26 Quotes By Photographer W Eugene Smith

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Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes by photographer W. Eugene Smith.
“Available light is any damn light that is available!” – W. Eugene Smith
“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.” – W. Eugene Smith
“[I crop ] for the benefit of the pictures. The world just does not fit conveniently into the format of a 35mm camera.” – W. Eugene Smith
“Hardening of the categories causes art disease.” – W. Eugene Smith
“Most photographers seem to operate with a pane of glass between themselves and their subjects. They just can’t get inside and know the subject.” – W. Eugene Smith
“What uses having a great depth of field, if there is not an adequate depth of feeling?” – W. Eugene Smith
“Passion is in all great searches and is necessary to all creative endeavors.” – W. Eugene Smith
“The purpose of all art is to cause a deep and emotion, also one that is entertaining or pleasing. Out of the depth and entertainment comes value.” – W. Eugene Smith
“I’ve never made any picture, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.” – W. Eugene Smith
“An artist must be ruthlessly selfish.” – W. Eugene Smith
“In music I still prefer the minor key, and in printing I like the light coming from the dark. I like pictures that surmount the darkness, and many of my photographs are that way. It is the way I see photographically. For practical reasons, I think it looks better in print too.” – W. Eugene Smith
“My pictures are complex and so am I.” – W. Eugene Smith
“I am constantly torn between the attitude of the conscientious journalist who is a recorder and interpreter of the facts and of the creative artist who often is necessarily at poetic odds with the literal facts.” – W. Eugene Smith,
“Up to and including the moment of exposure, the photographer is working in an undeniably subjective way. By his choice of technical approach, by the selection of the subject matter…and by his decision as to the exact cinematic instant of exposure, he is blending the variables of interpretation into an emotional whole.” – W. Eugene Smith
“The journalistic photographer can have no other than a personal approach; and it is impossible for him to be completely objective. Honest—yes. Objective—no.” – W. Eugene Smith
“I didn’t write the rules. Why would I follow them?” – W. Eugene Smith
“I am an idealist. I often feel I would like to be an artist in an ivory tower. Yet it is imperative that I speak to people, so I must desert that ivory tower. To do this, I am a journalist—a photojournalist. But I am 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. My principle concern is for honesty, above all honesty with myself…” – W. Eugene Smith
“My photographs at best hold only a small length, but through them I would suggest and criticize and illuminate and try to give compassionate understanding.” – W. Eugene Smith
“The photographer must bear the responsibility for his work and its effect …[for] photographic journalism, because of its tremendous audience reached by publications using it, has more influence on public thinking than any other branch of photography.” – W. Eugene Smith
“… to became neighbours and friends instead of journalists. This is the way to make your finest photographs.” – W. Eugene Smith
“I try to take what voice I have and I give it to those who don’t have one at all.” – W. Eugene Smith
“I would that my photographs might be, not the coverage of a news event, but an indictment of war.” – W. Eugene Smith
“Many claim I am a photographer of tragedy. In the greater sense I am not, for though I often photograph where the tragic emotion is present, the result is almost invariably affirmative.” – W. Eugene Smith
“I can’t stand these damn shows on museum walls with neat little frames, where you look at the images as if they were pieces of art. I want them to be pieces of life!” – W. Eugene Smith
“…and each time I pressed the shutter release it was a shouted condemnation hurled with the hope that the picture might survive through the years, with the hope that they might echo through the minds of men in the future – causing them caution and remembrance and realization.” – W. Eugene Smith
“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.” – W. Eugene Smith
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22 Quotes By Photographer Sally Mann

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Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes by Sally Mann.
