Sam Abell Quotes - Page 3

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• I'm interested in smokers standing on ledges, and big box stores, the rise of the suburbs, and the hollowing out of small towns. Self-storage. Things that didn't exist 50 years ago. Our common culture. What we have agreed is OK to live with.

  Sam Abell

  Self, Years, Culture

  Source: aphotoeditor.com

  7 Copy quote

• There are things that I teach, about building photographs, and that's why people come to my workshops. When people come to the workshops, they're consumed with seeking the subject, and I teach seeking the setting.

  Sam Abell

  People, Building, Photograph

  Source: aphotoeditor.com

  4 Copy quote

• I did it once, and National Geographic recruited me. I did it primarily out of curiosity. A lot of legendary photographers had worked on that campaign. Ernst Haas had done the early photography, and I knew him. There's a lore in photography about that campaign, and I was curious.

  Sam Abell

  Photography, Curiosity, Campaigns

  Source: aphotoeditor.com

  4 Copy quote

• The reason I don't want to say anything about it is it has a strange power to take over the conversation. Just like it's doing with us. I was asked to participate in a documentary about Richard Prince, and be the voice of someone who was appropriated, and I declined. The reason I did is I don't want it to be the subject of the discussion of my work.

  Sam Abell

  Voice, Say Anything, Want

  Source: aphotoeditor.com

  4 Copy quote

• There are a lot of ways to talk about the life of a photograph. You can talk about the afterlife of a photograph, and in the end I talk about that, with the Richard Prince picture. But mainly, what I dedicated the book to being about was how photographs begin their life, and where they begin it. And they begin it with the photographer's imagination and instinct and experience.

  Sam Abell

  Book, Afterlife, Imagination

  Source: dougplummer.blogs.com

  4 Copy quote

• It's a little bit like talking about the life of writing. The life of writing may be about many things, but it always begins with the writer. With the kernel of an idea, or a character, or an idea or a theme, or even an outcome. But for documentary photographers, photographs begin at that intersection of the real world and the imaginative inner world.

  Sam Abell

  Real, Writing, Character

  Source: dougplummer.blogs.com

  6 Copy quote

• Typically I see it with photographers who go to a place like India or Nepal, and everything's so colorful and exotic and they think, therefore, a picture's been taken.

  Sam Abell

  Taken, Thinking, India

  Source: dougplummer.blogs.com

  4 Copy quote

• I would like to go to Antarctica. That's about all.

  Sam Abell

  Antarctica

  Source: aphotoeditor.com

  4 Copy quote

• Aboriginal Australia is a tough place to work, rough and tough.

  Sam Abell

  Australia, Tough, Rough

  Source: dougplummer.blogs.com

  4 Copy quote

• I have this awareness that the more dynamic the situation is, the more on guard I need to be that the dynamic isn't controlling the situation. I found that myself in the Galapagos. For the first time in my life I was around very exotic animals, colorful, beautiful, and immediately present, all around. Birds, turtles, iguanas, seals. I was being seduced by their exoticism, I was taking pictures.The pictures weren't well lit, there was no moment in play, there was no depth to the pictures. I was just gawking with my camera at something I'd never seen before.

  Sam Abell

  Beautiful, Animal, Turtles

  Source: dougplummer.blogs.com

  7 Copy quote

• There's a great quote about Virginia Woolf, she had the same spiritual stake in her diaries as she had in her writing.

  Sam Abell

  Spiritual, Writing, Virginia

  Source: dougplummer.blogs.com

  4 Copy quote

• In my first class at the University of Kentucky, my American Literature professor came in, and the first sentence out of his mouth was "The central theme of American Literature is an attempt to reconcile what we've done to the New World." wrote that down in my notebook, and thought, "What is he talking about?" But that's what I think about now. The New World and what we've done to it.

  Sam Abell

  Notebook, Thinking, Kentucky

  Source: aphotoeditor.com

  4 Copy quote

• That statement [ Stephen Ambrose:'You, Sam, have the hardest job, which is, pretend like nothing has happened in the last 200 years.'] woke me up to the fact that the landscape that Lewis and Clark came across was greater than the Serengeti. And it's gone.

  Sam Abell

  Jobs, Hardest Job, Years

  Source: aphotoeditor.com

  5 Copy quote

• In the last workshop I taught, a woman flew in from Thailand. She's a medical doctor in Bangkok. I asked her in her one-on-one session where she wanted photography to be in her life.Did she want a second career? Was it about earning money? Or was it art? And she said "None of those. I want photography to be serious in my life." It would be like someone wanting music, like piano playing, to be a richer, deeper, and maybe even harder experience.

  Sam Abell

  Photography, Art, Doctors

  Source: aphotoeditor.com

  4 Copy quote

• Though Geographic didn't publish that photo in the story that it was done for, "The Life of Charlie Russell," a cowboy artist in Montana. But later, maybe a year and a half ago, they named it one of the 50 greatest pictures ever made at National Geographic.

  Sam Abell

  Artist, Cowboy, Years

  Source: aphotoeditor.com

  4 Copy quote

• [ My time and our common culture] it's what I'm photographing, and I'm very involved with that.

  Sam Abell

  Culture, Common, My Time

  Source: aphotoeditor.com

  4 Copy quote

• I did a story for the Geographic on Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, and Stephen Ambrose was the writer. He said, "I've got the easiest job in the world. I just have to re-tell the story of the greatest fishing, camping, hunting, canoeing trip of all time. You, Sam, have the hardest job, which is, pretend like nothing has happened in the last 200 years.

  Sam Abell

  Jobs, Hunting, Hardest Job

  Source: aphotoeditor.com

  5 Copy quote

• I'm very involved in photographing America now, so I don't think of faraway places, as I did when I was young.

  Sam Abell

  Thinking, America, Young

  Source: aphotoeditor.com

  4 Copy quote

• I now want to be a photographer of my time, and our common culture.

  Sam Abell

  Culture, Want, Common

  Source: aphotoeditor.com

  4 Copy quote

• My Dad took a workshop from a photographer who worked at the Toledo Blade, a newspaper I delivered. I knew this photographer's work. My Dad took a night class from him at the University of Toledo. Without that class, I wouldn't have become a photographer, because my Dad came home and taught me what he learned in class.

  Sam Abell

  Dad, Home, Night

  Source: aphotoeditor.com

  4 Copy quote

• The thing with my workshops is, photography is a thoughtful process. In an atmosphere of fast photography, and generally thoughtless, quick, automatic photography, I think that there is an interest in the slowed down, thoughtful approach.

  Sam Abell

  Photography, Thoughtful, Thinking

  Source: aphotoeditor.com

  4 Copy quote

• I had a book come out several years ago, when there were no blogs. This is a mark to me about how the environment has changed.

  Sam Abell

  Book, Years, Environment

  Source: dougplummer.blogs.com

  4 Copy quote

• First of all, I appropriate photographs.In presenting the Richard Prince photograph I tried to be as neutral as I could be. I put down the fact of it. I wanted it to be the same thing he wanted it to be, an open ended invitation to think about authorship, and who owns a created work. So I pair it with my appropriated picture.

  Sam Abell

  Thinking, Pairs, Firsts

  Source: dougplummer.blogs.com

  4 Copy quote

• I was asked by a student what my most significant accomplishment was at National Geographic, after thirty years, and I said that my career came to an appropriate close, and I still loved photography. Not everybody who spends their career at anything ends up fascinated and involved with it.

  Sam Abell

  Photography, Years, Careers

  Source: aphotoeditor.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think that it's workshops, honestly, that have kept me keen about photography, and about my photography. My career as a workshop photographer came while I was at the Geographic in the late 70's, and has continued consistently since then.

  Sam Abell

  Photography, Thinking, Careers

  Source: aphotoeditor.com

  4 Copy quote

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