kenzo Awa

One shot, one life.

For this is what the art of archery means: a profound and far-reaching contest of the archer with himself.

 

André Kertész

Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph.

In my own work I am an amateur, and I intend to remain one.

Events and mood are more important than good light and the happening is what is important.

Of course a picture can lie, but only if you are not honest with yourself.

I photograph the everyday, what might have seemed trivial before it was given new life by a new gaze.

I love to snap whatever deserves to be photographed, the world therefore, even in its glimpses of humble monotony

Peter, go to medical school.

You don't see the things you photograph.  You feel them.

 

Alex Killbee

Amateur photography isn't dead, it just smells funny.

It's not the photographer making the picture but the thing being photographed.  And when that thing is allowed to speak with its own voice the image comes alive.

 

Eric Kim

Every photograph we make is a self-portrait.

 

Yunghi Kim

Good journalism comes down to navigating, anticipating, and photographing moments.

This isn't about luck and it's definitely not about being in the right place at the right time - it's about calculated instinct.

It all comes down to reading human beings.  There is a lot of psychology in\volved with being a photojournalist through one's ability to predict human response.

 

Torkel Korling

The purpose is not to make a lot of pictures and select the best.  The best one is made by thinking.

 

Josef Koudelka

Sometimes when you want to say something about people, you do it better when people aren't there.

I am not a photographer.  I am a collector of my photographs.

You have to find the place where the photograph is waiting for you, and then go there as long as it takes to get it.

I am happy if people like to look at my photographs and if they get something out of them.  But I can't really influence what they get.  We all see things differently.

You can't make good photographs all your life.  You have a period when things go well, and a period when they don't.

I have never been interested in documenting reality.  I select from it only what interests me.

What matters most to me is to take photographs; to continue taking them and not to repeat myself. To go further, to go as far as I can.

I don’t pretend to be an intellectual or a philosopher. I just look.

I would like to see everything, look at everything, I want to be the view itself.

The most important thing is to enjoy taking photographs.

To be born in a country which is not free means that you appreciate freedom.  You don't think of it as something automatic, and you don't want anyone to take it from you.

I no longer need to carry with me 35 kilograms, only about 10 kilograms, and I don’t need to go through the X-ray machines which I really dislike. So the digital camera makes it easier, and also more interesting. I am 77 and I can say, Vive la Revolution! [Regarding digital cameras]

The transitional style in Czechoslovakia between reportage and essay was created in the course of the 1960s by Josef Kouldeka on the topic of the Gypsies.  That is where he was already turning away from the facticity of reportage and its non-aestheticism was manifest, in the use of the reportage method, in the move towards art and a non-documentary quality.  In other words, from description to reflection, from primary information to subjective and artistic interpretation of that information. [Anna Fárová, quoted in Returning]

 

Stanley Kubrick

The idea that a movie should be seen only once is an extension of our traditional conception of film as entertainment rather than art.

 

Dorothea Lange

When you're working well it is, first of all, a process of getting lost.  So that you live for maybe two, three hours as completely as possible a visual experience.

Beauty appears when one feels deeply.

Art is an act of total attention.

There are moments when time stands still.  You hope it will wait for you.  That fraction of a second captured on that tiny piece of sensitive film.

The subject must be something you truly love or you truly hate.

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.

When I said I am trying to get lost again I really expressed a very critical point of departure, that frame of mind you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject.  You can not do it by not being lost yourself.  I am trying to get lost again.

I believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera.

 

Jessica Lange

I've got a day job.  I just love taking photographs.  That's the only reason I do it.

I never crop; I think it's a conceit.  I always loved that Henri Cartier-Bresson showed you the whole image."

I like photographing in black and white because it defines things more, with greater precision.  Color is distracting.

It's the theatricality of the moment that interests me.  It's the light, some gesture, the context or some other special aspect that gets my attention and makes me what to take that photograph, tell that story.

I love taking photographs at night.  There are things that only happen at night and there's something about the night that makes people behave differently and the atmosphere different.

I started to carry a camera with me wherever I went. It was like an antidote to my work as an actress. When I’m acting, I always have lots of people around me, there’s always a huge crew. But, with photography, I found a wonderful way of being alone because photography is a very personal, very solitary act. It’s almost meditation and allows me to go to the other side. When I photograph, I’m the one observing, while when I’m acting, I’m the one being observed. When I realised that, I never left the house without my camera, even when I don’t have time to use it.

 

Annie Leibovitz

(From At Work)

I'm always perplexed when people say that a photograph has captured someone.  A photograph is just a tiny slice of a subject.  A piece of them in a moment.  It seems presumptuous to think you can get more than that.

When I'm asked about my work, I try to explain that there is no mystery involved.  It is work.  But things happen all the time that are unexpected, uncontrolled, unexplainable, even magical.  The work prepares you for that moment.  Suddenly the clouds roll in and the soft light you longed for appears.

 

Saul Leiter

Photography is about finding something and painting is about making something.

I happen to believe in the beauty of simple things.  I believe that the most uninteresting thing can be very interesting.

The world is full of endless things.  And there are many beautiful things.  And people have a talent for not noticing it.

A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person.

I think that mysterious things happen in familiar places.  You don't always need to run to the other side of the world.  (The vast majority of Leiter's photographs were made within a few blocks of his apartment in New York over 60 years.)

We live in a world full of expectations, and if you have the courage, you ignore the expectations.  And you can look forward to trouble.

I aspired to be unimportant.

 

Leonardo da Vinci

Learn how to see.

The first intention of the painter is to make a flat surface display a body as if modelled and separated from this plane... This accomplishment, with which the science of painting is crowned, arises from light and shade, or we may say, chiaroscuro.  

 

Sarah Elizabeth Lewis

Images force us to contend with the unspeakable. They help humanize clinical statistics, to make them comprehensible. They step into the breach.

 

Abraham Lincoln

There are no bad pictures.  That's just how your face looks sometimes.

 

Sally Mann

If you are working on a project and you are thinking it is time to put it out into the world, make sure you have already started your next body of work.  Not just started, either.  You should be well along on it.  You will know that the first project is finished when you find yourself joylessly going through the motions to eek out a few more pictures while, like a forbidden lover, the new ones call seductively to you.

 

Constantine Manos

It is easy to take good pictures, difficult to take very good pictures, and almost impossible to take great pictures.

By choosing a precise intersection between subject and time, the photographer may transform the ordinary into the extraordinary and the real into the surreal.

Grain is the brush stroke of photography.

To make good photography you have to think about what you want to do, what subject matter you want to treat, how you want to approach it, what you want your pictures to look like.

A good photograph is an idea.

Photography is suffering from the fact that it has become too easy to take a picture, rather than make a picture.

A beautiful picture is like a great poem.  If you take one word out, you destroy the poem, because it's a perfect thing.

 

Greg Marinovich

A picture should be far less about the photograph and more about the subject.

Photography is a craft.

 

Mary Ellen Mark

Digital or analogue doesn't matter; it's the pictures you make that matter.

There are so many famous photographers and great images that have come before...  The subject matter comes with its own visual legacy...  The point is, you can't let the legacy paralyze you.  You must be your own person and contribute to the legacy.  Don't worry about style and separating yourself from others shooting the same subject matter too much; the pictures will happen by shooting from your own personal point of view.  Worry more about getting a great picture.

There is nothing more extraordinary than reality.

 

Jim Marshall

Let the photograph be one you remember - not for its technique, but for its soul.  A part of your life, a part of your past to help shape your future.