“One of the things my career as an artist might say to young artists is: The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best. And unless you photograph what you love, you are not going to make good art.” – Sally Mann
“it’s always been my philosophy to try to make art out of the everyday and ordinary…it never occurred to me to leave home to make art.” – Sally Mann
“Unless you photograph what you love, you are not going to make good art.” – Sally Mann
“ If I could be said to have any kind of aesthetic, it’s sort of a magpie aesthetic—I just go and pick up whatever is around. If you think about it, the children were there, so I took pictures of my children. It’s not that I’m interested in children that much or photographing them—it’s just that they were there…” – Sally Mann
“Every image is in some way a “portrait,” not in the way that it would reproduce the traits of a person, but in that it pulls and draws (this is the semantic and etymological sense of the word), in that it extracts something, an intimacy, a force.” – Sally Mann
“I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. The lessons of impermanance, the occasional despair and the muse, so tenuously moored, all visit their needs upon me and I dig deeply for the spiritual utilities that restore me: my love for the place, for the one man left, for my children and friends and the great green pulse of spring.” – Sally Mann
“When the good pictures come, we hope they tell truths, but truths “told slant,” just as Emily Dickinson commanded. ” – Sally Mann
“What is truth in photography? It can be told in a hundred different ways. Every thirtieth of a second when the shutter snaps, its capturing a different piece of information.” – Sally Mann
“I think truth is a layered phenomenon. There are many truths that accumulate and build up. I am trying to peel back and explore these rich layers of truth. All truths are difficult to reach.” – Sally Mann
“If it doesn’t have ambiguity, don’t bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography—the mendacity of photography—it’s got to have some kind of peculiarity in it or it’s not interesting to me.” – Sally Mann
“Some of my pictures are poem-like in the sense that they are very condensed, haiku-lik. There are others that, if they were poetry, would be more like Ezra Pound. There is a lot of information in most of my pictures, but not the kind of information you see in documentary photography. There is emotional information in my photographs.” – Sally Mann
“I wish I could be a better writer, but writing is so difficult. I get seduced by visual aesthetics. Because I just like making beautiful pictures, sometimes I wander away from making a clear statement.” – Sally Mann
“There is a great quote from a female writer. She said, ‘If you don’t break out in a sweat of fear when you write, you are not writing well enough.” I tend to agree. I think my best pictures come when I push myself.” – Sally Mann
“I like to make people a little uncomfortable. It encourages them to examine who they are and why they think the way they do.” – Sally Mann
“Sometimes I think the only memories I have are those that I’ve created around photographs of me as a child. Maybe I’m creating my own life. I distrust any memories I do have. They may be fictions, too.” – Sally Mann
“Like all photographers, I depend on serendipity… I pray for what might be referred to as the angel of chance.” – Sally Mann
“I’m so worried that I’m going to perfect [my] technique someday. I have to say its unfortunate how many of my pictures do depend upon some technical error.” – Sally Mann
“All the good pictures that came so easily now make the next set of pictures virtually impossible in your mind.” – Sally Mann
“There’s always a time in any series of work where you get to a certain point and your work is going steadily and each picture is better than the next, and then you sort of level off and that’s when you realize that it’s not that each picture is better then the next, it’s that each picture up’s the ante. And that every time you take one good picture, the next one has got to be better.” – Sally Mann
“ Sometimes, when I get a good picture, it feels like I have taken another nervous step into increasingly rarified air. Each good-news picture, no matter how hard-earned, allows me only a crumbling foothold on this steepening climb—an ascent whose milestones are fear and doubt.” – Sally Mann
“As an artist your trajectory just has to keep going up. the thing that subverts your next body of work is the work you’ve taken before.” – Sally Mann
“Photographs open doors into the past but they also allow a look into the future.” – Sally Mann
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28 Quotes By Photographer Annie Leibovitz

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Here’s a collection  of my favorite quotes by photographer Annie Liebovitz.
