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20 Quotes By Photographer Gregory Heisler

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Enjoy this collection of quotes by Gregory Heisler.
“A photographer is responsible for creating a climate in which they can do their best work.” – Gregory Heisler
“Photography’s 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent moving furniture.” – Gregory Heisler
“Shoot what you can’t help but shoot” – Gregory Heisler
“To me, style is like your fingerprint. Nobody else has it.” – Gregory Heisler
“Magazines don’t have enough confidence to have their own style, so they use a borrowed style. That is shocking to me, but your perception is very accurate. It’s a way to be more commercially viable, but to me, that’s not having a style, that’s having a schtick.” – Gregory Heisler
“Normally I do all my own post work. It’s not that I do it better than anyone else, I just do it my way. I make decisions. People who print at labs are probably far better printers, but they won’t make my decisions mid-process. I don’t want to be out of the loop. I want to be a photographer and do all of it.” – Gregory Heisler
“There are a lot of decisions to make, creatively. Now, with digital, you can really be the author of your own work. From the beginning to the end of the process, you control everything.” – Gregory Heisler
“Photography’s 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent moving furniture.” ― Gregory Heisler
“People aren’t hiring just a picture, they’re hiring someone they can work with. That plays a big role.” – Gregory Heisler
“Fulfill the assignment first. I aim to please, probably to a fault. This is not a strategy I’d recommend to the next photographer, because it can curtail one’s own creative impulses. As a solution, photographers sometimes shoot two variations of a picture: one for the client that addresses the assignment and one for themselves that floats their boat.” ― Gregory Heisler
“I hate to say it because I think people are risk averse these days more than ever. Before they even pick up the phone, they know what the picture’s going to be. So there’s a certain comfort in that, a certain security that they can lay out the cover of the magazine and kind of know what it’s going to be.” – Gregory Heisler
“The picture I was hoping for is never the picture I get, but yeah, I think they fail all the time. Fortunately my clients don’t think they do, so I can continue to have a career. But I just look at them and think.” – Gregory Heisler
“I never do pictures that I’ve done before – but I really try not to. Whenever I get an assignment I try to think how to shoot this person for this story in this magazine at this point in time.” – Gregory Heisler
“The work is primarily subject-driven. All decisions flow from there. The photographs are all made in response to a unique subject, in particular context, at a specific moment in time. The thoughtful preparedness that defines my working method actually facilitates spontaneity and allows me to embrace surprise. I always have a game plan but view it as merely the jumping off point.” – Gregory Heisler
“A lot of the challenge and the reason for the success of those one-shot photographers is that their pictures almost have to be subject proof. Because you usually only have a few minutes with the person. You never know who’s going to walk into the room – whether they’re going to be friendly, grumpy, sick of photographers, or between meetings.” – Gregory Heisler
“It happens a lot. The first frame is the winner.” ― Gregory Heisler
“Photography isn’t just the “premier coup,” it’s the only coup. That’s the very essence of photographic portraiture. Whatever happens in front of the lens stays. What’s captured during the encounter is all that exists. A photograph has to bring all of his or her resources to bear on the moment of exposure. All the planning, intuition, technical prowess, and knowledge, as well as the trust and rapport you have (or haven’t) established, will show up in the picture, frozen forever. It’s like an interview, except that’s no opportunity for a follow-up question. It triggers a classic left/right brain struggle: spontaneous yet calculated, emotional and rational. It’s exciting but terrifying, thrilling when it works and heartbreaking when it doesn’t.” – Greg Heisler
“What is so appealing about black and white? Well, first of all, it’s unshackled from color, unfettered by the burden of wrangling the randomness of color as it exists in the world. By its very nature, black and white abstracts the images from reality and forces us to engage with it anew. Even the phrase “documentary black and white” is a bit of an oxymoron because a black-and-white image is anything but an accurate record being on enormous step removed from reality. But this frees up the photographer to see the world and re-create it in a fresh way, shifting the images can be symbolic or specific, a subtle statement or a sledgehammer. It can’t help but be more subjective, more right-brained communication.” – Greg Heisler
“I wanted to grow in terms of making pictures, not adapting to new software and technology. But that’s the game now.” – Gregory Heisler
“The kinds of pictures I want to take are the ones I don’t know how to make. And I don’t know what they’re going to look like yet, but I don’t want to keep on taking the pictures that I already took. I’m proud of them, I like them, but I don’t feel like I need to do more of them. I feel like moving in a different direction.” – Gregory Heisler
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10 Quotes By Photographer Richard Benson

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Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Richard Benson.
“I’ve always believed and I continue to believe that the elite of the world are the people who make things. And the lower class are the people who think, dwell on their thoughts and exchange ideas.” – Richard Benson
“I believe art, pieces of art, are pieces of understanding that you can’t render in any form other than the physical form in which you make the piece of art.” – Richard Benson
“The difference between an artist and a craftsman is that a craftsman is interested in his or her tools and an artist disdains them.” – Richard Benson
“I think nothing is more boring than to spend your time figuring out how to make a thing absolutely beautifully. I think you should make a thing as well as you need to make it to make it carry across the thing you’re trying to make clear and no better.” – Richard Benson
“The worst possible thing you can do is to waste your energy trying to get all the little tiny bits and pieces right because when you get all those right the important things are wrong. So whenever I make something I just try to get the big issues roughly correct. I have no interest in getting the little things all precise.” – Richard Benson
“If you try to reproduce a picture you can’t get it to be the same. If you can’t make it the same what you have to do is you’ve got to figure out what’s important about the thing. And you have to figure out the means by which the important thing is made clear in the original object. And you have to figure out what the new means are by which you can make the thing clear in the new context.” – Richard Benson
“I think there’s a real problem because we overintellectualize the things we make as artists and it’s compounded by the fact that today there is sort of a current idea that the thing about art is the way it’s about art.” – Richard Benson
“What can be more interesting than trying to make a picture or some thing that says something about the human condition – not the art condition. I’m interested in the human condition – not the art condition” – Richard Benson
“There is a great lesson in this for photographers of today who dedicate themselves to one project or another, failing to understand that the best work might come from an obsession with the medium rather than the personally oriented choice of what might be done with it. Lee always has a camera with him and is constantly making pictures. How much better the work of today might be if all the young and dedicated photographers took up this habit.” – Richard Benson
“This thing about technology as time changes is a really interesting thing. And how we keep trying to do good things with it is really complicated. I believe that the way in which we lived in the past was a way that lent itself to the tremendous kind of achievement concentrated in a single thing like a painting. And I believe the way we live now does not lead us to that. That is what I think is sad. Instead it leads us to photographs, where we have thousands of them and it seems to me that on a very basic level the effort is diluted over this broader area.” – Richard Benson
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11 Quotes By Photographer Julia Margaret Cameron

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“Beauty, you’re under arrest. I have a camera, and I’m not afraid to use it.” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied.” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“I turned my coal-house into my dark room, and a glazed fowl house I had given to my children became my glass house! The hens were liberated, I hope and believe not eaten… all hands and hearts sympathised in my new labour, since the society of hens and chickens was soon changed for that of poets, prophets, painters and lovely maidens, who all in turn have immortalized the humble little farm erection.” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“I believe that… my first successes in my out-of-focus pictures were a fluke. That is to say, that when focusing and coming to something which, to my eye, was very beautiful, I stopped there instead of screwing on the lens to the more definite focus which all other photographers insist upon… ” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“What is focus and who has the right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the Real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and Beauty. ” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour, and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“When an actor is in the moment, he or she is engaged in listening for the next right thing creatively. When a painter is painting, he or she may begin with a plan, but that plan is soon surrendered to the painting’s own plan. This is often expressed as ‘The brush takes the next stroke.’ In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express.” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer.” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“Personal sympathy has helped me on very much. My husband from first to last has watched every picture with delight, and it is my daily habit to run to him with every glass upon which a fresh glory is newly stamped, and to listen to his enthusiastic applause. This habit of running into the dining-room with my wet pictures has stained such an immense quantity of table linen with nitrate of silver, indelible stains, that I should have been banished from any less indulgent household.” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.” – Julia Margaret Cameron
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20 Quotes By Photographer Arnold Newman

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Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Arnold Newman.
“There are many things that are very false about photography when it is accepted without question. You must recognize and interpret it as you would any other art form, and then maybe it is a little more than real.” – Arnold Newman
“A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they’ll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won’t do a thing for you if you don’t have anything in your head or in your heart.”
― Arnold Newman
“We don’t take pictures with cameras – we take them with our hearts and minds.” – Arnold Newman
“The camera is a mirror with a memory, but it cannot think.” – Arnold Newman
“Visual ideas combined with technology combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold it’s own; if it doesn’t, the thing collapses.” – Arnold Newman
“Influences come from everywhere but when you are actually shooting you work primarily by instinct. But what is instinct? It is a lifetime accumulation of influence: experience, knowledge, seeing and hearing. There is little time for reflection in taking a photograph. All your experiences come to a peak and you work on two levels: conscious and unconscious.” – Arnold Newman
“There are very few Cartier-Bressons, Brassais, and W. Eugene Smiths in the world, but to me these men are photographers. They are artists because they make statements that all of us wish we could have made.” – Arnold Newman
“I didn’t set out to do something different so much as do something that interested me. I wasn’t trying to be avant-garde – that’s being fashionable. You don’t set out to revolutionize art, you make statements for yourself.” – Arnold Newman
“The photographer must be a part of the picture.” – Arnold Newman
“I don’t think any student, any photographer, any person should take pictures the way I take pictures. I build them because it’s the way I am, and that’s the way I should be. If I try to be something else and try to take pictures or talk to you humorously because I think I’ll get a few laughs, no. Somebody else, like Duane Michals might be basically funny. He is that way, he makes me laugh all the time. But he is being himself. A writer must be himself, a painter, all of us – or else suddenly we lose what we have.” – Arnold Newman
“A preoccupation with abstraction, combined with an interest in the documentation of people in their natural surroundings, was the basis upon which I built my approach to portraiture. The portrait of a personality must be as complete as we can make it. The physical image of the subject and the personality traits that image reflects are the most important aspects, but alone they are not enough…We must also show the subject’s relationship to his world either by fact or by graphic symbolism. The photographer’s visual approach must weld these ideas into an organic whole, and the photographic image produced must create an atmosphere which reflects our impressions of the whole.” – Arnold Newman
“There are no rules and regulations for perfect composition. If there were we would be able to put all the information into a computer and would come out with a masterpiece. We know that’s impossible. You have to compose by the seat of your pants.” – Arnold Newman
“I am always lining things up, measuring angles, even during this interview. I’m observing the way you sit and the way you fit into the composition of the space around you.” – Arnold Newman
“I think photography is a matter of controlling what’s in front of you and making it do your will. This, of course, implies absolute mastery over camera, medium, techniques, and the ability to work with the subject and get him willingly and happily without any self-conscious feeling to fall into those things which are natural to him. This is a very complicated thing to do in portraiture. Mine are deliberately self-conscious portraits and therefore contain no forced feeling of candidness… the subject is unaware of the fact that I am waiting – things begin to happen – the man begins to reveal himself. If the background becomes overwhelming and you lose the personality, then I have not made a good portrait and it is not a good picture. I think the world is full of intelligent people who are not really trying to be flattered; what they really want is to be understood”. The more I get to know my subject the more he gets to know me, and so often the pictures taken at the end of a sitting are much better both creatively and interpretively… A photographer is always in a state of preparing himself for a given moment… we have only an instant in which to think and act.” – Arnold Newman
“It seems to me that no one picture can ever be a final summation of a personality. There are so many facets in every human being that it is impossible to present them all in one photograph.” – Arnold Newman
“I’m convinced that any photographic attempt to show the complete man is utter nonsense, to an extent. We can only show, as best we can, what the outer man reveals; the inner man is seldom revealed to anyone, sometimes not even to the man himself. We have to interpret.” – 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.”- Arnold Newman
“Fantasy is like poetry; it can point to the truth.” – Arnold Newman
“I don’t care what you do with that negative, you can retouch it, you can spit on it, you can grind it underfoot. The only thing that matters is if it is honest. If (the picture) is honest, you and everybody can tell. If it is dishonest, you and everybody can tell.” – Arnold Newman
“I often wonder whether I would have done as well in painting.” – Arnold Newman
“Photography is 1% talent and 99% moving furniture.” – Arnold Newman
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12 Quotes By Photographer Arthur Meyerson

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Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Arthur Meyerson.
