12 Great Quotes By Photographer Sean Kernan

Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Sean Kernan.

“I’ve always envied painters who could layer up impressions and observations and give a larger sense of a person. It’s as though a painter accumulates a series of transparent faces that add up to a person. The photographer always gets stuck with whatever he can tease out of a sixtieth of a second, and if he does well he can print the exposure that has implications and resonances.” – Sean Kernan

“The benefits of chance are enormous, but you have to watch out for them too. Chance gets me beyond whatever I had in mind when I started to work. It comes into play when I let things happen and then chase alongside them and grasp them on the fly. But the artist is responsible to what chance gives him, and just setting it down without taking it in and manifesting it again in the heuristic process is not enough.” – Sean Kernan

“What is revealed to me lies beyond any ideas I had for the pictures.” – Sean Kernan

“I’m inclining toward the idea that the working process of art is a lot more thoughtless than I once imagined – thoughtless but not stupid. Somehow the pictures that work out just the way I wanted them to are the ones I lose interest in soonest. The expectation has become the limit. And I think that the way to take something beyond your own expectations is to leave what you see unnamed and beyond concept for as long as you can. I want to work as far beyond what I know as I can get, and the gate to that beyond lies exactly between seeing and naming.” – Sean Kernan

“You want to float in that space of awareness as long as you can, keeping all possibilities alive so they can become clearer, then you pull down one that is BOTH unexpected and makes perfect sense.” – Sean Kernan

“The process is in the elimination of conceptions and cleansing the mind, then in claiming the awareness and manifesting it in a work.” – Sean Kernan

“You can see it in a great actors work – look at De Niro, or Streep, or Arkin. They can just stare into the air and you’ll sit and watch them, watch their intensity. And I realized that some of the best photographers I know have that same kind of intensity. It shows in their work. Their intense staring generates its own power, and we respond by staring with them.” – Sean Kernan

“I have a real appreciation these days for work that abrades me into awareness.” – Sean Kernan

“What happens when two things that don’t go together at all suddenly do? You wake up! You stop describing and interpreting the world to yourself, and just for a moment you listen. You can’t explain what you see based on what you already know, so you have to look further and wider. You have to expand. It’s the kind of startle response that I think lies at the very center of how art can change peoples minds. It happens when something suddenly interrupts the flow of our thoughts and we tip over into a kind of silent hyperawareness. It is that state of awareness that I have come to think of as the state of creativity, where new dimensions and insights arise. If a photographer is in that state and manages to make a picture, people who see it can participate in that deeper awareness too. This kind of event is where I think art gets its power.” – Sean Kernan

“The first question I tell students to ask in the first critique of a class is not is the work good, but is it alive?” – Sean Kernan

“I think that if there’s a kind of art that I’d like to make it would be art that is beyond comment.” – Sean Kernan

“You give the viewer or reader some pieces of the puzzle so he can assemble the thing himself, in his own experience, in his own time. It lets him invent the piece inside for himself. When that happens, you’ve passed along, not the words or pictures or even ideas, but the state that Robert Henri talks about. If getting in the state is one great reason for doing art, then passing it to others closes the circuit and lets the power surge beyond our small minds. It’s a way of approaching the divine – one of the few ways left to us.” – Sean Kernan

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20 Quotes By Photographer Gregory Heisler

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
View 12 Great Photographs Collections here.
Read more in The Essential Collection Of Photographers’ Quotes.
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Find out more about Gregory Heisler here.