Quotes from famous photographers

kshapero

kshapero

South Florida Man
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"Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies"

Diane Arbus
 
From the Holy Trinity of Parisian street photographers:


"The beauty of the ordinary is always the source of my greatest emotions."
Willy Ronis

"If I knew how to take a good picture, I'd do it all the time."
Robert Doisneau

"Think about the photo before and after, never during."
Henri Cartier-Bresson
 
I like this HCB quote: "I'm not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It's drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff, sniff -- being sensitive to coincidence. You can't go looking for it; you can't want it, or you won't get it. First you much lose yourself. Then it happens."
 
As a former musician, I always liked:

The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance.
Ansel Adams
 
"Anything and all things are photographable. A photograph can only look like how the camera saw what was photographed. Or, how the camera saw the piece of time and space is responsible for how the photograph looks. Therefore, a photograph can look any way. Or, there's no way a photograph has to look (beyond being an illusion of a literal description). Or, there are no external or abstract or preconceived rules of design that can apply to still photographs."- Garry Winogrand
 
"What the photographer taking the picture and the historian viewing it must understand is that while the camera deals with recording factual things and events that form the subject of the photograph, it only produces a perceived reality that is remembered after the thing or event has passed. While people believe that photographs do not lie, this is an illusion caused by the mistaken belief that the subject and the picture of the subject is the same thing."- John Szarkowski
 
The trouble with photographing beautiful women is that you never get into the dark room
until after they're gone.
Yousuf Karsh
 
"If it's more than a hundred feet from the car it's not photogenic."
----------Edward Weston

Holding up his camera to show: "It's on Automatic. Let the camera do the work. I do the thinking."
----------Helmut Newton
 
The ratio of successful shots is one in God-knows-how-many. Sometimes you'll get several in one contact sheet, and sometimes it's none for days. But as long as you go on taking pictures, you're likely to get a good one at some point.

Elliott Erwitt
 
airfrogusmc said:
"Anything and all things are photographable. A photograph can only look like how the camera saw what was photographed. Or, how the camera saw the piece of time and space is responsible for how the photograph looks. Therefore, a photograph can look any way. Or, there's no way a photograph has to look (beyond being an illusion of a literal description). Or, there are no external or abstract or preconceived rules of design that can apply to still photographs."- Garry Winogrand
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I love that most Windogrand quotes are transliterations of his rambling way of speaking, rather than written words. He can sound a tad crazy, but it's quite enjoyable to watch the videos of him speaking.
 
There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.

Ernst Haas


“Leica, schmeica. The camera doesn’t make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But you have to see.”
— Ernst Haas
 
icebear said:
"A successful picture is the result of an uninterrupted chain of right decisions"
---- Ralph Gibson
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I couldn't find the Gibson quote but, its content has stayed with me over the years.

Its content was something like: The photograph is an illusion of reality. Three dimensions are made into two, a large space is made into a small one, printed on a sheet of paper. In the case of color, Color is made into Black and White.
 
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