20th-century Photographer Quotes

The photograph is an incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readability.

Is it not the artist who - like our dreams - dissolves the pretenses that hide us from ourselves, disclosing both our self-serving fantasies and our unsuspected potentialities?

Stories are one of the greatest gifts we can give to our children. Stories are equipment for life.

Matthew Knisely

Toys are intriguing, and I want to see what I can do with them. On a deeper level, they represent one way that society socializes its young

David Levinthal

The printed page seems to have come to something of a dead end for all of us.

I think one of the shortcomings of reality, of real experience, is most people's inability to examine something carefully and thoughtfully without moving around or being distracted by something else. What photography does really is it forces you to examine something you normally wouldn't.

I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art.

Infinitesimal is the nearest to zero infinitesimal is so small that it is no longer something but it is not yet nothing.

We cannot hope to control what we do not understand, nor to confront our adversary, war, with our eyes averted.

Working myself into a position of total versatility, so that I can do anything I want to do at the time I want to do it. Whether I do it or not is another question.

I wanted to make photographs that were immediate and revealing - different from traditional portraiture that called for formal distance between artist and subject.

There's an arc of being. There's a beginning, then the peak is reached and then there's the end. It's like the pole vaulter who begins his run, shoots up, then comes down. At the peak there is no movement. He's neither going up nor going down. It is that moment I wait for.

In a world of disturbing images, the general body of photography is bland, dealing complacently with nature and treating our preconceptions as insights. Strange, private worlds rarely slip past our guard...

Henry Holmes Smith

One could think of a person who seems to have two opposing and contradictory sides to his personality; but it turns out that in the end the two sides are complementary. The same happens with an artist's work: deep down, what appear as contradictory sides are merely different registers, different aspects of the reality that the artist inhabits

Manuel Álvarez Bravo

I think there is an element of magic in photography - light, chemistry, precious metals - a certain alchemy. You can wield a camera like a magic wand almost. Murmur the right words and you can conjure up proof of a dream. I believe in wonder. I look for it in my life every day; I find it in the most ordinary things.

Keith Carter (photographer)

It had never once occurred to me that the paper I wanted to work for would not want me. Certainly I never expected to be rejected solely because I was a girl!

Kathryn Tucker Windham

Photography, too, reduces the world to strips and rectangles; photographers scrutinize the surfaces of reality in hope of unlocking the potential for significance that is latent within them.

I loved to press the shutter, to freeze time, to turn little slices of life into rectangle rife with metaphor.

Deborah Copaken

Photographing is an emotional thing, a graceful thing. Photography allows me to wander with a purpose.

It was clear, I was not Manet's type. Picasso—who had a way with women—only used me & Duchamp never even considered me.

Carrie Mae Weems

My sympathies have always been with the everyday people... the center of my photography.

Jerome Liebling

To photograph is often compared to an act of redemption - to select from an infinite number of choices that which is to be remembered.

Children are the true believers, and some of us are lucky enough to make the transition to adulthoood without ever losing the ability to see through young eyes.

Black people have been killed for directing their gaze at the wrong person. I want my subjects to reclaim their right to look, to see, to be seen.

Emotion may be expressed, or the utter lack of it may be expressed, but the only important fact is that of expression.

William Mortensen