Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ken Burns

I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.

Kazimir Malevich

I regard photography and film simply as new technical means which painters must absolutely make use of, just as from time out of mind they have made use of brush, charcoal and color. It is certain, however, that photography and film must become as evocative for the sensibility as pencil, charcoal and brush. (1927)

Margaret Atwood

The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.

Marcel Duchamp

You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. (In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz)

Margaret Bourke-White

A kind of golden hour one remembers for a life time... Everything was touched with magic.

Margaret Bourke-White

I have never forgotten a picture that I ever made.

Margaret Bourke-White

I have always thought that if I could turn back the pages of history and photograph one man, my choice would be Moses.

Margaret Bourke-White

By some special graciousness of fate I am deposited - as all good photographers like to be - in the right place at the right time. Go into it as young as possible. Bring all the asset you have and play to win.

Margaret Bourke-White

The element of discovery is very important. I don't repeat myself well. I want and need that stimulus of walking forward from one new world to another. There is something demoralizing about going back to a place to retake pictures. You can no longer see your subjects in a fresh eye; you keep comparing them with the pictures you hold in your memory. [The] world was full of discoveries waiting to be made...(as a photographer) I could share the things I saw and learned...you would react to something all others might walk by.

Margaret Bourke-White

We are in a privileged and sometimes happy position. We see a great deal of the world. Our obligation is to pass it on to others.

Margaret Bourke-White

The camera is a remarkable instrument. Saturate yourself with your subject, and the camera will all but take you by the hand and point the way.

Margaret Bourke-White

If anyone gets in my way when I'm making a picture, I become irrational. I'm never sure what I am going to do, or sometimes even aware of what I do-only that I want that picture.

Margaret Bourke-White

I'm afraid my closely guarded solitude causes some hurt feelings now and then. But how to explain, without wounding someone, that you want to be wholly in the world you are writing about, that it would take two days to get the visitor's voice out of the house so that you could listen to your own characters again?

Margaret Bourke-White

If you want to photograph a man spinning, give some thought to why he spins. Understanding for a photographer is as important as the equipment he uses.

Margaret Bourke-White

As photographers, we live through things so swiftly. All our experience and training is focused toward snatching off the highlights... That all significant perfect moment, so essential to capture, is often highly perishable. There may be little opportunity to probe deeper.

Margaret Bourke-White

Photography is a very subtle thing. You must let the camera take you by the hand, as it were, and lead you into your subject.

Margaret Bourke-White

"Utter truth is essential, and that is what stirs me when I look through the camera."

Ben Shahn

Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know.

Paul Strand

Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningness. If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

Paul Strand

The photographer's problem is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium, for it is precisely here that honesty no less than intensity of vision is the pre-requisite of a living expression. The fullest realization of this is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation, through the use of straight photographic methods.

Paul Strand

Did I express my personality? I think that's quite unimportant because it's not people's selves but what they have to say about life that's important.

Paul Strand

Photography is only a new road from a different direction, but moving toward the common goal, which is life.

Paul Strand

Photography... is either an expression of a cosmic vision, an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing - to me. (1919)

Paul Strand

I don't care how you photograph - use the kitchen mop if you must, but if the product is not true to the laws of photography... you have produced something that is dead. (1923)

Paul Strand

Every artist I suppose has a sense of what they think has been the importance of their work. But to ask them to define it is not really a fair question. My real answer would be, the answer is on the wall.

Paul Strand

I've always wanted to be aware of what's going on around me, and I've wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time.

Paul Strand

Objectivity is of the very essence of photography, its contribution and at the same time its limitation

Paul Strand

Cartier-Bresson has said that photography seizes a 'decisive moment', that's true except that it shouldn't be taken too narrowly...does my picture of a cobweb in the rain represent a decisive moment? The exposure time was probably three or four minutes. That's a pretty long moment. I would say the decisive moment in that case was the moment in which I saw this thing and decided I wanted to photograph it.

Paul Strand

And if you can find out something about the laws of your own growth and vision as well as those of photography you may be able to relate the two, create an object that has a life of its own, which transcends craftsmanship. That is a long road, and because it must be your own road nobody can teach it to you or find it for you. There are no shortcuts, no rules.

Paul Strand

Your photography is a record of your living - for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people's ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzche meant when he said, 'I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him.' He knew how insidious other people's ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own personal vision.

Paul Strand

The important thing is, you have to have something important to say about the world.

Paul Strand

It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.

Paul Strand

Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.