 

Paul Martineau (Curator of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles)

We don't want to have negatives, we don't want to have digital files, because we don't can't decide how the object should be printed.  We believe that there are two parts to a picture, that the image is the object and it's not up to us to decide that part, or what size it should be.  Only the artist can decide that.

 

Alisa Martynova

Photography is a language.  Subject, colours, light and composition bear its semantic and grammatical value.

 

Stephen Mayes

No author would seek to identify as someone who can make marks on paper and so it is now with photographers.  With all the new tools that are available to us and with a literate audience ready to receive our work, it's time to raise our eyes beyond the craft and to define ourselves instead by what we have to say.

 

Don McCullin from his autobiography

Photography is not looking, it's feeling.  If you can't feel what you're looking at, then you're never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.

What I hoped I had captured in my pictures was an enduring image that would imprint itself on the world's memory.

If you look in newspapers today all you see is narcissism, really.

To be free and alone on the edge of an unfolding landscape is a therapeutic, possibly even a spiritual, experience.

I'm a photographer.  Period.  People call me an artist, but I'm not an artist.  I'm a photographer, and I'm very happy with that title.

Other sources:

It [photography] is a dangerous mistress, and it’s one of those love affairs that never ends, you know. It just never ends. You’re totally captive to photography once it gets a grip of you.

Black and white is not truthful, is it? I mean, we don’t live in a black-and-white world. We use black and white as a weapon because it will shout and scream at you. You won’t miss the black and white, but you could walk past a colour picture.

Photography is the truth if it's being handled by a truthful person.

If I can haunt people with my pictures I have done my job.

Photojournalism has had its day.

The word “art” – I absolutely hate it being associated with photography. Most American photographers now want to be called artists.

If you want to be a war photographer, there are plenty of social wars. There isn’t a city in England you can’t go to and find some poverty and unhappiness and tragedies.

You should not waste a single day of your life. You should be out on the streets every day.

You should not be governed by rules, which I think should be broken.

If you take a digital camera and do an autumn shot, it’s so sickly. The colours are totally false, they’re not real colours from digital cameras.

I use a camera the way I would use a toothbrush.  It's a necessity.  I need a camera to work with, but I don't work with a camera, I work with my feelings and my eyes.

The majority of the last 50 years of my life has been wasted, photographing wars.  What good have I done, showing pictures of suffering?  War is completely out of your control.  When a person is dying, injured badly or in shock, does he need you looking over him with a camera?  You're the last person he wants to see. He wants to see medical people rushing towards him, not me.

You can't go around kidding yourself that your photographs in a few papers will change the world.  They can't, and they haven't.  I despair about the human race.

Photography has given me a life.  The very least I could do was to try and articulate these stories with as much compassion and clarity as they deserve, with as loud a voice as I could muster.  Anything less would be mercenary.

Photography’s a case of keeping all the pores of the skin open as well as the eyes. A lot of photographers today think that by putting on the uniform, the fishing vest and all the Nikons that makes them a photographer. But it doesn’t. It’s not just seeing. It’s feeling.

My solace lies in recording what remains of the beautiful landscape of Somerset and its metallic dark skies, which gives this country an aged and sometimes remote feeling as if the past is struggling against the future.  The stillness of silence and sometimes my loneliness broke my imagination, but like the surrounding land, I am fighting to release the past in me.

 

Steve McCurry

If you wait, people will forget your camera and their soul will drift up into view.

The world is in color.  To me it is far more logical to photograph the world as it is.  Why would you photograph in black and white if the world is in color?  (Frames interview)  

Our work was always about the subject, about content. We photographers talk about art too, about photography as a craft, but taking pictures is above all about telling a story.

My camera is my passport.

One of the most important learning tools in photography is looking at great photography books.

If you come back at the end of the day with a couple of good pictures, that's a very good day.

 

Jimmy McIntyre

Even thick skin can’t stop you from losing a little bit of faith in humanity when you spend even a little time scrolling on Facebook.

 

Len Metcalf

Getting rid of choice makes my life easier, and my creativity stronger. (referring to using one lens)

Go early, stay late and then go back again. The harder you work in the field the more respect you will get from the people in your photos. You prove that your work is not just a hobby.

 

Sheila Metzner

It’s something I can’t stop, a photographer doesn’t retire.

 

Duane Michaels

Photographs should ask questions, not describe.

 

Joan Miro

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again.  You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.

 

Léonard Misonne

The subject is nothing, light is everything.

The sky is the key to the landscape.

 

Inge Morath

Photography is a strange phenomenon, you trust your eye and cannot help but bare your soul.

 

Abelardo Morell

If you don't play, you get dull.

I look at photography books all day long when I'm not shooting.

I'm 74 years old and I feel like I'm at the height of work right now.

There's a certain braveness that comes with doing work for a long time.

I do count on reality a lot, but reality can be so many things.

 

Daido Moriyama

Clarity is not what photography is about.

I don't think of my photos as a series.  Rather, I think of the photographs that I have taken from my youth to the present as one series.

 

Karen Mullarkey From an interview with Ken Jerecke

The problem with digital now is that young photographers erase their mistakes.  I want to see the mistakes as well as the successes.

I used to gallop horses, bareback when I was younger.  When it went right you and the horse were one.  That's the same thing with photographers.  When you and your camera are one, and you're connected into your third eye, that's when the magic happens.

Really good photographers work every day.  Where's that next picture?  That's what they want to know.  Great photographers are like children.  They're always curious.  They don't want to grow up, on a certain level.  They want to keep that childlike curiosity.

The best thing about photographers is the good ones never grow up.  For the best shooters, each assignment or moment is as exciting as the first one.

That's what is missing today because the beginners are starting out on digital.  You're fucked on digital.  I hate it.  They do center focus because that's what the fucking camera does.  Pardon me.  Then they get to erase their mistakes, which means they've learned nothing.

You don't learn from your successes.  You learn from your errors because you don't want to do them again.

All these kids who are constantly looking at the back of the camera have probably just missed the moment.

 

Carl Mydans

Behind the camera there must be a man's eye, and a soul.

The direction of a war photographer's lens reveals what he is thinking – his censored negatives, what he is trying to tell the world. (US Camera Annual circa 1941)

 

James Nachtwey

from Inferno

A photograph can enter the mind and reach the heart with the power of immediacy.  It affects that part of the psyche where meaning is less dependent upon words and makes an impact more visceral, more elemental, closer to raw experience.

What allows me to overcome the emotional obstacles inherent in my work is the belief that when people are confronted with images that evoke compassion, they will continue to respond, no matter how exhausted, angry or frustrated they may be.

from the documentary War Photographer

Why photograph war?  Is it possible to put an end to a form of human behavior which has existed throughout history by means of photography?  Portions of that notion seem ridiculously out of balance, yet that very idea has motivated me.  For me, the strength of photography lies in its ability to evoke a sense of humanity.  If war is an attempt to negate humanity then photography can be perceived as the opposite of war.  And if it's used well it can be a powerful ingredient in the antidote to war.

Everyone cannot be there and that is why photographers go there, to show them, to reach out and show grab them and make them stop what they're doing and pay attention to what is going on; to create pictures powerful enough to overcome the diluting effects of the mass media and shake people out of their indifference; to protest and by the strength of that protest to make others protest.

The worst thing is to feel that as a photographer I am benefitting from someone else's tragedy.  This idea haunts me.  It's something I have to rectify with every day because I know that if I ever allow genuine compassion to be overtaken by personal ambition I will have sold my soul.  The only way I can justify my role is to have respect for the other person's predicament.

Other

If you make an honest picture of war, it will be an anti-war photograph.

I try to use whatever I know about photography to be of service to the people I'm photographing.

When the truth is spoken, it doesn't need to be adorned.

 

Jimmy Nelson

The day you let go of what you existentially think and feel, you make the picture for yourself.  That's the beginning of the journey and that journey will go on for years and years.  You make the pictures for yourself because you want to feel something.  Forget the camera, forget what other people say – connect with what you feel.  If this feeling is sincere and genuine, and you're really connected with something that's original, then people will eventually look at your pictures. (Medium Format Magazine Jan 2021)

 

Beaumont Newhall

There are two courses open to the photographer.  He can make the uncommon common.  Or he can make uncommon the common.

 

Arnold Newman

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all.  It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.

Influence comes from everywhere but when you are actually shooting you work primarily by instinct. But what is instinct? It is a lifetime of accumulation of influence, experience, knowledge, seeing and hearing. There is little time for reflection in taking a photograph. All your experience comes to a peak and you work on two levels, the conscious and the unconscious.

 

Helmut Newton

I got good at 50.

 

Paul Nicklin

Amateurs tend to follow the camera.

I like to be vulnerable in the presence of an amazing animal, being able to create art and change people’s perceptions all at the same time.

 

Christopher Nolan

We try to always achieve what we can in camera, and have as good a time as possible while doing it.

 

Alex Noriega

(interview on podcast f8 The Photographer's Perspective July 26, 2019)

I'm not afraid to completely change an image.  I'm just trying to keep the base content real.  I'm not dropping in skies or creating total composites or anything.  But I'm also not afraid to take what nature gave me, which may be just this little tiny bit of light that may not be contrasty and push it to emphasize it.  But I always want the end result to be realistic or believable.  I think that taking it too far in post-processing is just breaking the fourth wall.  You've ruined the experience for someone when they know it was just a slider in photoshop.  

I work a lot with light very precisely because I want to take what nature gave me, in terms of light, and emphasize it without it looking painted on, without it looking forced globally on the image.  You really want to focus it on where you want the viewer's attention, and where the actual light would be in the scene.  That's what I use luminosity masks in Photoshop for.

 

Sean O'Connell

If I like a moment - I mean me, personally - I don't like to have the distraction of the camera.  I just want to stay in it.

 

Chris Orwig

In portraiture, we want to look at someone so deeply that we begin to see ourselves.

 

Louie Palu

Every photographer has that set of negatives that don't make it to the final product.  Those negatives are just as important as the good ones.  They're the ones that help you shape your vision.

 

Tim Parkin 

(interview on Matt Payne's podcast #124)

Large format changes the way you work.  Beyond anything to do with resolution, it's a way of working.

People miss out, quite often, how the physical aspects of the camera they use mediates what they create in their photography.

 

Louis Pasteur

Chance favors the prepared mind.

 

Irving Penn

A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it.

Good photography strikes the heart of the beholder and leaves him changed.

 

Vincent Peters

You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.

I always shoot film you know. I have some clients that say “you don’t shoot digital we don’t work with you” and I’m like okay no problem. But I don’t like digital. I think the whole process did a lot of damage to the industry and there isn’t a single photographer I spoke to who didn’t agree with that.

Digital is not just a process of capturing images. Digital is a different concept. The shoot is different. Your relation with the model is different. Anyway, I hardly know how to read an email.

As a photographer, every picture you take is a dialogue with mortality.  It is a moment that will be gone and will not come back.  It's a small death in your life, and you hold onto it and collect.  By the moment you are holding on to it you admit that all of this life will run through your life like sand.

It is an old fairy tale and desire in us to stop the process of time, but the more you hold it in your hand, you realize how fast life is moving on.

I use celebrities because I think they take on certain personas in ourselves, giving faces to different versions of what we are.  They are carrying the masks of our own hopes and fears.  They are actors in our own theatre of dreams that we need to give a face to.  We need to have somebody playing that part.

A woman once approached Sophia Loren at a restaurant in Los Angeles and told her, "I've always wanted to be Sophia Loren," to which Sophia replied, "So have I."

I do not want to explore people.  I do not want to drag them out and hurt their privacy, because their revelation would not even mean anything to us.  It would be like looking at an accident on the street.  But I think a personal connection means something, because the more personal they are, the more we can identify with them.  [discussing photography of celebrities]

The strength of the picture is not what you see, it's what you walk away with.

The things that you are missing inside of yourself are the things you are trying to create in your photography.

Every artist is driven by a sense of pain.  There is a deep desire to communicate something that you are longing for with other people, and you think that when you share it with people it will hurt less.

All of us have undeveloped film in the darkroom of our minds (attribution to Marcel Proust).

Light is always your key protagonist.  Light, itself, is glamorous.

Photography makes visible, but also makes the invisible tangible.

Hemmingway said write the truest sentence you know, where there is nothing to add and nothing to take away.

I'm the type of photographer who likes to raise curiosity, rather than confirm the obvious.

You understand yourself through the photography you do.  You don't photograph the way things are; you don't look at things they way they are.  You photograph the way you are; you look at things the way you are.

Light is nothing else than an emotional translation for you.  You can't see light.  You see things the way you interpret them, and the lighting will play a huge part in how you interpret something.

You can compare visual art to music.  If you shoot color, you have a larger orchestra, you have more instruments, which is interesting and impressive.  But if you do black and white, you reduce it to a very simple melody, very essential.  If you get that right, that melody will stay in your head.

 

Pablo Picasso

Colors are only symbols; reality is to be found in lightness alone.

In every photographer, there was a painter, a true artist, awaiting expression.

 

Eliot Porter

Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject.

I photograph for the thing itself - for the photograph - without consideration of how it may be used.  Some critics suggest that I make photographs primarily to promote conservation, but this allegation is far from the truth.  Although my photographs may be used in this way, it is incidental to my original motive for making them, which is first of all for personal aesthetic satisfaction.

Ultimately, to be successful as a work of art, a photograph must be both pleasing and convincing.  It must not leave the viewer in doubt about the validity of its subject, whether representational or imaginary.

For me the stereotype is the least interesting aspect of nature, and the one I most often reject as a color subject.

The photograph is an abstraction of nature - a fragment isolated from a greater implied role, missed but imagined, a connection which assists in holding the viewer's attention.

 

Mark Riboud

You make much better photographs when you think.

 

Eugene Richards

Every photographer has a line where it changes over from empathy or sympathy to disgust for its own sake, and it's really hard to know when that is.  And you tell yourself that whatever you're showing, as bad as it looks, it isn't nearly as bad as it really was.  Do you need to show it all?  No.  That's just common sense.  But you're not telling the complete story.

 

Fred Ritchin

The revelation of the image is located in the telling, not just in the evidence of what has been told.

The term "digital photography" doesn't have very much to do with photography.

We've handed digital image making all the aura of analog photography and it's a camouflage.  We know digital image making is not photography as it has been in the past; it has been made for other, new uses.

The photographic community has done very little to preserve the credibility of the image. My sense is that the photograph is a quotation from appearances. It's supposed to be a recording, if you're using it journalistically. If you're not doing that, the reader needs to know. Just like if you're quoting someone and you put it in quotation marks, that's what they said. If you want to paraphrase, you don't use quotation marks so the reader knows the difference. With a photograph, the reader assumes it's a quotation and if it's not, you have to tell them. If you don't do it, it's illegitimate in terms of journalism. You can manipulate all you want, but just let people know you're doing it.

https://www.americanphotomag.com/interview-fred-ritchin-establishing-standards-digital-manipulation

Following is from After Photography

Given the major dilemmas facing humanity and the planet, the harnessing of media to help us comprehend our transitional universe and to intervene in its evolution is less a luxury than an urgent requirement of citizenship.  We should be looking to create more useful, exploratory images, not just the flamboyant, shocking ones.

