“Charles Sheeler was a key figure in the American Precisionist Movement in the early 20th Century. He had careers as both a successful painter and as a photographer.” – Ted Forbes
Manhatta a short movie by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand.
Explore 12 Great Photographs By Great Photographers
Explore The Essential Collection Of Quotes By Photographers.
Explore The Essential Collection Of Documentaries On Photographers.
Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Charles Sheeler.
“I have come to value photography more and more for those things which it alone can accomplish rather than to discredit it for the things which it alone can accomplish rather than to discredit it for the thing which can only be achieved through another medium.” – Charles Sheeler
“Photography is nature seen from the eyes outward, painting from the eyes inward. Photography records inalterably the single image, while painting records a plurality of images willfully directed by the artist.” – Charles Sheeler
“My interest in photography, paralleling that in painting, has been based on admiration for its possibility of accounting for the visual world with an exactitude not equaled by any other medium. The difference in the manner of arrival at their destination—the painting being a result of composite image and the photograph being a result of a single image—prevents these media from being competitive.” – Charles Sheeler
“I favor a picture which arrives at its destination without the evidence of a trying journey rather than one which shows the marks of battle.” – Charles Sheeler
“I just don’t want to see any more than is absolutely necessary of the materials, physical material that goes into a picture.” – Charles Steeler
“Every age manifests itself by some external evidence. In a period such as ours when only a comparatively few individuals seem to be given to religion, some form other than the Gothic cathedral must be found. Industry concerns the greatest numbers-it may be true, as has been said, that our factories are our substitute for religious expression.” – Charles Sheeler
“You don’t build the house first and then make a blueprint after wards.” – Charles Steeler
“When we look at the next thing in sequence to the first object that we have gazed at, there’s still an overtone carried over of what the retina has just previously recorded.” – Charles Steeler
“There’s a large element of symbolism in O’Keeffe’s work, as you can readily see, and none whatever in mine. It’s purely a visual thing, and what you see is what you intend to see and no overtones of symbolism.” – Charles Steeler
“Photography is only visual, thank God! The lens is an unpsychological piece of glass whether formulated by Zeiss or Bausch and Lomb or whomever.” – Charles Sheeler
“When one goes back to our early photography whose mechanics was extremely simple and from our modern point of view often crude, it’s easy to see that the present immense elaboration of means isn’t very important.” – Charles Sheeler
“I feel that when photography became in general use I felt that it eliminated the points of those paintings which were immediately preceding photography. I don’t know of anything they added. In fact, I think photography in the same vein added a lot more than those paintings.” – Charles Steeler
“Isn’t it amazing how photography has advanced without improving.” – Charles Sheeler
Explore 12 Great Photographs By Great Photographers
Explore The Essential Collection Of Quotes By Photographers.
Explore The Essential Collection Of Documentaries On Photographers.
“In this episode, Marc Silber takes us inside the home of famous photographer, Edward Weston. Weston’s grandson, Kim is our tour guide. Watch and you’ll hear the secrets and unbelievable stories behind Weston’s iconic photographs. How long were his exposures and did he use an f/stop higher than 64? You’ll find out about his approach to photography and composition that you can use to develop your own voice as a photographer.”
Explore more in Marc Silber’s series Advancing Your Photography.
Explore 12 Great Photographs By Great Photographers
Explore The Essential Collection Of Quotes By Photographers.
Explore The Essential Collection Of Documentaries On Photographers.
Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Sean Kernan.
“Somehow the pictures that work out just the way I wanted them to are the ones I lose interest in soonest. The expectation has become the limit. And I think that the way to take something beyond your own expectations is to leave what you see unnamed and beyond concept for as long as you can. I want to work as far beyond what I know as I can get, and the gate to that beyond lies exactly between seeing and naming.” – Sean Kernan
“I have to say that what is revealed to me lies beyond any ideas I had for the pictures.” – Sean Kernan
“I think that I began by wanting to see what kind of pictures this intense way of working might produce, and honestly I didn’t have any idea beyond that. There was no planned outcome, none of what I recently heard a composer call “The Fallacy of Intention.” – Sean Kernan
“The benefits of chance are enormous, but you have to watch out for them too. Chance gets me beyond whatever I had in mind when I started to work. It comes into play when I let things happen and then chase alongside them and grasp them on the fly. It’s like two acrobats, one of whom doesn’t know that he’s an acrobat. But the artist is responsible to what chance gives him, and just setting it down without taking it in and manifesting it again in the heuristic process is not enough. Maybe it’s that chance is happening all the damn time, and it’s the artist’s intentional work with it that strains artworks out of the soup.” – Sean Kernan
“I’d love to say something more intelligent about this, but I don’t know that the process had much intelligence in it.” – Sean Kernan
“I’m inclining toward the idea that the working process of art is a lot more thoughtless than I once imagined – thoughtless but not stupid.” – Sean Kernan
The process is in the elimination of conceptions and cleansing the mind, then in claiming the awareness and manifesting it in a work.” – Sean Kernan
“So you want to float in that space of awareness as long as you can, keeping all possibilities alive so they can become clearer, then you pull down one that is BOTH unexpected and makes perfect sense.” – Sean Kernan
“It is the unexpectedness of the image that wakes us up so we really see something, and the rightness of the image that affirms what we have seen in the mind’s eye.” – Sean Kernan
“So if every thing looks right and it still feels wrong, or lacks resonance, or if it refers mainly to other photography and not to seeing, to awareness itself, you should sniff elsewhere.