“I usually am going out there in a very “open” state of mind and, therefore, my choices are totally instinctual based on whatever is in front of me.” – Arthur Meyerson
“At almost every workshop I’ve taught, someone will come up and ask me what they should shoot and/or where they should go to shoot. I try to explain that photography is a process… a process of discovery. Not only do you discover things to shoot, you discover things about yourself as a photographer. And, you discover what your interests really are and how best to capture those subjects. One suggestion I always make is to avoid preconceptions. Planning can be highly overrated. Don’t go out there with a definitive idea of what you want to shoot. Leave yourself open to chance… whether it’s the light, a moment, etc. This way you will avoid being disappointed by what you don’t find and instead be amazed by what you do!” – Arthur Meyerson
“The type of photographs that I make are more about a response to light.” – Arthur Meyerson
“I began to feel that if I was a good photographer I should be able to produce strong images all day long regardless of the time of day, weather, location or subject. So, it is important to learn to play the hand that’s dealt to you.” – Arthur Meyerson
“I started in black and white and later moved to color. Many have equated this to learning to draw before learning to paint.” – Arthur Meyerson
“For me, a good color photograph has always been more difficult to create than a good black and white image.” – Arthur Meyerson
“There are a couple of tests I apply to determine the strength of a color photograph. First, if I transpose it to black and white, is the image stronger? If yes, then I feel I have failed. In a color photograph, color must be part of the total equation. The next test is time. Print the photo, hang it on the wall, look at it everyday. Have I grown bored with it? Does the color still add? Does the photograph still resonate with me?” – Arthur Meyerson
“All the colors in the image work together within the composition and add to the overall image…. allowing me to express what I can’t express otherwise.” – Arthur Meyerson
“One of the great lessons that I learned from Ernst Haas in working with color, was to throw the picture out of focus, thus, eliminating the subject and then allowing you to see how the colors balance.” – Arthur Meyerson
“Early on, I realized that a graphic image, among other things, can be a useful tool. It can provide an exclamation point to an image. It can become a great simplifier to complex image. It can become an abstraction. It can become the image. At it’s best, it can take the viewer into a whole other world. On the other hand, an overly graphic image can create a very quick “Wow!” sensation and then upon further viewing, lose that original power because it has been discovered. I think the best graphic images are those where the compositions are less obvious and/or include a counterpoint.” – Arthur Meyerson
“I have always felt that my most successful photographs are like short stories; they say the most with the least. The best photographs don’t always have stories with answers; sometimes they’re stories that ask questions. And, sometimes they’re not stories at all; instead they may be visual poems.” – Arthur Meyerson
“When you shoot an assignment, you owe it to the client to try it their way; you owe it to yourself to do it your way and if they don’t like either, you’ll be hitting the highway.” – Arthur Meyerson
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10 Quotes By Photographer Irving Penn

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Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Irving Penn.
“I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That’s the curse of being a photographer.” – Irving Penn
“A good photograph is one that communicate a fact, touches the heart, leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.” – Irving Penn
“I myself have always stood in the awe of the camera. I recognize it for the instrument it is, part Stradivarius, part scalpel.” – Irving Penn
“A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.” – Irving Penn
“Over the years I must have spent thousands of hours silently brushing on the liquid coatings, preparing each sheet in anticipation of reaching the perfect print.” – Irving Penn
“I’ve tried a few times to depart from what I know I can do, and I’ve failed. I’ve tried to work outside the studio, but it introduces too many variables that I can’t control. I’m really quite narrow, you know.” – Irving Penn
“Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is the one they would like to show to the world… Every so often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.” – Irving Penn
“Many photographers feel their client is the subject. My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I’m trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader. The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.” – Irving Penn
“What I really try to do is photograph people at rest, in a state of serenity.” – Irving Penn
“I feed on art more than I ever do on photographs. I can admire photography, but I wouldn’t go to it out of hunger.” – Irving Penn
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7 Quotes By Photographer Harold Edgerton

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Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Harold Edgerton.
