{"id":46218,"date":"2025-11-26T01:41:56","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T06:41:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.johnpaulcaponigro.com\/blog\/?p=46218"},"modified":"2025-12-04T09:26:04","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T14:26:04","slug":"14-great-quotes-by-photographer-eric-meola","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johnpaulcaponigro.com\/blog\/46218\/14-great-quotes-by-photographer-eric-meola\/","title":{"rendered":"14 Great Quotes By Photographer Eric Meola"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-46213\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johnpaulcaponigro.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/10-Meola-750.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"750\" height=\"500\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Enjoy these quotes by photographer Eric Meola.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Photography for me is a passion, not a job. Once it becomes just a job you&#8217;ve lost sight of why you originally became a photographer.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Very early in your career you need to shoot things that you believe in, things that you really want to shoot. You need to take risks. Don&#8217;t wait for the phone to ring. Success is only going to happen if you are out there really working to make it happen.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I believe strongly that a photograph should stand on its own with a story, and without a caption.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I had to see what it looked like. I had to shoot whether there was light or whether there wasn&#8217;t light.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>There are literally hundreds of songs, poems, paintings, books, that influence us. Edward Hopper\u2019s \u201cNighthawks\u201d comes to mind, and Ernst Haas\u2019s photograph \u201cRoute 66, Albuquerque.\u201d It\u2019s impossible to delineate how they have influenced me, other than to state they have been imprinted in my mind \u2014 the light, the sound, the composition, the color. Out of this \u201csoup\u201d comes something new that may not be directly related to a particular influence, but certainly contains the ingredients of many different influences.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I\u2019m not out to make photographs in color; my photographs are about the color.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Color is my subject as much as the apparent subject.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Playing with color is my way to escape the chaos of the world, and to express it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I have no favorite color, but if I did, it would be gray \u2013 the perfect neutral that acts in contrast to the colors around it and lets them stand on their own.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;My work with color and light has become more and more abstract over the past five decades. I\u2019ve explored the way light is used in architecture, and how artists, such as Rothko, use color, both contrasting and complementary, to elicit strong emotional responses; they create a deeply spiritual resonance on a two-dimensional canvas.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;When I stare at Mark Rothko&#8217;s color field paintings, I am transformed as well as transfixed.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We &#8216;see red,&#8217; but how we see it is subjective. We see it in our mind&#8217;s eye, as I did this morning, when I heard a cardinal.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;What is important to me is not what my eye sees but what my mind&#8217;s eye sees; it&#8217;s that third eye that has blessed me with intention and demanded invention.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cA print is the photographer\u2019s statement about the light, the mood, the space, the spirit and being of the image, and that interpretation may change with time, with technology, and with the photographer\u2019s own interpretation of the image. A print is the completion of a photograph; without it, the image is suspended in time, without interpretation.\u201d \u2013 Eric Meola<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div id=\"content\" class=\"col-sm-8 col-sm-push-4\">\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #ff0000;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.johnpaulcaponigro.com\/blog\/46205\/color-a-conversation-with-eric-meola-dec-10-8-pm-est\/\">Enjoy our video Conversation Color!<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.johnpaulcaponigro.com\/blog\/17066\/12-great-photographs-by-eric-meola\/\">View 12 Great Photographs by Eric Meola<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.johnpaulcaponigro.com\/blog\/46218\/14-great-quotes-%E2%80%A6apher-eric-meola\/\"><strong>Read 14 Great Quotes By Photographer Eric Meola.<\/strong><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.johnpaulcaponigro.com\/blog\/photographers-qa\/eric-meola\/\">Read our short Q&amp;A<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.johnpaulcaponigro.com\/blog\/photographer-convos\/eric-meola\/\">Read our extended conversation.<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"https:\/\/ericmeola.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Discover more by Eric Meola.<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Enjoy these quotes by photographer Eric Meola. &#8220;Photography for me is a passion, not a job. Once it becomes just a job you&#8217;ve lost sight of why you originally became a photographer.&#8221; &#8220;Very early in your career you need to shoot things that you believe&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[2779],"tags":[43,1249,1809,56,80],"post_folder":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v18.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>14 Great Quotes By Photographer Eric Meola - John Paul Caponigro<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.johnpaulcaponigro.com\/blog\/46218\/14-great-quotes-by-photographer-eric-meola\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"14 Great Quotes By Photographer Eric Meola - John Paul Caponigro\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Enjoy these quotes by photographer Eric Meola. &#8220;Photography for me is a passion, not a job. 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