In the analog world the photograph of the photograph is always one generation removed, fuzzier, not the same; the digital copy of the digital photograph is indistinguishable so that "original" loses its meaning.

Digital media...stimulates other logics and ultimately new philosophies of life, moving from the authority of the Newtonian to the probability of the quantum, and from the visualization of the phenotype to a preference for the coded genotype.

If a photograph is said to be worth a thousand words, very few of those words generally come to mind after a caption tells the reader what the photo is supposed to be about.

Other

To use the phrase 'digital photography' is a mistake, because it really doesn't have much to do with photography.  Like when the automobile was invented we called it the horseless carriage, and referred to horsepower, but the car has nothing to do with horses.

It's generally the amateur at this point who is making the more authentic images.

 

Hernan Rodriguez

Spending time with the subject of a portrait is the most important thing.  That interaction is the value of the portrait.  If that person is not present there in that image, then it's not valuable to anybody.

 

Linda Ronstadt

It's nice to be acknowledged, nice for your work to be acknowledged.  But it's not what you do it for.  You do it for the work.  And if you're doing it for the prizes, you're in big trouble.

 

Arthur Rothstein

Provided the results are a faithful reproduction of what the photographer believes he sees, whatever takes place in the making of the picture is justified.

 

Galen Rowell

My first thought is always of light.

 

Selbastiao Salgado

I adore photography, taking photographs, holding my camera, choosing my frame, playing with the light.

There comes a moment when it is no longer you who takes the photograph, but receives the way to do it quite naturally and fully.

When you go to photograph, you have to understand what it is you are photographing. When you go to a country, you must know a little bit of the economy of this country, of the social movements, of the conflicts, of the history of this country—you must be part of it.

This is where I came from, and when I made my pictures, when I show the people from my side of the planet in my pictures, I show their dignity. I show that they work like we work, that they love like we love, that they live nice lives like we have nice lives here. That we can understand that we are the same.

Lélia was studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris at the school of architecture, and it was necessary for her to buy a camera to take pictures of architecture. We bought this camera, and I looked inside it, and my life completely changed. It became my camera. I started to use it and photography made a total invasion in my life. Probably if she had not bought this camera, it would never have happened, because that was very late in my life. I was 27 years old when I first looked through the viewfinder of a camera and took a picture.

I worked with Leicas. Small camera, few lenses—a Leica doesn’t need many lenses. With the viewfinder camera, you have three lenses—I had a 28-, a 35-, and a 50-mm. Two cameras, three lenses, my film: that’s it. I was free, for months.

You take a photo in a fraction of a second, but you need time to arrive there.  Time, commitment, experience and infinite curiosity.

We are having a big misunderstanding about photography.  What we are doing with the cell phones is not photography.  It's a new language of communication.  Photography is memory.  Photography is the mirror of society.

Photography will most likely disappear.

I spend a long time doing my stories.  I will spend months at a time living with the people.  It's a pleasure to be there.  This is very important.  You are not capable to go there and take 3 or 4 pictures and leave.  You must live, you must smell, you must know people, you must respect people, they must respect you.  You must become part of their community.

I have a big problem to come to digital because all my life I work with negatives.  It became very difficult to work with negatives with the number of x-rays in airports.  Each time through an x-ray effects the film a little bit, and it adds up.  Eventually, it affects the grain.  The film started to be not as good because of less silver in the emulsion.  

Photography is a way of life.  It's my life.

Photography is a language, a strong language.  With music, it's the only language that does not need translation.  What you write with photography you can read in Japan without any translation.  The first look and you understand it completely.

Photography is a recent language, maybe 150 years old.  Probably not to stay for long because the tools you use to photograph are the same tools that you use in computers to change everything

Photography was a kind of cross-section of reality that was in front of you.  In a fraction of a second we were capable to freeze something that was movement.  In that way it was a kind of mirror of society.

Not everyone has this instinct of photography.  You must have instinct of the image.  The image happens in front of you just in a fraction of a second.

You must be awake to the phenomenon and in this fraction of a second of interaction you must have a nice composition, you must deal with the light, you must have the history that you are photographing.  This coming together your own history, your concept of ethics, your concept of society, of solidarity, of respect.  Everything is there.  You must condense this in a fraction of a second.   

All my life I go into the light.

I have a way to photograph.  You work with space, you have a camera, you have a frame, and then a fraction of a second.  It's very instinctive.  What you do is a fraction of a second, it's there and it's not there.  But in this fraction of a second comes your past, comes your future, comes your relation with people, comes your ideology, comes your hate, comes your love - all together in this fraction of a second, it materializes there.

I looked through a lens and ended up abandoning everything else.

What I want is the world to remember the problems and the people I photograph. What I want is to create a discussion about what is happening around the world and to provoke some debate with these pictures. Nothing more than this. I don’t want people to look at them and appreciate the light and the palate of tones. I want them to look inside and see what the pictures represent, and the kind of people I photograph.

It is important that you respect what you are photographing.

 

Pennti Sammallahti

Small things are even more beautiful.

The final print is the most important thing for me.

Limited editions are for the art business, not for the art.

Luck is decisive.  All the pictures of which I am happy, it's a matter of good luck.  But to be a photographer you have to know when you are lucky.

When I'm photographing I try not to think too much, I try only to see.

I wait for a photograph like a pointer dog.  It's a matter of luck and circumstance.

You don't take photographs; you receive them.

I prefer winter, the worse the weather, the better the photograph will be.

I feel like I received the photograph, I didn't take it. If you're in the right place at the right time, then all you have to do is push a button. Being a photographer doesn't come into it. Everything I've photographed exists regardless of me, my role is only to be receptive.

Get a book of great photographs and spend a week studying each shot. Every day, think about a different aspect: subject, composition, tonal range, the moment when the image was taken and how the photograph was made.

"Pennti Sammallahti is an example of a very humble, genius photographer, who sells his work for $1,200, and couldn't care less about fame or money, and that's what makes him great.  Because the work is uncorrupted, it's pure.  He does it for himself.  He does it for his soul, and that's such an old fashioned concept, when the art world is driven by money."  [Peter Fetterman]

 

Alan Schaller

People often associate black and white with the terms classic or vintage. I have been hugely inspired by the old school film monochrome work of some of the greats, and aspire to get some of that tonality and feel into my work sometimes. But what really excites me as a photographer is the question: where do we go from this? Part of my take on photography has explored pushing contrast levels to the edge of what is possible, exploiting the creative options we are afforded by the incredible technology we have today from digital sensors and the new age of ultra high resolution lens design, and of course training my eye to see such opportunities. I love the idea of combining the clean sharpness of digital with the tones of black and white film. I shall always appreciate and incorporate the aesthetics and philosophies from the photographers who laid down the path for us today but I believe there is a lot left to explore in the world of monochrome photography as technology and the world around us advances. I intend to do my bit to seek it out!

If you're not shooting a photo series, or if you don't have a direction for your work, an idea of what you want to do and why you're doing it, you're just taking random pictures and hoping that they gel together.  It's the equivalent of an author, trying to write a book by coming up with really clever sentences, one by one, and stitching them together.  It doesn't actually make any sense.  

You don't write a song without a point; why would you make a photo without a point?

No one really cares about your photos, except for you.

 

Jan Schlegel

When you work on a print, like a silver gelatin print for, example - to make the print, to tone it, to mount it on aluminum, until it's finished - just the print alone is 15 hours until it is finished.  And these hours are invested into the print, into the craft, into the making of art.