“If you don’t wake up at three in the morning and want to do something, you’re wasting your time. ” – Harold Egerton
“When I was a boy, I read with great interest but skepticism about as magic lamp which was used with success by a certain Aladdin. Today I have no skepticism whatsoever about the magic of the xenon flash lamp which we use so effectively for many purposes.” – Harold Egerton
“The trick to education is to teach people in such a way that they don’t realize they’re learning until it’s too late.” – Harold Eugene Edgerton
“We worked and worked, didn’t get anywhere. That’s how you know you’re doing research.” – Harold Egerton
“In many ways, unexpected results are what have most inspired my photography.” – Harold Egerton
“Don’t make me out to be an artist. I am an engineer. I am after the facts, only the facts.” – Harold Egerton
“Work like hell, tell everyone everything you know, close a deal with a handshake, and have fun.” – Harold Egerton
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18 Quotes By Photographer Edward Burtynsky

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Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Edward Burtynsky.
“[Taking good images] is about knowing oneself and trying to listen to that kind of intuitive forces that allow you to respond more positively to one image or to one subject over another and pay attention to that emotion and to follow that and also to be aware of it.” – Edward Burtynsky
“I think you learn about pictures in yourself … being true to things that you personally respond to and this is the only way you find your original voice, by following your own instinct.” – Edward Burtynsky
“You need to have an inquiring mind. You have to ask questions (…), not accept what is given, but say: “Why is it so?” And it is in that kind of asking that you begin to get behind some of the issues that allow the world appear the way it does. So if you just accept the world the way it is and don’t question it I can’t see how you can go far creatively.” – Edward Burtynsky
“Sometimes you don’t know why you’re doing something. You’re intuitively following, to see where it leads.” – Edward Burtynsky
“Somebody referred to what I do as subliminal activism, which I like.” – Edward Burtynsky
“I wish my artwork could persuade millions of people to join a global conversation about sustainability.” – Edward Burtynsky
“We come from the nature and we have to understand what it is, because we are conected to it and we are part of it. And if we destroy nature we destroy ourselves” – Edward Burtynsky
“Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.
These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.” – Edward Burtynsky
“Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can’t.” – Edward Burtynsky
“I’m working in this very complex set of issues having to do with who we are as a species and how much we can do to the Earth before it starts to buckle under. My work can easily read as an indictment, but I don’t see it as that simple a problem.” – Edward Burtynsky
“I can go into the wilderness and not see anyone for days and experience a kind of space that hasn’t changed for tens of thousands of years. Having that experience was necessary to my perception of how photography can look at the changes humanity has brought about in the landscape. My work does become a kind of lament.” – Edward Burtynsky
“Industrial landscape – define us and our belonging to the planet.” – Edward Burtynsky
“Water, like many other resources, is harvested, transported and used throughout all aspects of society. Unlike other resources, water is critical to the survival of all forms of life. The underlying question that sits at the core of my exploration is to what degree can we shape water before it begins to shape us.” – Edward Burtynsky
“I think the environmental movement has failed in that it’s used the stick too much; it’s used the apocalyptic tone too much; it hasn’t sold the positive aspects of being environmentally concerned and trying to pull us out.” – Edward Burtynsky
“Digital photography and Photoshop have made it very easy for people to take pictures. It’s a medium that allows a lot of mediocre stuff to get through.” – Edward Burtynsky
“I wish I could create an IMAX film that would make my work accessible to a broader audience.” – Edward Burtynsky
“I wish we could launch a ground-breaking competition that motivates kids to invent new ideas in sustainable living.” – Edward Burtynsky
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23 Quotes By Photographer Paul Strand

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Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Paul Strand.
“Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.” – Paul Strand
“I’ve always wanted to be aware of what’s going on around me, and I’ve wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time.” – Paul Strand
“Your photography is a record of your living – for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people’s ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzche meant when he said, ‘I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him.’ He knew how insidious other people’s ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own personal vision.” – Paul Strand
“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 meaningness. 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.” – Paul Strand
“The material of the artist lies not within himself nor in the fabrications of his imagination, but in the world around him. The element which gives life to the great Picassos and Cezannes, to the paintings of Van Gogh, is the relationship of the artist to context, to the truth of the real world. It is the way he sees this world and translates it into art that determines whether the work of art becomes a new and active force within reality, to widen and transform man’s experience. The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.” – Paul Strand
“The camera machine cannot evade the objects which are in front of it. When the photographer selects this movement, the light, the objects, he must be true to them. If he includes in his space a strip of grass, it must be felt as the living differentiated thing it is and so recorded. It must take its proper but no less important place as a shape and a texture in relationship to the mountain tree or what not, which are included.” – Paul Strand
“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.” – Paul Strand
“I go and get the camera and do it. Photography is a medium in which if you don’t do it then, very often you don’t do it at all, because it doesn’t happen twice. A rock will probably always be more or less there juts the way you saw it yesterday. But other things change, they’re not always there the day after or the week after. Either you do it or you don’t. Certainly with things as changeable as shy and landscape with moving clouds and so on, if they look wonderful to you on a certain day and if you don’t do it then, you may never see them again for the rest of your life. So as a photographer you become very conscious – at least I do – that everything is in movement.” – Paul Strand
“The documentary photographer aims his camera at the real world to record truthfulness. At the same time, he must strive for form, to devise effective ways of organizing and using the material. For content and form are interrelated. The problems presented by content and form must be so developed that the result is fundimentally true to the realities of life as we know it. The chief problem is to find a form that adequately represents the reality.” – Paul Strand
“All good art is abstract in its structure.” – Paul Strand
“Objectivity is of the very essence of photography, its contribution and at the same time its limitation…” – Paul Strand
“Honesty no less than intensity of vision is the prerequisite of a living expression. This means a real respect for the thing in front of… the photographer… this is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation through the use of straight photographic methods…” – Paul Strand
“The existence of a medium, after all, is its absolute justification, if as so many seem to think, it needs one and all comparison of potentialities is useless and irrelevant. Whether a water-color is inferior to an oil, or whether a drawing, an etching, or a photograph is not as important as either, is inconsequent. To have to despise something in order to respect something else is a sign of impotence. [emphasis added] Let us rather accept joyously and with gratitude everything through which the spirit of man seeks to an ever fuller and more intense self-realization.” – Paul Strand
“Did I express my personality? I think that’s quite unimportant because it’s not people’s selves but what they have to say about life that’s important.” – Paul Strand
“It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.” – Paul Strand
“No matter what lens you use, no matter what speed the film, no matter how you develop it, no matter how you print it, you cannot say more than you can see.” – Paul Strand
“The important thing is, you have to have something important to say about the world.” – Paul Strand
“The artist is one who makes a concentrated statement about the world in which he lives and that statement tends to become impersonal—it tends to become universal and enduring because it comes out of something very particular.” – Paul Strand
“It has always been my belief that the true artist, like the true scientist, is a researcher using materials and techniques to dig into the truth and meaning of the world in which he himself lives; and what he creates, or better perhaps, brings back, are the objective results of his explorations. The measure of his talent––of his genius, if you will––is the richness he finds in such a life’s voyage of discovery and the effectiveness with which he is able to embody it through his chosen medium.” – Paul Strand
“And if you can find out something about the laws of your own growth and vision as well as those of photography you may be able to relate the two, create an object that has a life of its own, which transcends craftsmanship. That is a long road, and because it must be your own road nobody can teach it to you or find it for you. There are no shortcuts, no rules.” – Paul Strand
“The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.” – Paul Strand
“If the photographer is not a discoverer, then he is not an artist.” – Paul Strand
“Photography is only a new road from a different direction, but moving toward the common goal, which is life.” – Paul Strand
“I think of myself as an explorer who has spent his life on a long voyage of discovery.” – Paul Strand
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23 Quotes By Photographer Keith Carter

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Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Keith Carter.
