Below, we’ve listed 40 of the best quotes from the legendary documentary photographer, which are sure to inspire, motivate, and help take your photography to the next level.

For over 50 years Parr has been capturing the quirkiness and beauty in everyday life. He is known for his candid photography, which he believes “adds an extra dimension” to his work.

His photographs are instantly recognizable for their use of color, and witty style that is compellingly beautiful and subtly humorous.

Parr himself defines his photography as “a mixture of documentary observation and staged comment.”

If you enjoy the article or find it helpful, then don’t forget to share it with others through the usual channels (social media, forums, websites, etc) and check out Headshots.

Martin Parr Quotes

From the moment the tourist enters the site, everyone has to be photographed in front of every feature of note… The photographic record of the visit has almost destroyed the very notion of actually looking. 

Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work. 

I accept that all photography is voyeuristic and exploitative, and obviously I live with my own guilt and conscience. It’s part of the test and I don’t have a problem with it.

All types of photography are important. For me, vernacular photography is essential as it provides a record of a moment, of important events in peoples’ lives, whereas many documentary or artistic photos are produced for a specific purpose. There is an urgency in vernacular photography that you don’t necessarily feel in professional photography.

Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality. In the cookery pages, the food always looks amazing, right? Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.

When a mother takes pictures of her children on the beach, she doesn’t take herself for an artist; she does it for love, which is an excellent reason, from my point of view. 

Everyone is a photographer now, remember. That’s the great thing about photography. 

Quotes on Photography Style

I am what I photograph. 

With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society’s natural prejudice and giving this a twist.

My black-and-white work is more of a celebration, and the color work became more of a critique of society.

We are drowning in images. Photography is used as a propaganda tool, which serves to sell products and ideas. I use the same approach to show aspects of reality.

My photography is an observation of the western world’s middle classes and their endless quest for material abundance. 

The fundamental thing I’m exploring constantly is the difference between the mythology of the place and the reality of it… Remember I make serious photographs disguised as entertainment. That’s part of my mantra. I make the pictures acceptable in order to find the audience but deep down there is actually a lot going on that’s not sharply written in your face. If you want to read it you can read it.

It is part of my agenda to take photos that can fit into all the outlets for photography, from the gallery wall to the magazine or newspaper page. That, to me, is using photography at its best.

Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate, and that is an aspect that I have to puncture. I do that by showing the world as I really find it.

Finding your Subjects

What interests me most is to take pictures of things people don’t really care about.

I try to photograph my own and society’s hypocrisy.

The idea of England in decline is very attractive.

If there is any jarring at all in my photographs, it’s because we are so used to ingesting pictures of everywhere looking beautiful.

I looked around at what my colleagues were doing, and asked myself, “What relationship has it with what’s going on?” I found there was a great distortion of contemporary life. Photographers were interested only in certain things. A visually interesting place, people who were either very rich or very poor, and nostalgia.

I am only photographing what is obvious, and part of my way of working is to tap into people’s prejudices and depict all aspects of things happening in today’s society. I give people an opportunity to air their prejudices, and if they want to say the working class is scruffy and dirty, then the pictures exist to illustrate that thesis. 

Photography is, by its nature, exploitative. It’s whether you use this process with a sense of responsibility or not. I feel that I do so. My conscience is clear.

I often think of what I photograph as a soap opera, where I am waiting for the right cast to fall into place.

Quotes on Photography Technique

I go straight in very close to people and I do that because it’s the only way you can get the picture. You go right up to them. Even now, I don’t find it easy. I don’t announce it. I pretend to be focusing elsewhere. If you take someone’s photograph it is very difficult not to look at them just after. But it’s the one thing that gives the game away. I don’t try and hide what I’m doing – that would be folly.

When I first started learning how to take photographs, you had to spend the first six months figuring out what an f-stop was. Now you just go and take pictures. Nobody thinks about technical issues anymore because cameras or camera phones take care of that automatically.

I see things going on before my eyes and I photograph them as they are, without trying to change them. I don’t warn people beforehand. That’s why I’m a chronicler. I speak about us and I speak about myself. 

I love playing the game of fashion photography without knowing what the rules are. 

Martin Parr’s Tips for Better Photography

You have to take a lot of bad pictures. Dont’ be afraid to take bad pictures… You have to take a lot of bad pictures in order to know when you’ve got a good one.

The easy bit is picking up a camera and pointing and shooting. But then you have to decide what it is you’re trying to say and express. 

Unless it hurts, unless there’s some vulnerability there, I don’t think you’re going to get good photographs. 

Find something you are passionate about and shoot your way through this obsession with elegance and you will have a potentially great project. 

Get out there and do it. If it’s good, it will be seen. There is no such thing as a brilliant new contemporary photographer who is undiscovered.

What’s your Favorite Martin Parr Quote?

Have a favorite Martin Parr quote? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. Also, don’t forget to share it with others.

To see more of Martin Parr‘s photography, check out his image archive on Magnum Photos website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Check out the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

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The post Martin Parr Quotes: Creating Fiction out of Reality appeared first on Photogpedia.

A documentary and landscape photographer, Josef Koudelka first came to international prominence as the anonymous Czech photographer who chronicled the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The images he produced were eventually smuggled out of Prague and published in the Sunday Times.

Thematically, his work reveals humanity from the depths of chaos, portraying ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances and conflicts. Throughout his lengthy career he has established himself as the foremost chronicler of the changing landscape of Europe.

In this article, we’ll be sharing 25 of the best Josef Koudelka quotes. If you find the quotes helpful then we would be grateful if you could share the article with other photographers.

Josef Koudelka Quotes

I try to be a photographer. I cannot talk. I am not interested in talking. If I have anything to say, it may be found in my images.

I would like to see everything, look at everything, I want to be the view itself.

When I first started to take photographs in Czechoslovakia, I met this old gentleman, this old photographer, who told me a few practical things. One of the things he said was, “Josef, a photographer works on the subject, but the subject works on the photographer.

I don’t pretend to be an intellectual or a philosopher. I just look.

What matters most to me is to take photographs; to continue taking them and not to repeat myself. To go further, to go as far as I can.

The Work

I photograph only something that has to do with me, and I never did anything that I did not want to do. I do not do editorial and I never do advertising. No, my freedom is something I do not give away easily.

I never accepted any assignment, never photographed for money. I took photographs just for myself.

My work has no theme. I don’t care if my photographs get published, and I have no interest in “the news.” But the invasion of Prague was not news, it was my life.

[My] photographs are proof of what happened. When I go to Russia, sometimes I meet ex-soldiers… They say: “We came to liberate you….” I say: “Listen, I think it was quite different. I saw people being killed.” They say: No. We never… no shooting. No. No.” So I can show them my Prague 1968 photographs and say: “Listen, these are my pictures. I was there.” And they have to believe me.

The changes taking place in this part of Europe are enormous and very rapid. One world is disappearing. I am trying to photograph what’s left. I have always been drawn to what is ending, what will soon no longer exist.

Personally, I have had the good fortune of always being able to do what I wanted, never working for others. Maybe it is a silly principle, but the idea that no one can buy me is important for me. I refuse assignments, even for projects that I have decided to do anyhow. It is somewhat the same with my books. When my first book, the one on the gypsies, was published, it was hard for me to accept the idea that I could no longer choose the people to whom I would show my photos, that any one could buy them.

It never seemed important to me that my photos be published. It’s important that I take them. There were periods where I didn’t have money, and I would imagine that someone would come to me and say: “Here is money, you can go do your photography, but you must not show it.” I would have accepted right away. On the other hand, if someone had come to me saying: “Here is money to do your photography, but after your death it must be destroyed,” I would have refused.

I don’t like captions. I prefer people to look at my pictures and invent their own stories.

By [photographing theater] the same way I photograph real life, I learned to see the world as theater. To photograph the theater of the world interests me more… With the gypsies, it was theater, too. The difference was that the play had not been written and there was no director – there were only actors… It was the theater of life… All I had to know was how to react.

Devastation is photogenic.

Koudelka on Technique

Sometimes I photograph without looking through the viewfinder. I have mastered that well enough, it is almost as if I were looking through it.

…photography was easier in the beginning. It’s like a dart game: at the beginning, you can toss them anywhere, they will always be well placed. Wherever you hit is the right place. But once you start building something, you realize that certain pieces are missing.

Listen, I have never had any hero in my life or in photography. I just travel, I look and everything influences me.

When I photograph, I do not think much. If you looked at my contacts you would ask yourself: “What is this guy doing?” But I keep working with my contacts and with my prints, I look at them all the time. I believe that the result of this work stays in me and at the moment of photographing it comes out, without my thinking of it.

Quotes for Better Photography

If I couldn’t shoot lots of photos, I would not be the photographer that I am. Still, the cost of film has often been a problem. At times, to save money, I had to work with remainders of movie-film, and even to buy film that was stolen. But when I have only three rolls of film left in my bag, I panic.

I have to shoot three cassettes of film a day, even when not ‘photographing’, in order to keep the eye in practice.

What I needed most was to travel so that I could take photographs.

I never stay in one country more than three months. Why? Because I was interested in seeing, and if I stay longer I become blind.

I am not interested in repetition. I don’t want to reach the point from where I wouldn’t know how to go further. It’s good to set limits for oneself, but there comes a moment when we must destroy what we have constructed.

If I am dissatisfied, it’s simply because good photos are few and far between. A good photo is a miracle.

What’s your Favorite Josef Koudelka Quote?

Have a favorite Josef Koudelka quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. Also, don’t forget to share it with others through the usual channels (social media, forums, websites, etc).

To learn more about Koudelka’s photography, we recommend reading checking out his photographer profile on Magnum’s website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Visit the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

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W Eugene Smith Quotes

Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance. Always, I am on the threshold.

My pictures are complex and so am I.

I can’t stand these damn shows on museum walls with neat little frames, where you look at the images as if they were pieces of art. I want them to be pieces of life!

Each time I pressed the shutter release it was a shouted condemnation hurled with the hope that the picture might survive through the years, with the hope that they might echo through the minds of men in the future – causing them caution and remembrance and realization.

My camera, my intentions stopped no man from falling. Nor did they aid him after he had fallen. It could be said that photographs be damned for they bind no wounds. Yet, I reasoned, if my photographs could cause compassionate horror within the viewer, they might also prod the conscience of that viewer into taking action.

A photo is a small voice, at best, but sometimes – just sometimes – one photograph or a group of them can lure our senses into awareness. Much depends upon the viewer; in some, photographs can summon enough emotion to be a catalyst to thought.

Smith on Photojournalism

I think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose.

Photographic journalism, because of the tremendous audience reached by publications using it, has more influence on public thinking and opinion than any other branch of photography. For these reasons, it is important that the photographer-journalist has (beside the essential mastery of his tools) a strong sense of integrity and the intelligence to understand and present his subject matter accordingly.

Many claim I am a photographer of tragedy. In the greater sense I am not, for though I often photograph where the tragic emotion is present, the result is almost invariably affirmative.

I try to take what voice I have and I give it to those who don’t have one at all.

Humanity is worth more than a picture of humanity that serves no purpose other than exploitation.

… to became neighbours and friends instead of journalists. This is the way to make your finest photographs.

I think the only thing wrong with the word “documentary” is that it can give some people the idea that you can make absolutely dull pictures of the ingredients of something instead of the heart of something.

To have his photographs live on in history, past their important but short lifespan in a publication, is the final desire of nearly every photographer-artist who works in journalism. He can reach this phase only by combining a profound penetration into the character of the subject with a perfection of composition and technique – a consolidation necessary for any photographic masterpiece.

I think that basically all of my photographs are failures… I’m not saying that as a self negation or anything like that, I just don’t judge it upon it upon how “good” it was, but rather upon how I’d fail upon what I was trying to say… I think this “Tomoko in her Bath” personally is the best photograph I ever made, it came to say what I was trying to say.

Quotes on Capturing the Truth

The journalistic photographer can have no other than a personal approach; and it is impossible for him to be completely objective. Honest -yes. Objective – no.

The first word I would remove from the folklore of journalism is the word objective.

With considerable soul searching, that to the utmost of my ability, I have let truth be the prejudice.

I am constantly torn between the attitude of the conscientious journalist who is a recorder and interpreter of the facts and of the creative artist who often is necessarily at poetic odds with the literal facts.

I am an idealist. I often feel I would like to be an artist in an ivory tower. Yet it is imperative that I speak to people, so I must desert that ivory tower. To do this, I am a journalist—a photojournalist. But I am always torn between the attitude of the journalist, who is a recorder of facts, and the artist, who is often necessarily at odds with the facts. My principle concern is for honesty, above all honesty with myself.

Up to and including the moment of exposure, the photographer is working in an undeniably subjective way. By his choice of technical approach, by the selection of the subject matter… and by his decision as to the exact cinematic instant of exposure, he is blending the variables of interpretation into an emotional whole.

The Photo Essay

I bear in mind that I have to have an opener and closer. Then I make a mental picture of how to fill in between these two. Sometimes, at the end of the day, I’ll lie in bed and do a sketch of the pictures I already have. Then I’ll decide what pictures I need. In this way, I can see how the job is shaping up in the layout form.

In the building of a story, I being with my own prejudices, mark them as prejudices, and start finding new thinking, the contradictions to my prejudices, What I am saying is that you cannot be objective until you try to be fair. You try to be honest and you try to be fair and maybe truth will come out.

[I would list the picture to take, and other things to do. It began with a beginning, but it was a much tighter and more difficult problem at the end. I’d say, ‘Well, she has this relationship to that person. I haven’t shown it. How can I take a photograph that will show that? What is this situation to other situations?’

Here it becomes really like a playwright who must know what went on before the curtain went up, and have some idea of what will happen when the curtain goes down. And along the way, as he blocks in his characters, he must find and examine those missing relationships that five the validity of interpretation to the play.]

I don’t think a picture for the sake of a picture is justified – only when you consider the purpose. For example, I photographed a woman giving birth, for a story on a midwife. There are at least two gaps of great pictures in my pictures.

I have personally always fought very hard against ever packaging a story so that all things seem to come to an end at the end of a story. I always want to leave it so that there is a tomorrow. I suggest what might happen tomorrow – at least to say all things are not resolved, that this is life, and it is continuing.

The Importance of Emotion

Most photographers seem to operate with a pane of glass between themselves and their subjects. They just can’t get inside and know the subject.

I’ve never made any picture, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.

The purpose of all art is to cause a deep and emotion, also one that is entertaining or pleasing. Out of the depth and entertainment comes value.

What uses having a great depth of field, if there is not an adequate depth of feeling?

W Eugene Smith Quotes on Technique

I didn’t write the rules – why should I follow them? Since I put a great deal of time and research to know what I am about? I ask and arrange if I feel it is legitimate. The honesty lies in my – the photographer’s – ability to understand.

[I crop ] for the benefit of the pictures. The world just does not fit conveniently into the format of a 35mm camera.

In music I still prefer the minor key, and in printing I like the light coming from the dark. I like pictures that surmount the darkness, and many of my photographs are that way. It is the way I see photographically. For practical reasons, I think it looks better in print too.

[on why he prints his own pictures] The same reason a great writer doesn’t turn his draft over to a secretary… I will retouch.

Negatives are the notebooks, the jottings, the false starts, the whims, the poor drafts, and the good draft but never the completed version of the work… The print and a proper one is the only completed photograph, whether it is specifically shaded for reproduction, or for a museum wall.

W Eugene Smith Tips for Better Photography

When a good picture comes along, I shoot it. Later I may find a better variation of the same shot, so I shoot all over again.

Available light is any damn light that is available!

Since I am somewhat adequate as a photographer, I remain with it.

Halsmann: What if nobody sees [the work]? Besides a few friends?

Smith: Answer this and you will see how artists have acted throughout the bloody ages. The goal is the work itself.

An artist must be ruthlessly selfish.

Hardening of the categories causes art disease.

Passion is in all great searches and is necessary to all creative endeavors.

What’s your Favorite W. Eugene Smith Quote?

Have a favorite W. Eugene Smith quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. Like the article? Share it with other photographers.

To learn more about W. Eugene Smith’s photography, check out his photographer profile on Magnum’s website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Visit the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

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The post 42 W. Eugene Smith Quotes on Mastering the Photo Essay appeared first on Photogpedia.

Imogen Cunningham was a pioneering female photographer who strove to capture reality through her lens. Her remarkable portrait, nude and still life photography helped establish the medium as an art form.

Below we’ve listed 30 of the best Imogen Cunningham’s to inspire, motivate and help advance your photography.

Imogen Cunningham Quotes

Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.

Once a woman who does street work said to me, ‘I’ve never photographed anyone I haven’t asked first.’ I said to her, ‘Suppose Cartier-Bresson asked the man who jumped the puddle to do it again – it never would have been the same. Start stealing!’

I don’t talk about success. I don’t know what it is. Wait until I’m dead.

My interest in photography has something to do with the aesthetic, and that there should be a little beauty in everything.

I never divide photographers into creative and uncreative, I just call them photographers. Who is creative? How do you know who is creative or not?

Everybody who does anything for the public can be criticized. There’s always someone who doesn’t like it.

Cunningham on Subjects

[My] taste lay somewhere between reality and dreamland.

I photograph anything that can be exposed to light. The reason during the twenties that I photographed plants was that I had three children under the age of four to take care of so I was cooped up. I had a garden available and I photographed them indoors. Later when I was free I did other things.

I’ve tried my best to sell people on the idea that I photograph anything that can be exposed to light.

I never stopped photographing. There were a couple of years when I didn’t have a darkroom, but that didn’t stop me from photographing.