“The first thing I did with my very first camera was climb Mt. Fuji. Climbing Mt. Fuji is a lesson in determination and moderation. It would be fair to ask if I took the moderation part to heart. But it certainly was a lesson in respecting your camera. If I was going to live with this thing, I was going to have to think about what that meant. There were not going to be any pictures without it.” – Annie Leibovitz
“One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. It’s on all the time.” – Annie Leibovitz
“I’ve said about a million times that the best thing a young photographer can do is to stay close to home. Start with your friends and family, the people who will put up with you. Discover what it means to be close to your work, to be intimate with a subject. Measure the difference between that and working with someone you don’t know as much about. Of course there are many good photographs that have nothing to do with staying close to home, and I guess what I’m really saying is that you should take pictures of something that has meaning for you…” – Annie Leibovitz
“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
“When you are on assignment, film is the least expensive thing in a very practical sense. Your time, the person’s time, turns out to be the most valuable thing.” – Annie Leibovitz
“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
“A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.” – Annie Leibovitz
“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
“In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what’s going on, but it’s representative.” – Annie Leibovitz
“Coming tight was boring to me, just the face… it didn’t have enough information.” – Annie Leibovitz
“The camera makes you forget you’re there. It’s not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.” – Annie Leibovitz
“When I take a picture I take 10 percent of what I see.” – Annie Leibovitz
“I think self-portraits are very difficult. I’ve always seen mine as straightforward, very stripped down, hair pulled back. No shirt. Whatever light happened to be available. I’d want it to be very graphic – about darkness and light. No one else should be there, but I’m scared to do it by myself. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. The whole idea of a self-portrait is strange. I’m so strongly linked to how I see through the camera that to get to the other side of it would be difficult. It would be as if I were taking a photograph in the dark.” – Annie Leibovitz
“Photography’s like this baby that needs to be fed all the time. It’s always hungry. It needs to be read to, taken care of. I had to nourish my work with different approaches. One of the reasons that I went to Vanity Fair was that I knew I would have a broader range of subjects – writers, dancers, artists and musicians of all kinds. And I wanted to learn about glamour. I admire the work of photographers like Beaton, Penn, and Avedon, as much as I respected grittier photographers such as Robert Frank. But in the same way that I’d had to find my own way of reportage, I had to find my own form of glamour.” – Annie Leibovitz
“When I started to be published I thought about Margaret Bourke-White and the whole journalistic approach to things. I believed I was supposed to catch life going by me – that I wasn’t to alter it or tamper with it – that I was just to watch what was going on and report it as best I could. This shoot with John was different. I got involved, and I realized that you can’t help but be touched by what goes on in front of you. I no longer believe that there is such a thing as objectivity. Everyone has a point of view. Some people call it style, but what we’re really talking about is the guts of a photograph. When you trust your point of view, that’s when you start taking pictures.” – Annie Leibovitz
“You don’t have to sort of enhance reality. There is nothing stranger than truth.” – Annie Leibovitz
“What I am interested in now is the landscape. Pictures without people. I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually there are no people in my pictures. It is so emotional.” – Annie Leibovitz
“Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy – your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself.” – Annie Leibovitz
“I wish that all of nature’s magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.” – Annie Leibovitz
“I’d like to think that the actions we take today will allow others in the future to discover the wonders of landscapes we helped protect but never had the chance to enjoy ourselves.” – Annie Leibovitz
“My hope is that we continue to nurture the places that we love, but that we also look outside our immediate worlds.” – Annie Leibovitz
“There are still so many places on our planet that remain unexplored. I’d love to one day peel back the mystery and understand them.” – Annie Leibovitz
“I feel a responsibility to my backyard. I want it to be taken care of and protected.” – Annie Leibovitz
“I am impressed with what happens when someone stays in the same place and you took the same picture over and over and it would be different, every single frame.” – Annie Leibovitz
“If it makes you cry, it goes in the show.” – Annie Leibovitz
“I’ve always cared more about taking pictures than about the art market”. – Annie Leibovitz
“A very subtle difference can make the picture or not.” – Annie Leibovitz
“I actually love talking about taking pictures, and I think that helps everyone.” – Annie Leibovitz
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12 Quotes By Photographer Robert Frank

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Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes by photographer Robert Frank.
