American Photographer Quotes

Style as a concept has been hijacked to mean elite, refined and expensive when it should be thought of as a basic expression of life in much the same way as we all identify with music or speech.

Scott Schuman
Scott Schuman
Any fool can write a book and most of them are doing it; but it takes brains to build a house.

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

Matthew Knisely
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

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

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

Carl Mydans
Carl Mydans
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.

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

As a rule I do not like to explain my photographs, I want my pictures to be read and explored. I believe a good picture is open to many individual (subjective) associations. I am usually pleased when a viewer finds interpretations that I myself had not been aware of.

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...

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.

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
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.

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

Since 1873, I have been back four or five times. I have used the best cameras and the most sensitive emulsions on the market. I have snapped my shutter, morning, noon and afternoon. I have never come close to matching those first plates. (On photographing The Mountain of the Holy Cross)

William Henry Jackson
William Henry Jackson
It would be mistaken to suppose that any of the best photography is come at by intellection; it is like all art, essentially the result of an intuitive process, drawing on all that the artist is rather than on anything he thinks, far less theorizes about.

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

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

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.

Obsession and repetition in the process of making things is one constant element in my work.

I do not photograph for ulterior purposes. I photograph for the thing itself - for the photograph - without consideration of how it may be used.

We are Africans not because we are born in Africa, but because Africa is born in us.

The desert... may serve better as the backdrop for the problematic relationship between man and the environment. The human struggle, the successes... both noble and foolish, are readily apparent in the desert. Symbols and relationships seem to arise that stand for the human condition itself.