“At a fundamental level photography is much like pointing, and all of us occasionally point at things: look at that, look at that sailboat, look at that tree, etc. etc.” – Keith Carter
“The raw materials of photography are light and time and memory.” – Keith Carter
“Sharpness is overrated.” – Keith Carter
“When I started using the extreme short depth of field and single point of focus, I was trying to replicate my changing eyesight. We have binocular vision; one eye perceives space from the other. I don’t experience a scene visually at F32. It’s more like F1.4.” – Keith Carter
“I think the equipment you use has a real, visible influence on the character of your photography. You’re going to work differently, and make different kinds of pictures, if you have to set up a view camera on a tripod than if you’re Lee Friedlander with handheld 35 mm rangefinder. But fundamentally, vision is not about which camera or how many megapixels you have, it’s about what you find important. It’s all about ideas.” – Keith Carter
“In the history of photography, one process has always replaced another. The tumultuous realignment that’s going on in the photography now is really just a natural evolution. The irony is that none of the processes that have been replaced have disappeared. More people than ever are practicing every approach to shooting and printing.” – Keith Carter
“I love the history of photography and one process has always replaced another. However, very, very few have disappeared.” – Keith Carter
“I think there is an element of magic in photography — light, chemistry, precious metals — a certain alchemy. You can wield a camera like a magic wand almost. Murmur the right words and you can conjure up proof of a dream. I believe in wonder. I look for it in my life every day; I find it in the most ordinary things.” ― Keith Carter
“I think you go through stages in making art. In the first stages you get excited about the medium itself. It offers a very immediate kind of gratification. Here is what I see and here is a picture of it. Then it gets harder. Then you find somebody whose work excites you, such as Robert Frank, and it opens up new doors and so you replicate them or you do work that is influenced by them. I think all of that is very, very useful in terms of your own growth. Because if you have anything at all, you will only do that for a while, and then you use what you have learned and you try to turn it into your own voice. That is where things really get hard. If you can make that leap, then you start making personal work. Personal work is where most people stop. Most people stop when it gets personal. I will tell you my greatest secret, and I probably shouldn’t, but I will tell you anyway. Here is what I think and feel and I hope it is useful to you. If you really want to do something special, if you want to make poetry, and granted most people don’t, but if you do, you have to go beyond what is merely personal. You have to reach a level in the human psyche where we are all the same. That is the real journey.” ― Keith Carter
“I live in a small place more urban centers make fun of, where art is not necessarily the first thing in most people’s minds, and I thought: Gee, I don’t need to go in some exotic locations to make a meaningful picture, why don’t I just play like I came from China and I was transplanted into this culture, with this people and this language and this landscape and this architecture and this music and all these animals I’ve never seen before… why don’t I try to belong to my own place and make pictures that I really would like to make. I started doing that and it was the first time that anybody started paying attention to my work.” – Keith Carter
“I like small things, I like small moments that are almost elliptical, that are not necessarily linear; they’re natural things that happen in the world, but if you look at them from a slight angle there’s more than meets the eye.” – Keith Carter
“I don’t just look at the thing itself or at the reality itself; I look around the edges for those little askew moments — kind of like what makes up our lives – those slightly awkward, lovely moments.” – Keith Carter
“I don’t think science is necessarily incompatible with mystical or spiritual sensibilities. I often weigh them equally in my thinking, which sometimes finds itself into the work.” – Keith Carter
“I like to work in the real world, so I do a lot of searching or just simple looking. But I’m not above tweaking reality and making something up. I don’t think there are any rules in art. It’s not so much what you see as it is the significance you, the artist, see in it.” – Keith Carter
“I’m fond of implied narratives, oblique angles, and leaving a little room for the viewer to finish a picture.” – Keith Carter
“Your ideas come out of the way you conduct your life.” – Keith Carter
“Making these photographs has often seemed to me like a kind of dance. Often I have danced badly and the world has fallen apart at my feet. But sometimes the dance has gone well and my subject and I have moved together as if with shared purpose.” – Keith Carter
“I like what Wallace Stevens said: “Poetry must almost successfully resist intelligence.” I just change the word “poetry” to “my photographs.” – Keith Carter
“Poetry at least in my own life, is really about your own mortality. Everything in poetry makes me think of my mortality. It is not a dark thing in life; it prepares you for the graceful things that happen in your life. It gives me a license to make any kind of picture I want with great courage.” – Keith Carter
“You are lucky if you have one or two epiphanies in your life, particularly a creative one.” – Keith Carter
“I don’t know if I can articulate how I feel. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would make it here.” – Keith Carter
“How do you find a way to say what an extraordinary experience it is to be alive in this world? That is the kind of subject matter I try to work with.” – Keith Carter
“I want to be made better personally. That is the gig.” – Keith Carter
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