“The eye should learn to listen before it looks.” ― Robert Frank
“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”
― Robert Frank
“A message picture is something that’s simply too clear.” – Robert Frank
“To produce an authentic contemporary document, the visual impact should be such as will nullify explanation.” – 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.” – Robert Frank
“I am always looking outside, trying to say something that is true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what’s out there. And what’s out there is constantly changing.”
― Robert Frank
“There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough – there has to be vision, and the two together can make a good photograph.” – Robert Frank
“I have been frequently accused of deliberately twisting subject matter to my point of view. Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism. But criticism can come out of love.” – Robert Frank
“I always say that I don’t want to be sentimental, that the photographs shouldn’t be sentimental, and yet, I am conscious of my sentimentality.” – Robert Frank
“It is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph.” – Robert Frank
“My photographs are not planned or composed in advance, and I do not anticipate that the onlooker will share my viewpoint. However, I feel that if my photograph leaves an image on his mind, something has been accomplished.” – Robert Frank
“Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference” ― Robert Frank
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22 Quotes By Photographer David LaChapelle

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Here’s a selection of quotes by photographer David LaChapelle.
“I believe in a visual language that should be as strong as the written word.” – David LaChapelle
“I was always painting when I was a kid. But then when I handled a camera when I was 17, that was it for me. I loved photography. I would work 4 or 5 hours a day. It was like a calling.” – David LaChapelle
“I went to art high school and thought I’d be a painter. Unfortunately I didn’t finish high school, but that’s always been part of my work.” – David LaChapelle
“I’m a photographer, period. I love photography, the immediacy of it. I like the craft, the idea of saying ‘I’m a photographer.” – David LaChapelle
“People say photographs don’t lie, mine do.” – David LaChapelle
“I didn’t see any difference between being a photographer or being an artist. I didn’t make those boundaries. If someone wants to think it’s art, that’s great, but I’ll let history decide.” – David LaChapelle
“Then I got this idea in my head that magazines were like a gallery and if you got your magazine page ripped out and someone stuck it on their refrigerator, then that was a museum – someone’s private museum.” – David LaChapelle
“You just do what you love, and then a style happens later on.” – David LaChapelle
“I was working in this very bombastic style. I didn’t really know about style. I didn’t think about it: I did what I was interested in, what I was attracted to, what I was drawn to. I was drawn to color, and I was drawn to humor, and I was drawn to sexuality and spontaneity. It was all really intuitive. I never really thought, “Well this is the style…” – David LaChapelle
“I wanted it to provide an escape route, I wanted to make pictures that were fantastic and took you into another world, one that was brighter. I started off with this idea.” – David LaChapelle
“For me, it’s easier to like more things than to dislike them; I’m not a critic in that sense. I find it easier to like more, to be more open and enjoy more things, which has given me more opportunities.” – David LaChapelle
“I never want people to be repulsed with my pictures; I always want to attract people.” – David LaChapelle
“Just as Renaissance artists provided narratives for the era they lived in, so do I. I’m always looking beyond the surface. I’ve done that ever since I first picked up a camera.” – David LaChapelle
“In the fashion world, I was always an outsider, but I made people look good, so I had a career.” – David LaChapelle
“My idea was that if I took a picture of somebody and years later, or whenever, they would die and if someone wanted to know who this person was, they could take one of these pictures and it would tell who the person was.” – David LaChapelle
“I have this idea that you can use glamour and still have it represent something that matters.” – David LaChapelle
“The tools I learned photographing celebrities, now I want to use them to sell ideas.” – David LaChapelle
“The adornment of the body is a human need. I don’t see anything superficial about it unless your life becomes very materialistic.” – David LaChapelle
“I like thinking about the fragility of the human flesh and our bodies – our decay and eventual death.” – David LaChapelle
“It’s much harder to work for yourself, by yourself, than to create work for a gallery, because there are no limits and you can do anything you want. It’s always easier when you have a parameter, when you have a limit. You can work within the limit and push it and walk the line, but when you’re given absolutely no limits, it’s harder. You must really think. It’s more challenging.” – David LaChapelle
“I’ve never wanted to be part of an inner circle of any scene. I’ve always been an outsider looking to question and subvert.” – David LaChapelle
“Success to me is being a good person, treating people well.” – David LaChapelle
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22 Quotes By Photographer Richard Avedon

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Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes by photographer Richard Avedon.
