Thoughts From The Giants of Photography

   My personal choices from the websites brainyquote.com, agallery.com, anchellworkshops.com

I didn't want to tell the tree or weed what it was. I wanted it to tell me something and through me express its meaning in nature.
Wynn Bullock

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.
Ansel Adams

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.
Ansel Adams

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

Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.
Ansel Adams

The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.
Ansel Adams

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.
Ansel Adams

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.
Ansel Adams

I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.
Diane Arbus

Saturate yourself with your subject and the camera will all but take you by the hand.
Margaret Bourke-White

Like people and let them know it.
Robert Capa

I work to attain a 'state of heart', a gentle space offering inspirational substance that could purify one's vision. Photography, like music, must be born in the unmanifest world of spirit.

Paul Caponigro

Photography is not easy. You know it takes a painter or a sculpture or a musician years to perfect their technique. Then they're free to make an expression in a matter of moments. It takes moments for a photographer to perfect his technique. And then it takes years for him to make it into something that is truly creative and worthwhile.

Paul Caponigro

To be a photographer, one must photograph. No amount of book learning, no checklist of seminars attended, can substitute for the simple act of making pictures. Experience is the best teacher of all. And for that, there are no guarantees that one will become an artist. Only the journey matters.
Harry Callahan

Well, I don't think there's any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. Or maybe inspire them, or perk them up. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent, and kind of an eye.

Imogen Cunningham

We are only beginning to learn what to say in a photograph. The world we live in is a succession of fleeting moments, any one of which might say something significant.
Alfred Eisenstaedt

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.
Dorothea Lange

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
Dorthea Lange

I think you have to have a real point of view that's your own. You have to tell it your way. And, I think that it's a mistake to shoot for a specific magazine's point of view because it's never going to be as good. You have to shoot for yourself and photograph the way you believe it.
Mary Ellen Mark

I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody's face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.
Duane Michals

There are no rules and regulations for perfect composition. If there were we would be able to put all the information into a computer and would come out with a masterpiece. We know that's impossible. You have to compose by the seat of your pants.
Arnold Newman

And now, I feel at 85, I really feel that I'm just ready to start.
Gordon Parks

I had a tremendous interest and I just kept plugging away and knocking at doors, you know, seeking out encouragement where I could get it.
Gordon Parks

A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.
Irving Penn

Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject.
Eliot Porter

You learn to see by practice. It's just like playing tennis, you get better the more you play. The more you look around at things, the more you see. The more you photograph, the more you realize what can be photographed and what can't be photographed. You just have to keep doing it.
Eliot Porter

I almost never set out to photograph a landscape, nor do I think of my camera as a means of recording a mountain or an animal unless I absolutely need a 'record shot'. My first thought is always of light.
Galen Rowell

I find it some of the hardest photography and the most challenging photography I've ever done. It's a real challenge to work with the natural features and the natural light.
Galen Rowell

I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn't have a personal vision or doesn't communicate emotion fails.
Galen Rowell

Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance. Always, I am on the threshold.
W. Eugene Smith

Passion is in all great searches and is necessary to all creative endeavors.
W. Eugene Smith

Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness.
W. Eugene Smith

I knew, of course, that trees and plants had roots, stems, bark, branches and foliage that reached up toward the light. But I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself.
Edward Steichen

No photographer is as good as the simplest camera.
Edward Steichen

Once you really commence to see things, then you really commence to feel things.
Edward Steichen

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.
Edward Steichen

I do not object to retouching, dodging. or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique.
Alfred Stieglitz

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.
Alfred Stieglitz

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

The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.
Paul Strand

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

I'll go to do a shoot, I'll spend five or six hours at the beach with people, and when people think I'm all out of film, then they really relax and I get my good pictures.
Jock Sturges

That's my ambition: that you look at the pictures and realize what complex, fascinating, interesting people every single one of my subjects is.
Jock Sturges

The world is shrinking as we see more and more of it in the media, and the more we see of the world, the smaller we are, the more aware we are of how insignificant any one of us is.
Jock Sturges

If I had a picture of two handcuffed criminals being booked, I would cut the picture in half and get five bucks for each.
Weegee

People are so wonderful that a photographer has only to wait for that breathless moment to capture what he wants on film.
Weegee

Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.
Edward Weston

Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph, is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk.
Edward Weston

I see no reason for recording the obvious.
Edward Weston

I was extravagant in the matter of cameras - anything photographic - I had to have the best. But that was to further my work. In most things I have gone along with the plainest - or without.
Edward Weston

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea.
Edward Weston

Photography suits the temper of this age - of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately.
Edward Weston

Photography to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasurable it my be.
Edward Weston

There is nothing like a Bach fugue to remove me from a discordant moment... only Bach holds up fresh and strong after repeated playing. I can always return to Bach when the other records weary me.
Edward Weston

A very receptive state of mind... not unlike a sheet of film itself - seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second's exposure conceives a life in it.
Minor White

Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence.
Minor White