Photographer Quotes - Page 15

• It is an error common to many artists, who strive merely to avoid mistakes, when all our efforts should be to create positive and important work. Better positive and important with mistakes and failures than perfect mediocrity.

  Edward Steichen

  Photography, Mistake, Artist

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• A photograph is worth a thousand words, provided it is accompanied by only ten words.

  Edward Steichen

  Photography, Thousand, Ten

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• To make good photographs, to express something, to contribute something to the world he lives in, and to contribute something to the art of photography besides imitations of the best photographers on the market today, that is basic training, the understanding of self.

  Edward Steichen

  Photography, Art, Self

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• Some day there may be... machinery that needs but to be wound up and sent roaming o'er hill and dale, through fields and meadows, by babbling brooks and shady woods - in short, a machine that will discriminately select its subject and, by means of a skillful arrangement of springs and screws, compose its motif, expose the plate, develop, print, and even mount and frame the result of its excursion, so that there will be nothing for us to do but to send it to the Royal Photographic Society's exhibition and gratefully to receive the 'Royal Medal'.

  Edward Steichen

  Photography, Spring, Mean

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• It's important to understand it's OK to control the subject. If most editorial stories were photographed just as they are, editors would end up throwing most in the waste basket. You have to work hard at making an editorial picture. You need to re-stage things, rearrange things so that they work for the story, with truth and without lying.

  Alfred Eisenstaedt

  Photography, Lying, Hard Work

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• My style hasn't changed much in all these sixty years. I still use, most of the time, existing light and try not to push people around. I have to be as much a diplomat as a photographer. People don't often take me seriously because I carry so little equipment and make so little fuss... I never carried a lot of equipment. My motto has always been, "Keep it simple".

  Alfred Eisenstaedt

  Photography, Simple, Light

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• I seldom think when I take a picture. My eyes and fingers react - click. But first, it's most important to decide on the angle at which your photograph is to be taken.

  Alfred Eisenstaedt

  Photography, Taken, Eye

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• Photography is art when it's used by an artist.

  Ruth Bernhard

  Photography, Art, Used

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• What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

  Ruth Bernhard

  Photography, Real, Eye

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• You have to follow your instinct all the time. Otherwise you don't make it.

  Ruth Bernhard

  Photography, Instinct

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• I do have strong convictions and political opinions, but I don't think it's necessary to imbue my photographic work with them. I use photography as a vessel for visual material to flow through, to encourage conversation with the viewer. I try to present a catalyst and invite viewers to tell their own stories.

  Michael Kenna

  Photography, Strong, Thinking

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• I find that when one has worked long enough, technical know-how becomes almost irrelevant. In photography, it's not difficult to reach a technical level where you don't need to think about the technique any more. I think there is far too much literature and far too much emphasis upon the techniques of photography. The make of camera and type of film we happen to use has little bearing on the results.

  Michael Kenna

  Photography, Thinking, Long

  Interview with Brooks Jensen, www.michaelkenna.net. October 2003.

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• I often think of my work as visual haiku. It is an attempt to evoke and suggest through as few elements as possible rather than to describe with tremendous detail.

  Michael Kenna

  Photography, Thinking, Details

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• It's possible to think of photography as an act of editing, a matter of where you put your rectangle pull it out or take it away. Sometimes people ask me about films, cameras and development times in order to find out how to do landscape photography. The first thing I do in landscape photography is go out there and talk to the land - form a relationship, ask permission, it's not about going out there like some paparazzi with a Leica and snapping a few pictures, before running off to print them.

  Michael Kenna

  Running, Photography, Thinking

  Interview with Brooks Jensen, www.michaelkenna.net. October 2003.

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• The first time, I usually skim off the outer layer and end up with photographs that are fairly obvious. The second time, I have to look a little deeper. The images get more interesting. The third time it is even more challenging and on each subsequent occasion, the images should get stronger, but it takes more effort to get them.

  Michael Kenna

  Photography, Interesting, Effort

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• Getting photographs is not the most important thing. For me it's the act of photographing. It's enlightening, therapeutic and satisfying, because the very process forces me to connect with the world. When you make four-hour exposures in the middle of the night, you inevitably slow down and begin to observe and appreciate more what's going on around you. In our fast-paced, modern world, it's a luxury to be able to watch the stars move across the sky.

  Michael Kenna

  Photography, Stars, Moving

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• I gravitate towards places where humans have been and are no more, to the edge of man's influence, where the elements are taking over or covering man's traces.

  Michael Kenna

  Photography, Men, Covering

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• Parks and gardens are the quintessential intimate landscapes. People use them all the time, leaving their energy and memories behind. It's what's left behind that I like to photograph.

  Michael Kenna

  Photography, Memories, Garden

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• Perhaps most intriguing of all is that it is possible to photograph what is impossible for the human eye to see - cumulative time.

  Michael Kenna

  Photography, Eye, Impossible

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• Nothing is ever the same twice because everything is always gone forever, and yet each moment has infinite photographic possibilities.

  Michael Kenna

  Photography, Forever, Gone

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• All important pictures embody something that we do not yet understand.

  Emmet Gowin

  Photography, Important

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• As a good picture would come, I would never know exactly what I had done. When you did see it, it would strike you as a great surprise - who did that? How did it happen? Being surprised by your own work makes you both less serious and have serious reverence.

  Emmet Gowin

  Photography, Done, Serious

  "Emmet Gowin: 'Everyone thought my photographs were incestuous'". Interview with Sarah Moroz, www.theguardian.com. May 29, 2014.

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• Of course, this is one of the really important things about art, that you can make more than you can understand at the moment the thing is being made. But the gap between what we recognize inside ourselves - our feelings- and our ability to trust ourselves and to trust exposing ourselves to those ideas, can be great.

  Emmet Gowin

  Photography, Art, Ideas

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• It might take us a lifetime to find out what it is we need to say. Most of us fall into where our feelings are headed while we're quite young. But the beauty of all this uncertainty would be that in the process of exhausting all the possibilities, we might actually stumble unconsciously into the recognition of something that's useful to us, that speaks to a deep need within ourselves. At the same time, I like to think that in order for any of us to really do anything new, we can't know exactly what it is we are doing.

  Emmet Gowin

  Photography, Fall, Thinking

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• The authentic thing is to follow your heart, your instincts, your emotions. If you located yourself in an idea, your life would be lived very sadly.

  Emmet Gowin

  Photography, Heart, Ideas

  "Emmet Gowin: 'Everyone thought my photographs were incestuous'". Interview with Sarah Moroz, www.theguardian.com. May 29, 2014.

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