Photography is a little bit whimsical, magical I say.  There are things we cannot explain.  But these 15 hours - the frustrations I had, the fears I had, the joy I had because it worked - this all you find at the end in the print.  And I think this is what people feel.

 

Bryan Schutmaat

The challenge is the constant struggle to make work that you find meaningful and that does what you want it to do.  If that wasn't there, if there wasn't that tension, photography would be pretty boring.  It's the thing that makes you motivated, and it's the thing that makes you want to quit sometimes.  That the beauty of any creative pursuit, is overcoming that.


 

Mark Seliger

Photography is really infinite, right? When I think about being a musician, I can’t imagine playing the same songs over and over and over again for 30 years. Playing some of the same songs over, yeah, but I can’t imagine not writing new ones. You look at somebody like Dylan and he doesn’t play the same version of his songs. He reinvents what he does every time. And I think you should be reconnecting and digging deeper into the things that you make! Photography is the perfect example of that because cameras will change, process will change, but the root of a portrait doesn’t change. It’s how you evolve the idea. It’s how you retell that story.

 

Jerome Sessini

I don't like rigid categories. Sometimes there is art in journalism and journalism in art. Conscience, heart, beauty, balance and loss of balance are essentials for me.

I was never attracted by danger. I was interested in being a witness to historic moments and political changes, and I realised that there was a gap between the way the media told stories and reality.

Consider using subtraction rather than addition to make pictures better.

My photographic approach developed into a more honest depiction, removing the superfluous and seeking the truth.

 

Riley Sharbonno

The camera becomes a psychological filter, allowing the mind - through the eye- to choose what reaches it.

Empty memories - no, shells of memories - fill me with dread, because I feel that moments of my life have been lived by someone else.

As I look at my photos now, sometimes I don't even see the subject in focus.  I see the area behind it. And I remember another story.

 

Phil Sharp

Every so often, I make a photograph that has the right feeling.  It’s relatively simple at this point to make a photograph that is technically competent, but for me, a photograph has the power to transmit an otherwise transitory mood and emotion. Maybe photography can change the way one feels after all.

There is so much the face can tell us about what it means to be human.

Humans are interesting, and we all have a story to tell.

 

Tyler Shields

A photograph is taken in an instant, but it is made over a lifetime.

 

Rodney Smith

For me the print is the creation, the purpose, the result of my endeavor.

My creative process is intricately connected to how I examine my own life, how I got to know myself, how I drew clarity from my emotions and translated them into pictures. Taking photographs was my way of reconciling the mundane with the ideal, of reconciling my fears, and shifting from anxious loner to participant. It was with my camera that I began to find intimacy.

Today, a great deal of Western culture seems rooted in remoteness, anger, alienation, and squalor. I want people to see the beauty and whimsy in life, not its ugliness. I feel the need to reach out for its soul, its depth, and its underlying beauty. I represent a world that is possible if people act their best. It’s a world that’s slightly beyond reach, beyond everyday experience, but it’s definitely not impossible.

It’s not an intellectual concept; it is an emotional concept. Composition is like rhythm in music—it’s where everything is in sync. It’s where the whole picture comes together succinctly and carefully.

I expose and process the film by hand, slowly, and work to produce an exquisite artifact, the print. I labor to produce a thing of beauty. For me, the print is the creation, the purpose—the result of my endeavor.

If a picture answers every question, it's not worth looking at more than once.  The photograph should continuously raise more questions than it answers.

Much of music is a technical skill, as is photography.  However, the difference between a good musician and a great musician is, I think, quite obvious: emotion.

Stillness of hand cannot make up for emptiness of heart.

 

W. Eugene Smith 

From his Autobiographical Statement

I don't think there is anything that has replaced Life.  

I generally try to become so accepted into a community that they more or less forget about me as a photographer and as a journalist.

I truly at all times try to have consideration for the people I'm photographing.

I've never been satisfied with the work I've done.  My work is a failure as far as the height I'd like to reach with it.

I much prefer to have my photographs add this other element, so that possibly they will stir someone to action, do something about something.

I have no conflict between journalism and my artist self.  At one time I did, but then I realized that to be a good journalist I needed to be the finest artist that I could possibly be.

I just very quietly accept photography as an art.

From the Aperture monograph, 1969

Superficiality to me is untruth when it is of reportorial stature.  It is a grievous dishonesty when it is the mark of any important subject.

My cameras as note takers for my mind, so I may place evidence before others.

And never have I found the limits of the photographic potential.  Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance.  Always, I am on the threshold...

I made brash, dashing, 'interpretive' photographs which were overly clever and with too much technique... with great depth of field, very little depth of feeling, and with considerable 'success.'

From Let Truth be the Prejudice

It is far more satisfying to make fewer but finer photographs.

Photography, and to me this is photo-journalism, is a serious matter, and my integrity and sincerity might be called my religion.  This is not a new attitude on my part, and most of the researchers and editors with whom I work, if not always in agreement with my attitude, at least are aware of it.  In fact, I have had the word "idealistic" tossed sneeringly into my face on more than one occasion.  when I give myself to a story I give myself to it completely–until publication do us part–and then frequently I grieve (and without exception for the failure that is Smith's), and never quite forget.

I photographed, not with a camera, I forgot it was there, I photographed with my heart, and I was trying to capture his soul upon film. (British PM Clement Attlee)

This is the effort I strive for finally, to see beyond the physical characteristics.

The highest function is to make people see things they have not seen before.

It's hard to photograph through tears.

You can't photograph if you're not in love.

Then again out of it all there comes a moment relaxed by a reward, a feeling of warm contentment rather than happiness.  This reward... comes mostly from within and is the understanding within myself that something I have tried to create, or to interpret to others with my pictures, has been at least fairly well accomplished.

From Minamata

The first word I would remove from the folklore of journalism is the word objective.  That would be a giant step toward truth in the "free" press.  And perhaps "free" should be the second word removed.  Freed of these two distortions, the journalist and photographer could get to his real responsibilities.

I well remember a confrontation with an editor of Life magazine in which he said I did not have the proper spirit, the proper respect for the needs of Life, a proper belief in what Life was trying to do.  He said I was not being responsible.  [Smith responded], My belief is that my responsibilities within journalism are two.  My first responsibility is to my subjects.  My second responsibility is to my readers.  I believe that if I fulfill those two responsibilities I will automatically have fulfilled my responsibilities to the magazine.

To cause awareness is our only strength.

When victims sue, when victims protest, when a desperate move causes public disruption of the daily status quo, it becomes terribly easy to reverse the roles of the protagonists.  Too often, it is somehow quite easy to believe that those who seek justice after being injured are the attackers, and that those who have caused the injury are the victims.

From Shadow and Substance, by Jim Hughes:

The finished picture must have the mood of the surroundings injected into it.  One must observe and feel these surroundings, and interpret them, translating them into the finished work.  The stuff I am shooting so far is record shooting which contains nothing more.  It has no soul.  I must defeat that, or be defeated. (On USS Bunker Hill, before Rabaul.]

Much of the emotion that is war is in the faces of the men fighting that war. (p 135)

Sometimes poetry is not very practical, and I always know just how good or bad my pictures are, and there is no one else who can tell me. (p 136)

If only the bad were killed in wars, then perhaps wars would be worthwhile, but unfortunately the good die also, and even the women and babies.  

Bear no intolerance towards any man, woman, or child because of race, color, or creed, and towards those same persons remember that they have every right that you have.  The only intolerance that you must have is against intolerance – and even here you must search out and understand the reasons for that intolerance, and eliminate it by example and education.  Try to understand everyone that you disagree with, it will give you more strength.  [This and the quote immediately above were written on October 19, 1944, just prior to Gene Smith going ashore in the Philippines with MacArthur's army.  It was a farewell letter to his children, because he fully expected to be killed.  He wasn't.]

