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40 Quotes On Perfection

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Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes on perfection.
“They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they’d make up their minds.” – Winston Churchill
“Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.” – Vince Lombardi
“Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it.” – William Ellery Channing
“Great sculptors and artists spend countless hours perfecting their talents. They don’t pick up a chisel or a brush and palette, expecting immediate perfection. They understand that they will make many errors as they learn, but they start with the basics, the key fundamentals first.” – Joseph B. Wirthlin
“Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.” – Martha Graham
“Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.” – Voltaire
“Perfection is the child of time.” – Joseph Hall
“Perfection is immutable. But for things imperfect, change is the way to perfect them.” – Owen Feltham
“It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection.” – Oscar Wilde
“An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.” – J. D. Salinger Read More

Joel Meyerowitz's Once More Around The Sun

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What happens when a street photographer moves from the streets of New York City to a small town in southern of France? Joel Meyerowitz’s Once More Around The Sun answers this question in the form of a visual diary. It’s a fascinating look into the life, the heart, the mind and the approach how a master street photographer.
Written one year after the fact Meyerowitz now posts one image a day and his thoughts.
“Of the more than 15,000 images I made that year I will select an image every day, or perhaps two, maybe even three, who knows? Whatever keeps the blog interesting and might provoke some discussion. I may feel inclined to write something about what I saw, or describe some aspect of engagement with the moment, or share what came up for me after I made an image. At this point it is an open ended opportunity which will be shaped by time and the work. Much like Photography itself.”
Visit Joel Meyerowitz’s Once More Around The Sun here.
Find out more about Joel Meyerowitz here.
Read 18 Quotes by Joel Meyerowitz here.
View 8 Videos by Joel Meyerowitz here.

Alumnus Andy Batt's New Book Camera & Craft

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Congratulations! Alumni Andy Batt’s new book Camera & Craft was voted one of the best photo books of 2014 by photo.net! (Yes. Many of my alumni are or become working pros.)

“An instructional photography book at heart, Camera & Craft is refreshingly conversational. It does dive into the nitty gritty of professional workflow, but it also throws working photographers from a variety of disciplines into the mix to share their stories and working preferences so that you can build the foundation to move your photographic work to the next level. Once you understand and harness the power of the technical tools at your disposal — combining your camera with your craft— you will become a better artist too.”

Here’s what Andy shared about his new book.

“As a way of going about this backwards, let me start with something that happened at the end. After a year of writing the book Camera & Craft, I went to Argentina with JP and Seth. This was a gift from my wife and business partner Therese. It was a perfect gift—it was an immersion in getting my head back together, and finding time for my own photography. It was an amazing time, and the work I created there is still influencing me and moving me forward. This much needed photographic adventure came right on the heels of delivering my final draft of Camera & Craft to my co-author Candace Dobro so she could do an amazing job of polishing my words and making sure that our book was readable and grammatically correct.

The book was a project that came directly from my teaching the online Digital Masters of Photography program for SVA. My experiences there gave me a good idea of an audience for this book: the inspired amateur and the dedicated student of photography. I wanted to craft a book that was conversational and technical, and meant to be read like a class, from front to back. To be blunt: these days anyone can take a good picture. Smart cameras, good automatic software, Instagram and iPhones—all of these enable anybody to call themselves a photographer. So what qualities drive the rest of us? What is it that distinguishes the professional and the fine art photographer from everyone else? One of the answers to that question—in my opinion—is mastery over the tools you use. Whether it’s cameras, lenses or software, I believe that understanding how they work leads to mastery, and mastery opens doors to creativity. My hope is that emerging photographers will learn to put their cameras on manual and take charge of their photography, and become better artists. ” – Andy Batt
Get the book here.
Find out more about Andy Batt here.
Connect with Andy on Facebook and Twitter.
Read more Alumni Success Stories here.

Check Out PHOTOGRAPH Issue 11

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“Issue 11 of PHOTOGRAPH magazine celebrates the power of movement, from the strength and elegance of African beasts, to heading across town via public transportation, to the muscular physicality of dancers, to traveling across the country and documenting it all in black and white.

Portfolios and interviews feature the work of Ken and Michelle Dyball, who open up about how they find life—and wildlife—on the savannahs of the Maasai Mara; impressionistic photographer Valda Bailey, who found unexpected grace and beauty while riding the No. 8 bus; Thomas David, who took a concept of dust and dance and created a powerful series; and Russell Grace, who—in trying to impress a girl—inadvertently switched to infrared photography, with beautiful results.

Regular contributors John Paul Caponigro, Bruce Percy, Guy Tal, Chris Orwig, Martin Bailey, Piet Van den Eynde, Adam Blasberg and I discuss seizing time, the strength of numbers, the starkness of nature, creative flow (and getting unstuck), the art and science of photography, depth of field, telling the story of your subject through lighting, and how to create a photo panel.”

This installment in my column Creative Composition explores the power of Number.

