Margaret Bourke-White Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

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
The very secret of life for me... was to maintain in the midst of rushing events an inner tranquillity. I had picked a life that dealt with excitement, tragedy, mass calamities, human triumphs and suffering. To throw my whole self into recording and attempting to understand these things, I needed an inner serenity as a kind of balance.

Margaret Bourke-White
Nothing attracts me like a closed door. I cannot let my camera rest until I have pried it open.

Margaret Bourke-White
I believe a burning purpose attracts others who are drawn along with it and help fulfill it.

Margaret Bourke-White
Work is a religion to me, the only religion I have. Work is something you can count on, a trusted, life-long friend who never deserts you.

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 [photography] as young as possible. Bring all the assets you have and play to win.

Margaret Bourke-White
A study of modern photography can make better artists but a study of modern artists cannot make better photographers.

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
A book, while it is being written, has an intense life of its own which you share.

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
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
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
If anyone gets in my way when I am 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