“I hate cameras. They interfere, they’re always in the way. I wish: if I could just work with my eyes alone.” – Richard Avedon
“I believe that you’ve got to love your work so much that it is all you want to do.” – Richard Avedon
“And if a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it’s as though I’ve neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up. I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.” – Richard Avedon
“I think all art is about control – the encounter between control and the uncontrollable.” – Richard Avedon
“Anything is an art if you do it at the level of an art.” – Richard Avedon
“Camera lies all the time. It’s all it does is lie, because when you choose this moment instead of this moment, when you… the moment you’ve made a choice, you’re lying about something larger. ‘Lying’ is an ugly word. I don’t mean lying. But any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.” – Richard Avedon
“There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” – Richard Avedon
“It’s in trying to direct the traffic between Artiface [sic] and Candor, without being run over, that I’m confronted with the questions about photography that matter most to me.” – Richard Avedon
“I’ve worked out of a series of no’s. No to exquisite light, no to apparent compositions, no to the seduction of poses or narrative. And all these no’s force me to the “yes.” I have a white background. I have the person I’m interested in and the thing that happens between us.” – Richard Avedon
“My photographs don’t go below the surface. They don’t go below anything. They’re readings of the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues.” – Richard Avedon
“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” – Richard Avedon
“The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion ….” – Richard Avedon
“There’s always been a separation between fashion and what I call my “deeper” work. Fashion is where I make my living. I’m not knocking it. It’s a pleasure to make a living that way. It’s pleasure, and then there’s the deeper pleasure of doing my portraits. It’s not important what I consider myself to be, but I consider myself to be a portrait photographer.” – Richard Avedon
“Whenever I become absorbed in the beauty of a face, in the excellence of a single feature, I feel I’ve lost what’s really there…been seduced by someone else’s standard of beauty or by the sitter’s own idea of the best in him. That’s not usually the best. So each sitting becomes a contest.” – Richard Avedon
“The pictures have a reality for me that the people don’t. It is through the photographs that I know them.” – Richard Avedon
“I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.” – Richard Avedon
“A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.” – Richard Avedon
“A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he’s being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he’s wearing or how he looks. He’s implicated in what’s happened, and he has a certain real power over the result.” – Richard Avedon
“Snapshots that have been taken of me working show something I was not aware of at all, that over and over again I’m holding my own body or my own hands exactly like the person I’m photographing. I never knew I did that, and obviously what I’m doing is trying to feel, actually physically feel, the way he or she feels at the moment I’m photographing them in order to deepen the sense of connection.” – Richard Avedon
“If each photograph steals a bit of the soul, isn’t it possible that I give up pieces of mine every time I take a picture?” – Richard Avedon
“My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.” – Richard Avedon
“Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is … the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.” – Richard Avedon
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13 Quotes By Photographer Stephen Shore

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Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes by photographer Stephen Shore.
“I discovered that this camera was the technical means in photography of communicating what the world looks like in a state of heightened awareness. And it’s that awareness of really looking at the everyday world with clear and focused attention that I’m interested in.” – Stephen Shore
“It’s the bane of my existence that I see photography not as a way of recording personal experience particularly, but as this process of exploring the world and the medium. I have to be reminded, “It’s your son’s birthday party. Bring a camera.” And then, when I’m there, “Take a picture,” because it doesn’t occur to me to use it as this memorializing thing.” – Stephen Shore
“I wanted to make pictures that felt natural, that felt like seeing, that didn’t feel like taking something in the world and making a piece of art out of it.” – Stephen Shore
“I do what feels natural, but I can’t say I haven’t thought about it..” – Stephen Shore
“There’s something arbitrary about taking a picture. So I can stand at the edge of a highway and take one step forward and it can be a natural landscape untouched by man and I can take one step back and include a guardrail and change the meaning of the picture radically… I can take a picture of a person at one moment and make them look contemplative and photograph them two seconds later and make them look frivolous.” – Stephen Shore
“I enjoy the camera. Beyond that it is difficult to explain the process of photographing except by analogy: The trout streams where I flyfish are cold and clear and rich in the minerals that promote the growth of stream life. As I wade a stream I think wordlessly of where to cast the fly. Sometimes a difference of inches is the difference between catching a fish and not. When the fly I’ve cast is on the water my attention is riveted to it. I’ve found through experience that whenever—or so it seems—my attention wanders or I look away then surely a fish will rise to the fly and I will be too late setting the hook. I watch the fly calmly and attentively so that when the fish strikes—I strike. Then the line tightens, the playing of the fish begins, and time stands still.” – Stephen Shore
“I was photographing every meal I ate, every person I met, every waiter or waitress who served me, every bed I slept in, every toilet I used.” – Stephen Shore
“I don’t have to have a single point of emphasis in the picture. It can be complex, because it’s so detailed that the viewer can take time and read it, and look at something here, and look at something there, and they can pay attention to a lot more.” – Stephen Shore
“With a painting, you’re taking basic building blocks and making something that’s more complex than what you started with. It is a synthetic process. A photograph does the opposite: It takes the world, and puts an order on it, simplifies it.” – Stephen Shore
“I know that a larger print expands the information. And so more of the stuff that I’m looking at is there for a viewer to see. Now, what I found attractive about the contact print was the almost surreal density of information. That here’s this thing that you can take in, in a couple of seconds. But, to actually stand on that spot, and look at every branch on this tree, and every shadow on this building, and the pebbles on the road—this could take minutes of attention. It was, like, maybe fifteen minutes of attention had been compressed into this thing you can take in, in a few seconds. That’s what I mean by “surreal density” of information..” – Stephen Shore
“Beaumont Newhall released a revised edition of his History of Photography, where he had a chapter called “Recent Trends”. It was supposed to be the trends of the twentieth century. And he had four recent trends, and they were, as I recall; the straight photograph, the document, the formalist photograph, and the equivalent. And so it’s Paul Strand as the straight photograph, and maybe Cartier-Bresson as the document, or Walker Evans as the document, and Steiglitz as the equivalent, or maybe the formalist is Walker Evans. Whatever. But that’s the point. It’s that, to me, someone like Walker Evans is all of them. And that you could even look at Walker Evans as the equivalent, in Steiglitz, Minor White terms. Except that he’s drawing his metaphor not from nature, but from the complexity of the built environment, which may allow for a different kind of equivalent. So I thought, “Why can’t a photograph be all four things at once?” –be an art object; be a document, what ever that means exactly, but deal with content; be a formalist exploration; and operate on some, metaphor is not the right word but, resonant level..” – Stephen Shore
“There may be a difference between “withholding judgment” and an “arrest of interpretation. There can be interpretation without judgment even though everyone knows that an artist can’t be fully objective and that my framework of understanding governs what I find and therefore what I show you. But accepting that, there’s a difference in emphasis with a judgment. It has to do with a couple things. One, as I said, is temperament: I tend to back off from critical stances that I feel are judgmental. The other is that most judgments dismiss the complexities of reality—at least to my eyes. To use an analogy, I’m talking about the difference between a journalist interpreting factseven defining facts—to describe an event and an editorial writer passing judgment on the same event. A debate presents a binary view: for or against. It doesn’t capture the greater com- plexity of a continuum. But I’m also deeply interested in showing something of our time, so that I’m not just aiming a camera at the world. There is an interpretation; I’m looking at things and thinking about them..” – Stephen Shore
“A quote that I like very much… comes close to explaining my attitude about taking photographs…. “Chinese poetry rarely trespasses beyond the bounds of actuality… the great Chinese poets accept the world exactly as they find it in all its terms and with profound simplicity… they seldom talk about one thing in terms of another; but are able enough and sure enough as artists to make the ultimately exact terms become the beautiful terms.” – Stephen Shore
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21 Quotes By Photographer Jerry Uelsmann

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Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes by photographer Jerry Uelsmann.