Each time I pressed the shutter release, it was a shouted condemnation hurled with the hope that the pictures might survive through the years and at last echo through the minds of men in the future. [speaking of his photographs from Saipan]

There must be a realization that photography is the best liar among us, abetted by the belief that photography shows it as it is.

Photography is not just a job to me.  I'm carrying a torch with a camera.

Journalism, idealism and photography are three elements that must be integrated into a whole before my work can be of complete satisfaction to me.

In the building of a story I begin in my own prejudices, mark them as prejudices, and start finding new thinking, the contradictions to my prejudices.  What I am saying is that you cannot be objective until you try to be fair.  You try to be honest and you try to be fair and maybe truth will come out.

I have personally always fought very hard against ever packaging a story so that all things seem to come to an end at the end of a story.  I always want to leave it so that there is a tomorrow.

The search for truth may yet throw me into an insane asylum.

I think that two pictures, three pictures, four pictures, can say things that single pictures, full page, full bleed, cannot.  And they say it by what is not said, like silences in music, like silences in staging.  And two pictures with their two separate thoughts can cause another quite different thing to happen, quite off the page, in the mid of the beholder.

If you are going to make your communications and your artwork, you do have to be pushing at boundaries.

In unadulterated photography the form and content have to be rhythmed into an optical cohesiveness at the exact instant of exposure, and on the one negative, with little chance for other than minute revisions during the printing of it.  I might ask how many times da Vinci scraped, altered and repainted details of that canvas [Mona Lisa].  It could be that the number of times he reworked that single canvas might just equal the number of exposures made in the taking of any single photograph of mine.  The repetitive effort of revision done for the purpose of improving the ultimate result is frequently criticized when it is applied to photography, while with a writer, or composer, or any other artist, it would be lauded or ignored.

Negatives are the notebooks, the jottings, the false starts, the whims, the poor drafts, and the good draft – but never the completed version of the work…. The print – and a proper one – is the only completed photograph, whether it is specifically shaded for reproduction, or for a museum wall.

Negatives are private, as is my bedroom – my children and my prints may be gazed at by the public, if they care to do so.

I would say that a great part of my finest work is of participation rather than observation, and is the antithesis of mere reaction… Since I believe we have photographically just begun to touch the inner man, the spiritual, I would probe and probe and probe (but with compassion)… and continue in quest of de-veiling the mysteries.

I think that one of the rewards that make this an interesting profession, and is, as well, the gravest responsibility of the photo-historian or journalist is the search through the maze of conflictions to the island of intimate understanding.

Superficiality to me is untruth when it is of reportorial stature.

I don't believe photography has to do with realism.  Because form is recognizable does not mean it is realism.

Facts just do not tell truth without poetry and drama.

Photography has very little of reality in it, and then only on the lower level of simple recognition.  Beyond that, in transmission of the inner feeling, I feel that everything that is honest to the situation is honest to the photograph.

A good photograph compels you to enter its reality and atmosphere for a moment and experience it.

The strong archetypal image should not be used for shallow situations, otherwise you misuse its power.

I have to take more photographs.

America is very rich in suspicion, and slights and hatreds, these days.  Fifteen years ago, I could walk anywhere.  (1970 after he was assaulted in Philadelphia)

All these years that I have been taking pictures, professionally and for publication, I have not developed calluses on my heart, and I think maybe I am more tender of heart now than I was in the beginning.

I photograph many sad situations that have within them the opening of a hope.  I believe in humanity.

Photography is a small voice at best.  Daily, we are deluged with photography at its worst, until its drone of superficiality threatens to numb our sensitivity to all images.  Then why photograph?  Because sometimes – just sometimes – a photograph or photographs can lure our senses into greater awareness.  Much depends upon the viewer; but to some, photographs can demand enough of emotions to be a catalyst to thinking.  Someone – or perhaps many – among us may be influenced to heed reason and understanding until a way is found to right that which is wrong, and may even be inspired to the dedication needed to search for the cure to an illness.  For the rest of us, it may perhaps give a greater sense of understanding and compassion for those alien to our own lives.  Photography is a small voice.  It is an important voice in my life – but not the only one.  I believe in it.  If it is well conceived, it sometimes works.  That is why I – and also Aileen – photograph in Minamata.     (Camera 35 April 1974)

From Darkroom

When I go out to shoot, I never change lenses on my camera.  I change the camera, and if I'm working at full strength, I usually carry two sets of them, different makes for black and white and color film, so that I know by the very feel of the camera which film I'm using.

For the "Nurse Midwife" story I was using mostly Leicas, but now I use single-lens reflexes - Minoltas, Pentaxes, Nikons.  Although I'm still fond of the rangefinder camera, I do love that ability to edge in for an extra fraction of an inch and have something absolutely lined up.  I think the single-lens reflex gives you the best control.

You don't always have to fight the light.  Sometimes you can use it to make an entirely different kind of photograph.

There is nothing in photography I hate worse than the discipline of the darkroom, and yet I have spent all these years printing.  The reason is very simple.  I want the damn pictures to say what I want them to say.  I want to subdue those things that are not important to the statement, and I want to make sure that the important things are open, clear and direct.  Making my own print is the only way to fulfill what I saw when I made the photograph.

I don't feel that bleaching is dishonest to the reality of the image, because it helps me state clearly what I feel the true reality to be.  Basically, I bleach to bring back what is not held strongly in the film or the paper.

The atmosphere of the darkroom is important.  It has to be very open, very comfortable, so that you have room to move around in while working.  And it must have music.

I'm trying to extract from any negative a photograph that expresses what I want to say.  I don't think one more mechanical process takes anything away.

I look at the negative, and I look at the print.  I come face to face with all the mistakes I made.  In the darkroom it is my problem to overcome the mistakes.  I know the print I want, and know I'll probably get it, but it's sheer drudgery.

My formula for successful printing remains ordinary chemicals, an ordinary enlarger, music, a bottle of scotch - and stubbornness.

Other sources

Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes - just sometimes - one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness.

I'm an idealist... I'm always torn between the attitude of the journalist, who is a recorder of facts, and the artist, who is often necessarily at odds with the facts.

Making my own print is the only way to fulfill what I saw when I made the photograph.

I don't feel that bleaching is dishonest to the reality of the image, because it helps me state clearly what I feel the true reality to be.  I bleach to bring back what is not held strongly in the film or the paper.

My formula for successful printing remains ordinary chemicals, an ordinary enlarger, music, a bottle of scotch - and stubbornness.

I didn't make the rules, so why should I follow them?

What use is having a great depth of field, if there is not an adequate depth of feeling?

Negatives are the notebooks, the jottings, the false starts, the whims, the poor drafts, and the good draft but never the completed version of the work... The print, and a proper one, is the only completed photograph.

I never made one photograph, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.

Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential.  Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance.  Always, I am on the threshold.

Fine equipment is an asset, but not a necessity, to a good photographer. (18 yo)

To have his photographs live on in history, past their important but short lifespan in a publication, is the final desire of nearly every photographer-artist who works in journalism.  He can reach this plane only by combining a profound penetration into the character of the subject with a perfection of composition and technique—a consolidation necessary for any photographic masterpiece.

Iron clad rules often rust.

From the movie, Minamata

Native Americans believed that a photograph would take a piece of the subject's soul.  But what gets left out of the fine print is, that it can also take a piece of the photographer’s soul.  It will break your heart.  So, if you take it, you take it seriously.

People must see what's going on behind the eyes, because that's where the truth is.