“The first question I tell students to ask in the first critique of a class is not is the work good, but is it alive ?” – Sean Kernan
“You can see it in a great actors work – look at De Niro, or Streep, or Arkin. They can just stare into the air and you’ll sit and watch them, watch their intensity. And I realized that some of the best photographers I know have that same kind of intensity. It shows in their work. Their intense staring generates its own power, and we respond by staring with them.” – Sean Kernan
“I have a real appreciation these days for work that abrades me into awareness.” – Sean Kernan
Learn more about Sean Kernan here.
View 12 Great Photographs By Sean Kernan here.
View video by Sean Kernan here.
View 12 Photographs Celebrated By Sean Kernan here.
Read more Great Quotes By Photographers here.
Sean Kernan’s The Secret Books
Sean Kernan makes insightful comments on twelve photographs.
“At this point I most respond to things that stir me to a kind of seeing that I didn’t think I could do. They make me want to try, even though I have no idea where or how to begin. This group contains work from major artists and workshop students, proving that anyone can break through.” – Sean Kernan
Anselm Keifer. I love this artist’s work, and in particular his books, of which this is one. The distressing of the photographic image and its inclusion in a book makes me think it’s a history of the end of the world…that has been left out in the atomic rain.
Arno Minkinnen. Arno’s “subject” has been his body for so long that he has found the deepest caves of the mind. They are not only what he thinks but of what they make me think. In this case I see some Finnish shamanistic ritual that takes place at the threshold of life/death, with passage going either way.
Diane Arbus. This seems to sum up all the mystery of her seeing. The more you think and say about this image, the further afield you drift. Just look at it and shut up.
Duane Michals. So often we look at a photograph. Here we start to read it and realize that we are being drawn in as a player, as a subject of the…picture. And so is anyone else who looks at it. Fantastic!
Irving Penn. This photo knocked me out when I saw it. It is not documentary. Instead Penn has bridged the world of the highland Quechuan Indians of Peru and the formality of Brozino, the great Rennaisance portraitist.
Larry Clark. Photographers love to visit other worlds (see Penn, above), but Larry lived in the drug world and he had a camera. Tough, tough pictures. To learn more, read Dennis Johnson’s book, Jesus’ Son.
Michelle Elloway. This picture started as a workshop assignment to photograph a place where something had happened. I said nothing about writing down what it was that had happened, but the photographer blew the class away by writing the results of the event, turning the whole thing into a chilling Shirley-Jackson moment. (If you don’t know Shirley Jackson, read The Lottery.
Ralph Gibson. Ralph’s work is sui generis, very simple, graphic and pregnant. This photo isn’t really like that, thanks to that wavering curtain, I think.
Rebecca Biddle Mossman. I love pictures that get beyond thinking. I am sure that the photographer just started off the situation, then saw something and pushed it, then just let it happen. (That’s my guess.) It’s the best way of working, and it leads to photos that you can’t believe you took.
Saul Leiter. I’m giving him three, because he is new to me and because he has a freedom that I wish I had! The first is just saucy, impudent, sexy and innocent. I look at this woman and I just want to give her a shirt and take her out for coffee. She’s young in the picture, but I’d still love to meet her and say “So, tell me about your life.”
Or maybe not. Maybe it’s better to just suspend in the moment.
Saul Leiter. The second Leiter is just…ah…like watching a juggler make a perfect catch from completely off center.
Saul Leiter. The third Leiter brings together three entirely different kind of images and resolves them while somehow leaving them intact.
Learn more about Sean Kernan here.
View 12 Great Photographs By Sean Kernan here.
High frequency
Medium Frequency
Low Frequency
Frequency is a term that’s being used more and more. That’s because new tools offer you more control over frequency than ever before. Noise reduction, sharpening, and HDR all offer unprecedented control over the look and feel of detail in our images. Frequency is used to describe the amount of detail packed into a given area of an image. This is measured by the amount of tonal variation between rows or columns of pixels. Imagine measuring an image with a line that passes across it (horizontally from left to right or vertically from top to bottom). The mean or average tonal value along lines can be charted and then compared to values from other measurement lines, especially those nearest to each other.
I’m co-leading a workshop in Japan through April 9.
Follow my social networks to see images and more.
Richard Benson and Frank Cost discuss important recent transitions in photography at Parsons The New School for Design in NYC during a two day conference The Photographic Universe.
Read my conversation with Richard Benson.
Explore 12 Great Photographs By Great Photographers
Explore The Essential Collection Of Quotes By Photographers.
Explore The Essential Collection Of Documentaries On Photographers.
To celebrate Women’s History Month, here’s a selection of the many documentaries on women photographers I’ve collected and shared over the years.
Plus, you’ll find links to quotes and image collections at the end.
Diane Arbus| View
Ruth Bernhard | View
Laura Gilpin | View
Nan Goldin | View
Lauren Greenfield | View
Lois Greenfield | View
Annie Leibovitz | View 1 | View 2
Sally Mann | View 1 | View 2 | View 3
Mary Ellen Mark | View
Cristina Mittermeier | View
Tina Modotti | View
Sarah Moon | View
Elizabeth Opalenik | View
Cindy Sherman | View
Joyce Tenneson | View 1 | View 2
View more on B&H’s Women Of Influence.
Get to know Lauren Greenfield in these three interviews.
Find out more about Lauren Greenfield here.
View more Photographer’s Videos here.