“Photography is just light remembering itself.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“The camera is a license to explore.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“There are no uninteresting things. There are just uninterested people.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“I try to begin working with no preconceived ideas.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“When the entire process becomes a prescribed ritual that does not allow for spontaneous variations and reactions, the vitality of the medium and our relation to it suffers.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“Let us not be afraid to allow for “post-visualization.” By post-visualization I refer to the willingness on the part of the photographer to revisualize the final image at any point in the entire photographic process.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“It is the illusion of knowledge, not ignorance, that keeps one from growing.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“The goal of the artist is not to resolve life’s mysteries, but to deepen them.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“In the arts there are many right answers.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“The truth is that one is more frequently blessed with ideas while working.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“I’ve learned over the years that when you get a clue to another possibility to follow it through…” – Jerry Uelsmann
“The camera is a fluid way of encountering that other reality.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“My visual quest is driven by a desire to create a universe capable of supporting feelings and ideas.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“I think of many of my photographs as being obviously symbolic but not symbolically obvious. There isn’t any specific correlation between the symbols in this image and any content that I have in mind.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“One of the major changes in attitude that occurred in the world of art as we moved from the nineteenth into the twentieth century was that the twentieth century artist became more involved with personal expression than with celebrating exclusively the values of the society or the church. Along with this change came a broader acceptance of the belief that the artist can invent a reality that is more meaningful than the one that is literally given to the eye. I subscribe enthusiastically to this.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“The contemporary artist…is not bound to a fully conceived, previsioned end. His mind is kept alert to in-process discovery and a working rapport is established between the artist and his creation. While it may be true, as Nathan Lyons stated, ‘The eye and the camera see more than the mind knows,’ is it not also conceivable that the mind knows more than the eye and the camera can see?” – Jerry Uelsmann
“All knowledge is self-reflective.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“I’m really very concerned with helping to create an attitude of freedom and daring toward the craft of photography.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“Ultimately, my hope is to amaze myself. The anticipation of discovering new possibilities becomes my greatest joy.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“I have gradually confused photography with life.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“The creative process can sustain itself throughout the entire celebration of photography.” – Jerry Uelsmann
Read my conversation with Jerry Uelsmann here.
Read more Photographer’s Quotes here.

20 Quotes By Photographer Alfred Stieglitz

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Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes by photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
“Photography my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“When I photograph I make love.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“If you can imagine photography in the guise of a woman and you’d ask her what she thought of Stieglitz, she’d say: He always treated me like a gentleman.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“Wherever there is light, one can photograph.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“…the goal of art was the vital expression of self.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“My photographs are a picture of the chaos in the world, and of my relationship to that chaos. My prints show the world’s constant upsetting of man’s equilibrium, and his eternal battle to reestablish it.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“For that is the power of the camera: seize the familiar and give it new meanings, a special significance by the mark of a personality.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“I have all but killed myself for Photography. My passion for it is greater than ever. It’s forty years that I have fought its fight – and I’ll fight to the finish – single handed & without money if need be. It is not photographs – it is not photographers – I am fighting for. And my own photographs I never sign. I am not fighting to make a ‘name’ for myself. Maybe you have some feeling for what the fight is for. It’s a world’s fight. This sounds mad. But so is Camera Work mad. All that’s born of spirit seems mad in these [days] of materialism run riot.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“My ideal is to achieve the ability to produce numberless prints from each negative, prints all significantly alive, yet indistinguishably alike, and to be able to circulate them at a price not higher than that of a popular magazine, or even a daily paper. To gain that ability there has been no choice but to follow the road I have chosen.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs [rather than paintings, etchings, etc.] that unless one has eyes and sees, they won’t be seen – and still everyone will never forget having once looked at them.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“Photographers must learn not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“I do not object to retouching, dodging. or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“The ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired off-hand, but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labor.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“It is not art in the professionalized sense about which I care, but that which is created sacredly, as a result of a deep inner experience, with all of oneself, and that becomes ‘art’ in time.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“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
“The great geniuses are those who have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience.” – Alfred Stieglitz
Read more Photographer’s Quotes here.