 

Rick Smolan

If you’re really a photographer, you shoot for yourself; the assignment is extra.

 

Jacob Aue Sobol

The most difficult thing for me is to take pictures from far away.

Every image I create is a picture of how I feel that day – my experience of a place. It has become my ability to isolate my emotions and communicate them through the camera and into the mind of the viewer. From the beginning, I got used to this close connection between my emotional life and my pictures. In this way, my aim has always been to reach layers in people, which are not immediately visible, but nonetheless shape who we are and add substance to our lives.

Snapshot photography is a form of expression that is closely related to our emotions – pictures we take of people we care about and moments we want to keep. That’s why I try to use my pocket cameras as much as possible; they support the feeling of something unpredictable and playful.

My ambition is not to invent something new, but to live and experience the world and the people I love, and to tell this story by using photography as a diary.

When I photograph, I try to use my instincts as much as possible.  It is when pictures are unconsidered and irrational that they come to life; that they evolve from showing to being.

 

Susan Sontag

from On Photography

In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects.  Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.

Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one - and can help build a nascent one.

The most enduring triumph of photography has been its aptitude for discovering beauty in the humble, the inane, the decrepit.  At the very least, the real has a pathos.  And that pathos is - beauty.

Socially concerned photographers assume that their work can convey some kind of meaning, can reveal truth.  But partly because the photograph is, always, an object in a context, this meaning is bound to drain away; that is, the context which shapes whatever immediate - in particular, political - uses the photograph may have is inevitably succeeded by contexts in which such uses are weakened and become progressively less relevant.  One of the central characteristics of photography is that process by which original uses are modified, eventually supplanted by subsequent uses - most notably, by the discourse of art into which any photograph can be absorbed.

The aesthetizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by neutralizing it.

Photographs are often invoked as an aid to understanding a tolerance.  In humanist jargon, the highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.  But photographs do not explain; they acknowledge.

The reason that humanism has become the reigning ideology of ambitious professional photographers is that it masks the confusions about truth and beauty underlying the photographic experience.

Although photography generates works that can be called art, photography is not an art form at all.  Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

The force of photographic images comes from their being material realities in their own right, richly informative deposits left in the wake of whatever emitted them, potent means for turning the tables on reality - for turning it into a shadow.

 

Alec Soth

Every photographer should try lots of different kinds of photography, and then listen deep down to what feels right; what's really resonating within them.

I think that if we looked at the percentages in photography then the success rate would be really low: the point at which you’re doing everything technically right, and then you’re also presented with perfect subject matter and situation, and all of the elements (weather, light, etc.) come together – that’s a pretty magical thing.  One of the main lessons that experience has taught me is that something like that is exceptionally rare.

 

Edward Steichen

Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyone with a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed.

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.

When that shutter clicks, anything else that can be done afterward is not worth consideration.

A photograph is worth a thousand words, provided it is accompanied by only ten words.

To make good photographs, to express something, to contribute something to the world he lives in, and to contribute something to the art of photography besides imitations of the best photographers on the market today, that is basic training, the understanding of self.

It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

Every photograph is a fake from start to finish.

A portrait is not made in the camera, but on either side of it.

 

John Steinbeck

The camera need not be a cold mechanical device.  Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it.  It can be the extension of mind and heart.

I hate cameras.  They are so much more sure than I am about everything.

 

Ralph Steiner

By showing a picture, you're showing an x-ray of your heart.

 

Mark Steinmetz

The picture has to be more interesting than what it describes.

 

Alfred Stieglitz

Making a photograph is like making love.

Photography my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.

Photographers must learn not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs.

As a matter of fact, nearly all the greatest work is being, and has always been done, by those who are following photography for the love of it, and not merely for financial reasons. As the name implies, an amateur is one who works for love.

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

 

Tom Stoddart

There comes a time when I think it's better to put down the zoom and pick up a couple of Leicas and 50 rolls of film and go off and do your own thing.

I've always tried to make pictures that will mean something way down the line.

Art photography is about 'look at me,' whereas photojournalism is about 'look at this.'

It should be an instant reaction to pick up the camera.

 

Hans Strand

A great image should reflect your mind and what you feel rather than what you see.

 

Paul Strand

Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.

Above all, look at the things around you, the immediate world around you.  If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaning.

It is easy to make a picture of someone and call it a portrait. The difficulty lies in making a picture that makes the viewer care about a stranger.

If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

The important thing is, you have to have something important to say about the world.

The decision as to when to photograph, the actual click of the shutter, is partly controlled from the outside, by the flow of life, but it also comes from the mind and the heart of the artist. The photograph is his vision of the world and expresses, however subtly, his values and convictions.

 

Art Streiber

Now, in an age in which we are inundated with imagery, the image bears the burden of grabbing the reader and pulling them into the story.

 

Matt Stuart

I generally try to keep my professional photography separate from my art photography.  It's the idea of two blokes, one wearing the bowler hat and the other wearing a beret.  The bowler hat bloke feeds the beret bloke, but the beret bloke is necessary for the bowler bloke.

 

Josef Sudek from Poet of Prague

A photographer should never impose restrictions upon himself.

 

Wolfgang Suschitzky

I enjoy all photography.  My approach is to 'find' photographs – to observe things, no arrange them.

Great photography is a combination of the right choice of detail, the elimination of all that is inessential and the right moment that makes the picture.

Composition is a matter not of rules, but of taste.

 

Chris Suspect

Photography is not safe.  If you want to produce work that is memorable it needs to challenge and provoke.

 

DT Suzuki

Zen finds its inevitable association with art but not with morality.  Zen may remain unmoral, but not without art.

 

Jonathan Swift

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

 

Guy Tal

Photography, when practised creatively and expressively, may offer the photographer not only means of recording views, but also views into his or herself.

The possibilities and challenges of self-expression in photography, as one encounters and overcomes them, also prompt the seeking of yet more, more personal, and more interesting things to express.

 

Sara Terry

Practice photography until the mechanics are intuitive, then put it all aside.  Enter the space of not knowing.  Let the photo show you where it is.  All those tools you practiced are part of your subconscious and will not fail you.  

If you're doing reportage you have to think about the assignment or what the editor thinks, but you can still put your head there.

The images of what something should look like follow all the rules and look like the same image 100 other good photographers would make.  Sunset, rule of thirds.  Those are learned behaviors and they will create repetitive stereotypical images because anybody can do them.  But the image that nobody else makes is the one that comes from your intuitive response.  You have to work with no thought of the rules because following the rules makes us all the same.

One of the best gifts you can give yourself as a photographer is to find the space where you don't have a voice in your head, or you don't have an agenda or an assignment.

[from podcast The Candid Frame #463 with Ibarionex]

 

Cole Thompson

My success is no longer measured by the length of my resume, but rather by how I feel about the art that I create.

You don't create a masterpiece by following the rules.

What's the best way to make money from fine art photography?  Sell your equipment.

When you get inspired you must act, because you never get another chance.

 

Henry David Thoreau

It's not what you look at that matters, but what you see.

 

Alexey Titarenko

The work that lasts forever, it’s a long and complicated process.

 

Peter Turnley 

I continue to hope and believe that the best stories and photographs are yet to occur.

Photography is about sharing a moment we have framed.

If you're going to make a photograph, make a photograph.  Make a beautiful photograph.  Do it.

The notion of a story is a complex topic.  Good stories leave you wanting to know more.

Clarity and authenticity are important parts of storytelling.

A little imperfection makes a photograph credible.

Let your subject have dignity.

A photograph should be sharp.  Choose your aperture and ISO to have a shutter speed of at least 1/125 sec.

