Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes by photographer Ernst Haas.
“With photography a new language has been created. Now for the first time it is possible to express reality by reality. We can look at an impression as long as we wish, we can delve into it and, so to speak, renew past experiences at will.” – Ernst Haas
“We can write the new chapters in a visual language whose prose and poetry will need no translation.” – Ernst Haas
“There are almost too many possibilities. Photography is in direct proportion with our time: multiple, faster, instant. Because it is so easy, it will be more difficult.” – Ernst Haas
“Living in a time of the increasing struggle of the mechanization of man, photography has become another example of this paradoxical problem of how to humanize, how to overcome a machine on which we are thoroughly dependent… the camera…” – Ernst Haas
“A few words about the question of whether photography is art or not: I never understood the question.” – Ernst Haas
“There are two kinds of photographers: those who compose pictures and those who take them. The former work in studios. For the latter, the studio is the world…. For them, the ordinary doesn’t exist: every thing in life is a source of nourishment.” – Ernst Haas
“The best pictures differentiate themselves by nuances…a tiny relationship – either a harmony or a disharmony – that creates a picture.” – Ernst Haas
“Best wide-angle lens? Two steps backward. Look for the ‘ah-ha’.” – Ernst Haas
“The most important lens you have is your legs.” – Ernst Haas
“The camera doesn’t make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But, you have to SEE.” – Ernst Haas
“The camera only facilitates the taking. The photographer must do the giving in order to transform and transcend ordinary reality. The problem is to transform without deforming. He must gain intensity in form and content by bringing a subjective order into an objective chaos.” – Ernst Haas
“You don’t take pictures; the good ones happen to you.” – Ernst Haas
“Learn by doing or even better unlearn by doing.” – Ernst Haas
“Don’t park… Arrival is the death of inspiration.” – Ernst Haas
“I am not interested in shooting new things – I am interested to see things new.” – Ernst Haas
“A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?” – Ernst Haas
“You become things, you become an atmosphere, and if you become it, which means you incorporate it within you, you can also give it back. You can put this feeling into a picture. A painter can do it. And a musician can do it and I think a photographer can do that too and that I would call the dreaming with open eyes.” – Ernst Haas
“There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.” – Ernst Haas
“I want to be remembered much more for a total vision than for a few perfect single pictures.” – Ernst Haas
“I prefer to be noticed some day, first for my ideas and second for my good eye…” – Ernst Haas
“Only a vision – that is what one must have.” – Ernst Haas
“Style has no formula, but it has a secret key. It is the extension of your personality. The summation of this indefinable net of your feeling, knowledge and experience.” – Ernst Haas
“In every artist there is poetry. In every human being there is the poetic element. We know, we feel, we believe.” – Ernst Haas
“Every work of art has its necessity; find out your very own. Ask yourself if you would do it if nobody would ever see it, if you would never be compensated for it, if nobody ever wanted it. If you come to a clear ‘yes’ in spite of it, then go ahead and don’t doubt it anymore.” – Ernst Haas
Read more photographer’s quotes here.
View photographer’s favorite quotes here.