30 Quotes By Photographer Diane Arbus

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Here’s a selection of quotes by photographer Diane Arbus.
“The camera is a kind of license.” – Diane Arbus
“Photography was a licence to go whenever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.” – Diane Arbus
“My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.” – Diane Arbus
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” – Diane Arbus
“Lately I’ve been struck with how I really love what you can’t see in a photograph.” – Diane Arbus
“I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do — that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.” – Diane Arbus
“I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don’t think of.” – Diane Arbus
“The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way.” – Diane Arbus
“One thing that struck me very early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.” – Diane Arbus
“I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.” – Diane Arbus
“Some pictures are tentative forays without your even knowing it. They become methods. It’s important to take bad pictures. It’s the bad ones that have to do with what you’ve never done before. They can make you recognize something you hadn’t seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again.” – Diane Arbus
“What moves me about…what’s called technique…is that it comes from some mysterious deep place. I mean it can have something to do with the paper and the developer and all that stuff, but it comes mostly from some very deep choices somebody has made that take a long time and keep haunting them.” – Diane Arbus
“I used to have this notion when I was a kid that the minute you said anything, it was no longer true. Of course it would have driven me crazy very rapidly if I hadn’t dropped it, but there’s something similar in what I’m trying to say. That once it’s been done, you want to go someplace else. There’s just some sense of straining.” – Diane Arbus
“The Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination and I think it’s true. I would never choose a subject for what it means to me or what I think about it. You’ve just got to choose a subject – and what you feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold if you just plain choose a subject and do it enough.” – Diane Arbus
“I’m very little drawn to photographing people that are known or even subjects that are known. They fascinate me when I’ve barely heard of them.” – Diane Arbus“I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.” – Diane Arbus
“What I’m trying to describe is that it’s impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else’s…. That somebody else’s tragedy is not the same as your own.” ― Diane Arbus
“I don’t know what good composition is…. Sometimes for me composition has to do with a certain brightness or a certain coming to restness and other times it has to do with funny mistakes. There’s a kind of rightness and wrongness and sometimes I like rightness and sometimes I like wrongness.” – Diane Arbus
“The camera is cruel, so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.” – Diane Arbus
“For me the subject of a picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated.” – Diane Arbus
“I would never choose a subject for what it means to me. I choose a subject and then what I feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold.” – Diane Arbus
“Take pictures of what you fear.” – Diane Arbus
“The more specific you are, the more general it’ll be.” – Diane Arbus
“Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what people observe.” – Diane Arbus
“Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.” – Diane Arbus
“There’s a kind of power thing about the camera. I mean everyone knows you’ve got some edge. You’re carrying some magic which does something to them. It fixes them in a way.” – Diane Arbus
“It’s always seemed to me that photography tends to deal with facts whereas film tends to deal with fiction.” – Diane Arbus
“Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.” – Diane Arbus
“The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.” – Diane Arbus
“If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.” ― Diane Arbus
“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.” – Diane Arbus
Read more Photographer’s Quotes here.