photographic quotes

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Some wise thoughts of those who inspire me:

• My early childhood equipped me really well for my portrait work: The quick encounter, where you are not going to know the subject for very long. These days I am much more comfortable with the fifteen minute relationship, than I am with a life long relationship. - Annie Leibovitz

• Photography is nothing--it's life that interests me. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment. - Ansel Adams

• The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• In Gene's(*) photographs there is something which throbs, something always tremulant. They are taken between the shirt and the skin. Anchored between the shirt and the skin – at the heart – his camera moves even by its passionate integrity. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• When I was around 20 years old I began to take pictures. It changed my world. The sky was no longer just blue or red, rather an infinite spectrum of colours. Things which I had never noticed began to obtain form and life. Travelling, even just the short distance to school, became an experience. Sparrows which sat flocked together on telephone lines were like notes on paper, forming a song which I saw and wished to give others the opportunity to hear and see – a picture. – Páll Stefánsson

• Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm – the relationship between shapes and values. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• I never question what to do, it tells me what to do. The photographs make themselves with my help. – Ruth Bernhard

• If you're not interested in life, then photography has no meaning." - Ruth Bernhard

• Photography offered all things a young person desires – a sense of purpose, a real sense of adventure and something at the end of it to reward you. – Donovan Wylie

• There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer – Ansel Adams

• I hope that we don't ever see the day when ready-made photo system, which guarantees good photographic compostions in advance, go on the market. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• I don't try to overintellectualize my concepts of people. In fact, the ideas I have, if you talk about them, they seem extremely corny and it's only in their execution that people can enjoy them...It's something I've learned to trust: The stupider it is, the better it looks. - Annie Leibovitz

• The photographer who combines scientific method with artistic skill is in the best possible position to do the good work. – Ferdinand Hurter

• You are asking me what makes a good picture. For me, it is the harmony between subject and form that leads each one of those elements to its maximum of expression and vigor. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• Actually, I'm not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration. Ansel Adams

• Pictures must not be too picturesque. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• As far as I am concerned, taking photographs is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from other means of visual expression. It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It is a way of life. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing a meditation. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed. – Garry Winogrand

• Sometimes I enjoy just photographing the surface because I think it can be as revealing as going to the heart of the matter. - Annie Leibovitz

• Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• He made me suddenly realize that photographs could reach eternity through the moment. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• I'm not interested in photography. With photography you don't grasp anything. It's just intuition. To be a draftsman is very different. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score, and the print the performance. – Ansel Adams

• The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• Pictures, regardless of how they are created and recreated, are intended to be looked at. This brings to the forefront not the technology of imaging, which of course is important, but rather what we might call the eyenology (seeing). - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• Avoid making a commotion, just as you wouldn’t stir up the water before fishing. Don’t use a flash out of respect for the natural lighting, even when there isn’t any. If these rules aren’t followed, the photographer becomes unbearably obstrusive. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own. – Susan Sontag

• Thinking is not unifying or making the appearance familiar under the guise of a great principal. Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one’s consciousness, making of every image a privileged place. - Albert Camus

• When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph. - Annie Leibovitz

• My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera’s eye may entirely change my idea. – Edward Weston

• A good photograph is knowing where to stand. - Ansel Adams

• In photography, visual organization can stem only from a developed instinct. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• Ultimately, simplicity is the goal – in every art, and achieving simplicity is one of the hardest things to do. Yet it’s easily the most essential. – Pete Turner

• There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs. - Ansel Adams

• Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph. – Matt Hardy

• Drawing with its graphology, elaborates what our consciousness grasps in an instant. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field. - Peter Adams

• Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing. Success depends on the extent of one's general culture. one's set of values, one's clarity of mind one's vivacity. The thing to be feared most is the artificially contrived, the contrary to life. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term -meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching – there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster. – Ansel Adams

• Let me here call attention to one of the most universally popular mistakes that have to do with photography – that of classing supposedly excellent work as professional, and using the term amateur to convey the idea of immature productions and to excuse atrociously poor 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; and viewed in this light the incorrectness of the popular classification is readily apparent. – Alfred Stieglitz

• Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• It matters little how much equipment we use; it matters much that we be masters of all we do use. - Sam Abell

• Photography is not about cameras, gadgets and gismos. Photography is about photographers. A camera didn't make a great picture any more than a typewriter wrote a great novel. - Peter Adams

• To see in color is a delight for the eye but to see in black and white is a delight for the soul. – Andri Cauldwell

• A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words. - Ansel Adams

• To take photographs means to recognize -- simultaneously and within a fraction of a second -- both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks! - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• You don’t take a photograph, you make it. – Ansel Adams

• I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don’t find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges. – William Albert Allard

• A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people. - Annie Leibovitz

• I'm not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It's drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff, sniff – being sensitive to coincidence. You can't go looking for it; you can't want it, or you want get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art. - Ansel Adams

• There is nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept. - Ansel Adams

• I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed - Garry Winogrand

• Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop. –Ansel Adams

• In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• Memory is very important, the memory of each photo taken, flowing at the same speed as the event. During the work, you have to be sure that you haven't left any holes, that you've captured everything, because afterwards it will be too late. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• There is no closed figure in nature. Every shape participates with another. No one thing is independent of another, and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition – an organic coordination of visual elements. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• What we do during our working hours determines what we have; what we do in our leisure hours determines what we are. – George Eastman

• Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera." - Dorthea Lange

• As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships. – Ansel Adams

• I discovered that while many photographers think alike when it comes to equipment and chemistry, there are seldom two who agree on anything when it comes to what constitutes a good image. - Peter Adams

• I’m looking for the unexpected. I’m looking for things I’ve never seen before. – Robert Mapplethorpe

• Having and camera makes you no more a photographer than having a hammer and some nails makes you a carpenter. - Claude Adams

• Sharpness is a bourgeois concept. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• You learn to see by practice. It’s just like playing tennis, you get better the more you play. The more you look around at things, the more you see. The more you photograph, the more you realize what can be photographed and what can’t be photographed. You just have to keep doing it. – Eliot Porter

• In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it. – Emile Zola

• In photojournalistic reporting, inevitably, you’re an outsider. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

• One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind.” - Dorothea Lange

• A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed. - Ansel Adams

• A mad, keen photographer needs to get out into the world and work and make mistakes. - Sam Abell

• Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like." David Alan Harvey

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

• Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs. - Ansel Adams

• Of course it's all luck. - Henri Cartier-Bresson