Get 20% Off through Tuesday Feb 3.

Get PHOTOGRAPH Issue 11 here.

Alumnus David Reinfeld's New Exhibit Ideograms

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David Reinfeld’s new photography exhibit Ideograms opens Jan 29 and runs through Feb 15 at the Piermonts Fine Arts Gallery in Piermont, NY

David Reinfeld describes the work in his new exhibit.

“Intention,  Randomness, and Meaning. This is the central theme of my upcoming exhibit Ideograms at the Piermont Fine Arts Gallery from Jan 29- Feb 15, 2015.  It is a series of images about all and nothing, the source for finding meaning and inspiration in my life. This latest series of composite images traces back to my first attempt to make a composite photograph at JP’s workshop several years ago.  His workshop was transformative for me- finally a way to express my imagination as jazz.  I’ve made thousands of composites since that time and my thinking about the composite process has come full circle.  Making a composite now feels the same as walking down the street taking traditional photographs.  Looking back, I think the idea for Ideograms came to me when I was very young; I remember going to the movies just to see the credits.  The photographs are very much a part of two aesthetic constructs- letters that intersect to create new shapes, and letters pasted on the abstract walls of our culture.  The pictures are large, up to 30 x 40”, organized by the interactions of shape and color across the span of each wall area.

When I make Ideogram images, I look for shapes and colors to create new shapes and colors, sometimes all by themselves.  At first, I felt it was important to use photographs of mine that stood strongly on their own.  Now I am more receptive to using any image, looking for constructs hidden in plain sight. Somehow pictures seem talk to each other in this process regardless of how I intervene.  My role seems to be as a guide with an ill formed idea.

I’ve always been intrigued by how letters and symbols create meaning, something from nothing, imagine that!  It’s a curious endeavor, a bit obscure, but endlessly intriguing. It’s like seeing a print come out of the developer for the first time, each time.”

Read more Alumni Success Stories here.

15 Quotes By Photographer Josef Koudelka

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Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes by Josef Koudelka.
“What matters most to me is to take photographs; to continue taking them and not to repeat myself. To go further, to go as far as I can.” – Josef Koudelka
“I am not interested in repetition. I don’t want to reach the point from where I wouldn’t know how to go further. It’s good to set limits for oneself, but there comes a moment when we must destroy what we have constructed.” – Josef Koudelka
“If I am dissatisfied, it’s simply because good photos are few and far between. A good photo is a miracle.” – Josef Koudelka
“I have to shoot three cassettes of film a day, even when not ‘photographing’, in order to keep the eye in practice.” – Josef Koudelka
“Sometimes I photograph without looking through the viewfinder. I have mastered that well enough, it is almost as if I were looking through it.” – Josef Koudelka
“When I photograph, I do not think much. If you looked at my contacts you would ask yourself: “What is this guy doing?” But I keep working with my contacts and with my prints, I look at them all the time. I believe that the result of this work stays in me and at the moment of photographing it comes out, without my thinking of it.” – Josef Koudelka
“I don’t pretend to be an intellectual or a philosopher. I just look.” – Josef Koudelka
“I photograph only something that has to do with me, and I never did anything that I did not want to do. I do not do editorial and I never do advertising. No, my freedom is something I do not give away easily.” – Josef Koudelka
“I don’t like captions. I prefer people to look at my pictures and invent their own stories.” – Josef Koudelka
“I never stay in one country more than three months. Why? Because I was interested in seeing, and if I stay longer I become blind.” – Josef Koudelka
“My photographs are proof of what happened. When I go to Russia, sometimes I meet ex-soldiers… They say, ‘We came to liberate you….’ I say: ‘Listen, I think it was quite different. I saw people being killed.’ They say: No. We never… no shooting. No. No.’ So I can show them my Prague 1968 photographs and say, ‘Listen, these are my pictures. I was there.’ And they have to believe me.” – Josef Koudelka
“The changes taking place in this part of Europe are enormous and very rapid. One world is disappearing. I am trying to photograph what’s left. I have always been drawn to what is ending, what will soon no longer exist.” – Josef Koudelka
“It never seemed important to me that my photos be published. It’s important that I take them. There were periods where I didn’t have money, and I would imagine that someone would come to me and say: ‘Here is money, you can go do your photography, but you must not show it.’ I would have accepted right away. On the other hand, if someone had come to me saying: ‘Here is money to do your photography, but after your death it must be destroyed,’ I would have refused.” – Josef Koudelka
“When I first started to take photographs in Czechoslovakia, I met this old gentleman, this old photographer, who told me a few practical things. One of the things he said was, “Josef, a photographer works on the subject, but the subject works on the photographer.” – Josef Koudelka
“I would like to see everything, look at everything, I want to be the view itself.” – Josef Koudelka
View 12 Great Photographs By Josef Koudelka.
Explore The Essential Collection Of Quotes By Photographers here.