Quotes on Photography

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... 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... All that's born of spirit seems mad in these days of materialism run riot.

My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.

For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.

Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion... the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

When I'm ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I'm interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.

To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things.

I tried to keep both arts alive, but the camera won. I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!

In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.

For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.

A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.

Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can.

Art is what we call...the thing an artist does. It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human. Art is not in the ...eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist.

The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.

Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact

Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing.