13 Quotes By Photographer Stephen Shore

 
Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes by photographer Stephen Shore.
“I discovered that this camera was the technical means in photography of communicating what the world looks like in a state of heightened awareness. And it’s that awareness of really looking at the everyday world with clear and focused attention that I’m interested in.” – Stephen Shore
“It’s the bane of my existence that I see photography not as a way of recording personal experience particularly, but as this process of exploring the world and the medium. I have to be reminded, “It’s your son’s birthday party. Bring a camera.” And then, when I’m there, “Take a picture,” because it doesn’t occur to me to use it as this memorializing thing.” – Stephen Shore
“I wanted to make pictures that felt natural, that felt like seeing, that didn’t feel like taking something in the world and making a piece of art out of it.” – Stephen Shore
“I do what feels natural, but I can’t say I haven’t thought about it..” – Stephen Shore
“There’s something arbitrary about taking a picture. So I can stand at the edge of a highway and take one step forward and it can be a natural landscape untouched by man and I can take one step back and include a guardrail and change the meaning of the picture radically… I can take a picture of a person at one moment and make them look contemplative and photograph them two seconds later and make them look frivolous.” – Stephen Shore
“I enjoy the camera. Beyond that it is difficult to explain the process of photographing except by analogy: The trout streams where I flyfish are cold and clear and rich in the minerals that promote the growth of stream life. As I wade a stream I think wordlessly of where to cast the fly. Sometimes a difference of inches is the difference between catching a fish and not. When the fly I’ve cast is on the water my attention is riveted to it. I’ve found through experience that whenever—or so it seems—my attention wanders or I look away then surely a fish will rise to the fly and I will be too late setting the hook. I watch the fly calmly and attentively so that when the fish strikes—I strike. Then the line tightens, the playing of the fish begins, and time stands still.” – Stephen Shore
“I was photographing every meal I ate, every person I met, every waiter or waitress who served me, every bed I slept in, every toilet I used.” – Stephen Shore
“I don’t have to have a single point of emphasis in the picture. It can be complex, because it’s so detailed that the viewer can take time and read it, and look at something here, and look at something there, and they can pay attention to a lot more.” – Stephen Shore
“With a painting, you’re taking basic building blocks and making something that’s more complex than what you started with. It is a synthetic process. A photograph does the opposite: It takes the world, and puts an order on it, simplifies it.” – Stephen Shore
“I know that a larger print expands the information. And so more of the stuff that I’m looking at is there for a viewer to see. Now, what I found attractive about the contact print was the almost surreal density of information. That here’s this thing that you can take in, in a couple of seconds. But, to actually stand on that spot, and look at every branch on this tree, and every shadow on this building, and the pebbles on the road—this could take minutes of attention. It was, like, maybe fifteen minutes of attention had been compressed into this thing you can take in, in a few seconds. That’s what I mean by “surreal density” of information..” – Stephen Shore
“Beaumont Newhall released a revised edition of his History of Photography, where he had a chapter called “Recent Trends”. It was supposed to be the trends of the twentieth century. And he had four recent trends, and they were, as I recall; the straight photograph, the document, the formalist photograph, and the equivalent. And so it’s Paul Strand as the straight photograph, and maybe Cartier-Bresson as the document, or Walker Evans as the document, and Steiglitz as the equivalent, or maybe the formalist is Walker Evans. Whatever. But that’s the point. It’s that, to me, someone like Walker Evans is all of them. And that you could even look at Walker Evans as the equivalent, in Steiglitz, Minor White terms. Except that he’s drawing his metaphor not from nature, but from the complexity of the built environment, which may allow for a different kind of equivalent. So I thought, “Why can’t a photograph be all four things at once?” –be an art object; be a document, what ever that means exactly, but deal with content; be a formalist exploration; and operate on some, metaphor is not the right word but, resonant level..” – Stephen Shore
“There may be a difference between “withholding judgment” and an “arrest of interpretation. There can be interpretation without judgment even though everyone knows that an artist can’t be fully objective and that my framework of understanding governs what I find and therefore what I show you. But accepting that, there’s a difference in emphasis with a judgment. It has to do with a couple things. One, as I said, is temperament: I tend to back off from critical stances that I feel are judgmental. The other is that most judgments dismiss the complexities of reality—at least to my eyes. To use an analogy, I’m talking about the difference between a journalist interpreting factseven defining facts—to describe an event and an editorial writer passing judgment on the same event. A debate presents a binary view: for or against. It doesn’t capture the greater com- plexity of a continuum. But I’m also deeply interested in showing something of our time, so that I’m not just aiming a camera at the world. There is an interpretation; I’m looking at things and thinking about them..” – Stephen Shore
“A quote that I like very much… comes close to explaining my attitude about taking photographs…. “Chinese poetry rarely trespasses beyond the bounds of actuality… the great Chinese poets accept the world exactly as they find it in all its terms and with profound simplicity… they seldom talk about one thing in terms of another; but are able enough and sure enough as artists to make the ultimately exact terms become the beautiful terms.” – Stephen Shore
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16 Quotes On Perspective

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Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes on perspective.
“A little perspective, like a little humor, goes a long way.” – Allen Klein
“Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.” – Alan Kay
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” – Marcus Aurelius
“Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Never write about a place until you’re away from it, because that gives you perspective” – Ernest Hemingway
“In the perspective of every person lies a lens through which we may better understand ourselves.” – Ellen J. Langer
“Never solve a problem from its original perspective.” – Charles Thompson
“Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems – but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems incredible.” – Salman Rushdie
“The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“Always focus on the front windshield and not the review mirror.” ― Colin Powell
“I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may – light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful” – John Constable
“I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire. And it also puts our worries in perspective.” – Stephen Hawking
“Humans have the ability to shift perspective. We can experience the world through our senses. Or we can remove ourselves from our senses and experience the world even less directly. We can think about our life, rather than thinking in our life.” – John J. Emerick
“No perspective, no perception. / New perspective, new perception.” ― Toba Beta
“What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. which is not where I want to be.” ― Margaret Atwood
“Winners have the ability to step back from the canvas of their lives like an artist gaining perspective. They make their lives a work of art / an individual masterpiece.” – Denis Waitley
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21 Quotes By Photographer Jerry Uelsmann

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Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes by photographer Jerry Uelsmann.
“Photography is just light remembering itself.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“The camera is a license to explore.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“There are no uninteresting things. There are just uninterested people.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“I try to begin working with no preconceived ideas.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“When the entire process becomes a prescribed ritual that does not allow for spontaneous variations and reactions, the vitality of the medium and our relation to it suffers.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“Let us not be afraid to allow for “post-visualization.” By post-visualization I refer to the willingness on the part of the photographer to revisualize the final image at any point in the entire photographic process.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“It is the illusion of knowledge, not ignorance, that keeps one from growing.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“The goal of the artist is not to resolve life’s mysteries, but to deepen them.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“In the arts there are many right answers.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“The truth is that one is more frequently blessed with ideas while working.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“I’ve learned over the years that when you get a clue to another possibility to follow it through…” – Jerry Uelsmann
“The camera is a fluid way of encountering that other reality.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“My visual quest is driven by a desire to create a universe capable of supporting feelings and ideas.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“I think of many of my photographs as being obviously symbolic but not symbolically obvious. There isn’t any specific correlation between the symbols in this image and any content that I have in mind.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“One of the major changes in attitude that occurred in the world of art as we moved from the nineteenth into the twentieth century was that the twentieth century artist became more involved with personal expression than with celebrating exclusively the values of the society or the church. Along with this change came a broader acceptance of the belief that the artist can invent a reality that is more meaningful than the one that is literally given to the eye. I subscribe enthusiastically to this.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“The contemporary artist…is not bound to a fully conceived, previsioned end. His mind is kept alert to in-process discovery and a working rapport is established between the artist and his creation. While it may be true, as Nathan Lyons stated, ‘The eye and the camera see more than the mind knows,’ is it not also conceivable that the mind knows more than the eye and the camera can see?” – Jerry Uelsmann
“All knowledge is self-reflective.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“I’m really very concerned with helping to create an attitude of freedom and daring toward the craft of photography.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“Ultimately, my hope is to amaze myself. The anticipation of discovering new possibilities becomes my greatest joy.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“I have gradually confused photography with life.” – Jerry Uelsmann
“The creative process can sustain itself throughout the entire celebration of photography.” – Jerry Uelsmann
Read my conversation with Jerry Uelsmann here.
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22 Quotes On Originality

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Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes on originality.
“A man’s originality is not only the most beautiful , but his best personality for humanity in life. “- Anuj Somany
“No one can be profoundly original who does not avoid eccentricity.” – Andre Maurois
“But it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” – Herman Melville
“Originality consists in trying to be like everybody else – and failing.” – Raymond Radiguet
“Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.” – Charles Baudelaire
“When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.”- Jean Cocteau
“The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.” – Arthur Koestler
“Those who say there are no more original ideas need to get out of the way of those of us who are creating them.” – Steven Symes
“A man’s mind stretched by a new idea, can never go back to its original dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.” – Thomas Carlyle
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with something original.” – Ken Robinson
“No one ever discovered anything new by coloring inside the lines.” – Thomas Vasquez
“It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.” – Wallace Stevens
“The merit of originality is not novelty, it is sincerity.” – Thomas Carlyle
“Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself.” – James Stephens
“The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.” – Blaise Pascal
“Originality exists in every individual because each of us differs from the others. We are all primary numbers divisible only by ourselves.” – Jean Guitton
“Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.” – Judy Garland
“Insist upon yourself. Be original.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Do your work, but do your thing.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“When there is an original sound in the world, it makes a hundred echoes.” – John A. Shedd“
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” – W.H. Auden
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20 Quotes By Photographer Alfred Stieglitz

 
Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes by photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
“Photography my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“When I photograph I make love.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“If you can imagine photography in the guise of a woman and you’d ask her what she thought of Stieglitz, she’d say: He always treated me like a gentleman.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“Wherever there is light, one can photograph.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“…the goal of art was the vital expression of self.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“My photographs are a picture of the chaos in the world, and of my relationship to that chaos. My prints show the world’s constant upsetting of man’s equilibrium, and his eternal battle to reestablish it.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“For that is the power of the camera: seize the familiar and give it new meanings, a special significance by the mark of a personality.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“I have all but killed myself for Photography. My passion for it is greater than ever. It’s forty years that I have fought its fight – and I’ll fight to the finish – single handed & without money if need be. It is not photographs – it is not photographers – I am fighting for. And my own photographs I never sign. I am not fighting to make a ‘name’ for myself. Maybe you have some feeling for what the fight is for. It’s a world’s fight. This sounds mad. But so is Camera Work mad. All that’s born of spirit seems mad in these [days] of materialism run riot.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“My ideal is to achieve the ability to produce numberless prints from each negative, prints all significantly alive, yet indistinguishably alike, and to be able to circulate them at a price not higher than that of a popular magazine, or even a daily paper. To gain that ability there has been no choice but to follow the road I have chosen.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs [rather than paintings, etchings, etc.] that unless one has eyes and sees, they won’t be seen – and still everyone will never forget having once looked at them.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“Photographers must learn not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“I do not object to retouching, dodging. or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“The ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired off-hand, but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labor.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“It is not art in the professionalized sense about which I care, but that which is created sacredly, as a result of a deep inner experience, with all of oneself, and that becomes ‘art’ in time.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“Let me here call attention to one of the most universally popular mistakes that have to do with photography – that of classing supposedly excellent work as professional, and using the term amateur to convey the idea of immature productions and to excuse atrociously poor photographs. As a matter of fact nearly all the greatest work is being, and has always been done, by those who are following photography for the love of it, and not merely for financial reasons. As the name implies, an amateur is one who works for love; and viewed in this light the incorrectness of the popular classification is readily apparent.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“The great geniuses are those who have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience.” – Alfred Stieglitz
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30 Quotes By Photographer Diane Arbus

 
Here’s a selection of quotes by photographer Diane Arbus.
“The camera is a kind of license.” – Diane Arbus
“Photography was a licence to go whenever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.” – Diane Arbus
“My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.” – Diane Arbus
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” – Diane Arbus
“Lately I’ve been struck with how I really love what you can’t see in a photograph.” – Diane Arbus
“I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do — that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.” – Diane Arbus
“I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don’t think of.” – Diane Arbus
“The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way.” – Diane Arbus
“One thing that struck me very early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.” – Diane Arbus
“I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.” – Diane Arbus
“Some pictures are tentative forays without your even knowing it. They become methods. It’s important to take bad pictures. It’s the bad ones that have to do with what you’ve never done before. They can make you recognize something you hadn’t seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again.” – Diane Arbus
“What moves me about…what’s called technique…is that it comes from some mysterious deep place. I mean it can have something to do with the paper and the developer and all that stuff, but it comes mostly from some very deep choices somebody has made that take a long time and keep haunting them.” – Diane Arbus
“I used to have this notion when I was a kid that the minute you said anything, it was no longer true. Of course it would have driven me crazy very rapidly if I hadn’t dropped it, but there’s something similar in what I’m trying to say. That once it’s been done, you want to go someplace else. There’s just some sense of straining.” – Diane Arbus
“The Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination and I think it’s true. I would never choose a subject for what it means to me or what I think about it. You’ve just got to choose a subject – and what you feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold if you just plain choose a subject and do it enough.” – Diane Arbus
“I’m very little drawn to photographing people that are known or even subjects that are known. They fascinate me when I’ve barely heard of them.” – Diane Arbus“I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.” – Diane Arbus
“What I’m trying to describe is that it’s impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else’s…. That somebody else’s tragedy is not the same as your own.” ― Diane Arbus
“I don’t know what good composition is…. Sometimes for me composition has to do with a certain brightness or a certain coming to restness and other times it has to do with funny mistakes. There’s a kind of rightness and wrongness and sometimes I like rightness and sometimes I like wrongness.” – Diane Arbus
“The camera is cruel, so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.” – Diane Arbus
“For me the subject of a picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated.” – Diane Arbus
“I would never choose a subject for what it means to me. I choose a subject and then what I feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold.” – Diane Arbus
“Take pictures of what you fear.” – Diane Arbus
“The more specific you are, the more general it’ll be.” – Diane Arbus
“Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what people observe.” – Diane Arbus
“Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.” – Diane Arbus
“There’s a kind of power thing about the camera. I mean everyone knows you’ve got some edge. You’re carrying some magic which does something to them. It fixes them in a way.” – Diane Arbus
“It’s always seemed to me that photography tends to deal with facts whereas film tends to deal with fiction.” – Diane Arbus
“Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.” – Diane Arbus
“The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.” – Diane Arbus
“If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.” ― Diane Arbus
“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.” – Diane Arbus
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22 Quotes By Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe

 
Here’s a selection of quotes by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
“If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it’s as though I’ve neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“I never liked photography. Not for the sake of photography. I like the object. I like the photographs when you hold them in your hand.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“To make pictures big is to make them more powerful.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“I like to look at pictures, all kinds. And all those things you absorb come out subconsciously one way or another. You’ll be taking photographs and suddenly know that you have resources from having looked at a lot of them before. There is no way you can avoid this. But this kind of subconscious influence is good, and it certainly can work for one. In fact, the more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“With photography, you zero in; you put a lot of energy into short moments, and then you go on to the next thing.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“…My whole point is to transcend the subject. …Go beyond the subject somehow, so that the composition, the lighting, all around, reaches a certain point of perfection. That’s what I’m doing. Whether it’s a cock or a flower, I’m looking at it in the same way. …in my own way, with my own eyes.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“When I have sex with someone I forget who I am. For a minute I even forget I’m human. It’s the same thing when I’m behind a camera. I forget I exist.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“I am obsessed with beauty. I want everything to be perfect, and of course it isn’t. And that’s a tough place to be because you’re never satisfied.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“Beauty and the devil are the same thing.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“When I work, and in my art, I hold hands with God.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“I don’t know why my pictures come out looking so good. I just don’t get it.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“I always thought I was good. That’s why it was so frustrating when other people didn’t agree.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“One must ease the public into it – that’s an art in itself.”- Robert Mapplethorpe
“Sell the public flowers… things that they can hang on their walls without being uptight.”- Robert Mapplethorpe
“I recorded that because it happened to me. I wasn’t making a point.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“My lifestyle is bizarre, but the only thing you need to know is where the darkroom is.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“I went into photography because it seemed like the perfect vehicle for commenting on the madness of today’s existence.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“People don’t have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography.”- Robert Mapplethorpe
“My theory about creativity is that the more money one has, the more creative one can be.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“The photographs that are art have to be separated from the rest – then preserved.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“I don’t think any collector knows his true motivation.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“I’m looking for the unexpected. I’m looking for things I’ve never seen before”. – Robert Mapplethorpe
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19 Quotes By Photographer William Eggleston