[above from a workshop in Seattle 2017]

 

Jerry Uelsmann

There are no uninteresting things.  Only uninterested people.

Did you hear about the professor who dreamed that he was giving a lecture and woke up to find that he was?

Ultimately, my hope is to amaze myself.

The camera is essentially a license to explore.

Usually the first thing The Photo Gods show you is the cliché – that is, the most obvious photograph.  I've leanred that I usually have to take that picture in order to move on.

 

Tony Vaccaro

I try to use my photography to tell those people mankind is grateful for what you have given them.  Everyone needs to be encouraged and photography is my way of saying thank you for being you.

 

Pauline Vermare (Magnum website)

Street photography is the art of gleaning what is at hand – subjects, lights, shapes – to create beautifully composed and arresting images. It is an artistic form of hunting and gathering, a scavenger hunt led by a conscious or subconscious urge to collect patterns and scenes that offer themselves freely to the mind and eyes of the photographer. For some, like Cartier-Bresson or Sergio Larraín, street photography provides the highest form of awareness, and a complete presence in the world.

 

Leonardo da Vinci

The first intention of the painter is to make a flat surface display a body as if modeled and separated from this plane, and he who surpasses others in this skill deserves most praise.  This accomplishment, with which the science of painting is crowned, arises from light and shade, or we may say chiascuro.

Your shadows and lights should be blended without lines or borders in the manner of smoke losing itself in the air. (sfumato)

Always set your figures so that the side to which the head turns is not the side to which the breast faces, since nature for our convenience has made us with a neck which bends with ease in many directions.

Paint so that a smoky finish can be seen, rather than contours and profiles that are distinct and crude.  When you paint shadows and their edges, which cannot be perceived except indistinctly, do not make them sharp or clearly defined, otherwise your work will have a wooden appearance.

The edges of the mist will be indistinct against the blue of the sky, and towards the earth it will look almost like dust blown up.

 

Charlie Waite

The print is the photograph's rightly inheritance.

We must get over ourselves and not be too precious.

Immerse yourself, as deep as you can, into the whole landscape photograph making process.

Get friendly with clouds.

The manifestation of the beautiful relationship we have with the landscape is to be found within the print that we made of it.  So when we produce a photograph it does have parity with what we felt.  And by looking at that photograph, it invokes the experience we had at that time, and, hopefully, informs and illuminates and awakens the people who look at it.

Colour can be dangerous territory.

For me it matters that the image I made was of something that truly existed.  The moment the viewer feels unsettled or distrustful of the image the relationship between viewer and photograph is completely broken, so I don’t care really to manipulate my images and for the image to depart to a whole other place where the viewer has no belief in it.

It’s a very solitary thing, landscape photography.  There’s nobody next to you saying this is going to be a masterpiece, so you have to use your own sense of judgment, your own understanding of composition, your own understanding of light, of shape, of pattern, of colour, of design.  And ultimately, if you get them right you own the moment, you own the experience, and you keep it for the rest of your life.

Find your signature and specialize. Don’t be a jack of all trades. Find your way of seeing. And be memorable for your particular way of seeing. I was given that advice, and it’s a bumpy ride, like acting. It’s really not easy. It’s precarious and insecure, but there are many different ways of seeing, and many ways that are still to be found. Make your images have meaning. And practise.

The camera is the most incredible conduit through which we can engage the landscape.

Ansel Adams was an enormous intellect who was able to convert geographic reality to transcendent emotional experience.

Omit the redundant.

Landscape photography is a process of honoring something that you've come across.

 

David Ward

Commune with, rather than consume, the landscape.

We can only make images that have an effect on others by being affected ourselves.  Two or three different places to explore in a day is generally plenty.  Any more and we risk forcing shallow responses.

One of my guiding ideas is to always try and make an image of something that moves me, regardless of whether it be in a positive or negative way.  Landscape photography is often relentlessly cheerful, but other moods strike us as we walk and I'm keen to try and give voice to these.

It's hard to know when the inspiration for an image will strike us, the one thing that we can be certain of is that we should always obey its call.  

The problem we try to solve is always personal.  Bu choosing our subject and our composition we actually invent both the puzzle and solution.  The answer we find one day may not please us upon another.

If we wish to be truly creative, we will forever walk on uncertain terrain without a map.

Technical perfection alone is not enough; it will never be inspirational, never make another human's heart beat faster, never bring a tear to another's face.

A photograph is transparent... We see through its surface to a slice of reality almost in the same way as if we were staring through glass.

The photographic image is perceived as a direct translation of reality... so that we may see it unmediated by the hand of an artist.

Look hard, think long and only then press the shutter release.

Being able to produce a perfectly exposed, perfectly sharp image doesn't make you a photographer, just a competent camera operator.

 

Todd Webb

A creative photograph is one seen through the photographer. The reason for making the photograph is often unexplainable.

 

Alan Weiss

Reality is an operating system for people who have no imagination.

 

Ivan Weiss

When you're engaged in thought you forget about what your face is doing.  And when you forget about what your face is doing, your face does what it is designed to do, which is to communicate to the outside world what you're thinking and feeling. When somebody is comfortable enough that they allow you to take a picture of them while they are in a moment of introspection, then you know that that actually is the real person. 

 

Orson Wells

The enemy of art is the total lack of limitations.

 

Eddy van Wessel

You don’t shoot much with a Leica because you are connected with the subject. Why should you make a picture that you really don’t need?  It’s very easy to make a lot of shitty pictures, but if you want to have a good picture you’d better use your eye, your ears and your nose. Absorb the atmosphere, take time, and then infiltrate with your camera and try to capture that same emotion. If this is in your image you’ll make a good shot.

Sometimes the world is something you just can’t understand. 

People are usually as hard as the surface they live on. 

It’s always little things that you look at. It’s not so much a Xerox of the things in front of you. It’s always you look at something, you isolate it and use it to create a scene that makes it interesting to look at. Sometimes it works.

 

Edward Weston

The camera sees more than the eye.

Nature cannot be copied exactly even by means of a camera.

I want the greater mystery of things revealed more clearly than the eyes see.

The important and only vital question is, how much greater, finer am I than I was yesterday?

Picturesqueness... is an actual hindrance to work.

Any creative work should function as easily and naturally as breathing.

To photograph a rock, have it look like a rock but be more than a rock.

To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the laws of gravitation before going for a walk.

The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don’t know what to do with it.

 

Minor White

If I have anything to give you through camera, it must be of myself.  A gnawing burns inside, to make something of myself worth giving.

If you could stop the shouting of your own thoughts in your ears, you might be able to hear the small voice of a pine cone in the sun.

When we invent a subject we turn the photograph into a mirror of some part of ourselves.

Don't photograph what it is, photograph what else it is.

All photographs are self portraits.

The state of mind of a photographer while creating is a blank... like a sheet of film - seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second's exposure conceives a life in it.

 

Huntington Witherill

Be open enough to be receptive when a photograph finds you.

 

Bastiaan Woudt

A successful portrait is more than just a representation of a person's appearance.  I should grab your attention and make you question who the person is, why they look the way they do, and what they think.

I shoot exclusively in black and white.  My eye is always focused on black and white photographs.  Colour seems too distracting.  I believe that art photography should offer a unique insight into the photographer's mind.  Black and white helps to distance oneself from reality and, paradoxically, to focus even more on the subject.

 


Sources for the above photographs include books, magazine articles, websites, interviews (video and podcasts), documentaries, personal communication and other sources.  I omitted listing the sources because that would have made this page difficult to navigate.  Most of these quotes can be found by inserting a phrase in a search engine.  Most are verbatim, however some of them are from memory and may not be exact quotes.

Another exhaustive source is found here.