 
Here’s a selection of quotes by phot0grapher William Eggleston.
“I am at war with the obvious.” – William Eggelston
“You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.” – William Eggelston
“I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important.” – William Eggelston
“It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.” – William Eggelston
” Whatever it is about pictures, photographs, it’s just about impossible to follow up with words. They don’t have anything to do with each other.” – William Eggelston
“I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I’ve never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something. ” – William Eggelston
“I only ever take one picture of one thing. Literally. Never two. So then that picture is taken and then the next one is waiting somewhere else.” – William Eggelston
“I don’t have a burning desire to go out and document anything. It just happens when it happens. It’s not a conscious effort, nor is it a struggle. Wouldn’t do it if it was. The idea of the suffering artist has never appealed to me. Being here is suffering enough.” – William Eggelston
“There is no particular reason to search for meaning.” – William Eggelston
“A picture is what it is and I’ve never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn’t make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they’re right there, whatever they are.” – William Eggelston
“I never know beforehand. Until I see it. It just happens all at once. I take a picture very quickly and instantly forget about it.” – William Eggelston
” I don’t really look at other people’s photographs at all. It takes enough time to look at my own.” – William Eggelston
” I don’t have favorites. I look at pictures democratically. To me they are all equal. ” – William Eggelston
” I just wait until [my subject] appears, which is often where I happen to be. Might be something right across the street. Might be something on down the road. And I’m usually very pleased when I get the image back. It’s usually exactly what I saw. I don’t have any favorites. Every picture is equal but different.” – William Eggelston
“I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify. ” – William Eggelston
“I’ve always assumed that the abstract qualities of [my] photographs are obvious. For instance, I can turn them upside down and they’re still interesting to me as pictures. If you turn a picture that’s not well organized upside down, it won’t work.” – William Eggelston
“Whether a photo or music, or a drawing or anything else I might do—it’s ultimately all an abstraction of my peculiar experience.” – William Eggelston
“You become technically proficient whether you want to or not, the more you take pictures.” – William Eggelston
“Photography just gets us out of the house.” – William Eggelston
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27 Quotes On Imperfection

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Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes on imperfection.
“They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they’d make up their minds.” – Winston Churchill
“Gold cannot be pure, and people cannot be perfect.” – Chinese Proverb
“Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.” –  Salvador Dalí
“To escape criticism – do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.” – Elbert Hubbard
“Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly.” – Robert H. Schuller
“Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except the best.” – Henry Van Dyke
“Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.” – Thomas Carlyle
“Primary purposes of a mirror: (1) To help civilized men realize their imperfections, and, (2) To help the imperfect hide their imperfections.” – Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“Nothing and no one is perfect. It just takes a good eye to find those hidden imperfections.” – Daphne Delacroix
“There is a kind of beauty in imperfection.” – Conrad Hall
“In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.” – Alice Walker
“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” – Francis Bacon Sr.
“Even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.” – Thomas de Quincey
“Perfection itself is imperfection.” – Vladimir Horowitz
“The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise.” – Alden Nowlan
“Someone will always be prettier. Someone will always be smarter. Someone will always be younger. But they will never be you.” – Anonymous
“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” – Anna Quindlen
“We learn as much by others’ failings as by their teachings. Examples of imperfection is just as useful for achieving perfection as are models of competence and perfection.” – Magdeleine Sable
“Maybe the most any of us can expect of ourselves isn’t perfection but progress.” – Michelle Burford
“Usefulness is not impaired by imperfection. You can still drink from a chipped cup.” – Greta K. Nagel
“Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.” – Confucius
“Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.” – Judy Garland
“The word ‘Imperfect’ actually spells ‘I’m perfect’ because everyone is perfect in their own imperfect ways.” – Anonymous
“This is the very perfection of a man, to find out his own imperfections.” – Saint Augustine
“My imperfections and failures are as much a blessing from God as my successes and my talents and I lay them both at his feet.” – Mahatma Gandhi
“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” – Leonard Cohen
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you. ” –  Rumi
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24 Quotes By Photographer Ernst Haas

 
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
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