You know, a documentary is only interesting once in a while. If you look at a whole book of Dorothea [Lange]’s where she has row after row of people bending over and digging out carrots – that can be very tedious. And so it’s only once in a while that something happens that is worth doing.

I don’t like landscapes. I never had had the time to run out when the weather was right. You know, always I would be getting dinner for somebody, when it was sunset time, when you can do a nice landscape. Or, crack of dawn, I’m not there. So, I’ve very seldom have done anything that could be called a landscape. But I do things in a landscape.

I’m still sticking with people more than things and I don’t walk around the city as much as I did. I don’t know why. Telephone. All the other agonies of life, keep you from doing what you really think you should do.

I was invited to photograph Hollywood. They asked me what I would like to photograph. I said, Ugly men.

Portrait Photography Quotes

The thing that’s fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.

So many people dislike themselves so thoroughly that they never see any reproduction of themselves that suits. None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.

A woman said to me when she first sat down, You’re photographing the wrong side of my face. I said, Oh, is there one?

I turn people into human beings by not making them into gods.

Related: 150+ Portrait Photography Quotes

Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don’t know.

When you do portraits professionally it’s not a desire, it’s for money.

One must be able to gain an understanding at short notice and close range of the beauties of character, intellect, and spirit so as to be able to draw out the best qualities and make them show in the outer aspect of the sitter. To do this one must not have a too pronounced notion of what constitutes beauty in the external and, above all, must not worship it. To worship beauty for its own sake is narrow, and one surely cannot derive from it that esthetic pleasure which comes from finding beauty in the commonest things.

Ansel [Adams] once said to somebody that I [Cunningham] was versatile, but what he really meant was that I jump around. I’m never satisfied staying in one spot very long, I couldn’t stay with the mountains and I couldn’t stay with the trees and I couldn’t stay with the rivers. But I can always stay with people, because they really are different.

Cunningham Quotes for Better Photography

I just believe in working. I’m not one of those romantic explainers of my own individual point of view.

I don’t think there’s any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.

I wasn’t very ambitious. I think that’s the solution. I just took things as they came. I wouldn’t say I didn’t have any problem, but I didn’t care. I didn’t think I was going to save the world by doing photography as some of these people do. I was just having a good time doing it, and so I still had a good time no matter what I had to photograph.

There are too many people studying it [photography] now who are never going to make it. You can’t give them a formula for making it. You have to have it in you first, you don’t learn it. The seeing eye is the important thing.

…I can’t recreate my feelings about how I happened to do this or that, because a lot of my stuff was done without any motivation, more than just what I call having a good time fooling around.

I made a lot of mistakes, and I still do. But, I try not to worry about it, because I never will be the perfectionist, and I never tried to be, I guess. Just so they didn’t come out all, mussed up. I don’t think anyone knows his own work. We always make mistakes about what we like and what we don’t like. One can never tell, I’ve done so many things that I’ve no idea about how to evaluate them.

The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.

What’s your Favorite Imogen Cunningham Quote?

Have a favorite Imogen Cunningham quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. If you’ve found the article helpful, then we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers.

To see more of Imogen Cunningham’s photography, head over to the image archive on the Imogen Cunningham Trust website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Check out the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

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The post 30 Imogen Cunningham Quotes to Advance your Photography appeared first on Photogpedia.

Below we’ve put together a list of 40 quotes from the master photographer to inspire, motivate and help take your photography to the next level.

Paul Strand Quotes

Objectivity is of the very essence of photography, its contribution and at the same time its limitation.

You see, the extraordinary thing about photography is that it’s a truly popular medium… But this has nothing to do with the art of photography even though the same materials and the same mechanical devices are used, Thoreau said years ago “You can’t say more than you see.” No matter what lens you use, no matter what the speed of the film is, no matter how you develop it, no matter how you print it, you cannot say more than you see. That’s what that means, and that’s the truth.

I’ve always felt you can do anything you want in photography, if you can get away with it.

I think of myself as an explorer who has spent his life on a long voyage of discovery.

If the photographer is not a discoverer, then he is not an artist.

Photography is only a new road from a different direction, but moving toward the common goal, which is life.

I’ve always felt you can do anything you want in photography, if you can get away with it.

The important thing is, you have to have something important to say about the world.

Documentary Photography Quotes

The documentary photographer aims his camera at the real world to record truthfulness. At the same time, he must strive for form, to devise effective ways of organizing and using the material. For content and form are interrelated. The problems presented by content and form must be so developed that the result is fundamentally true to the realities of life as we know it. The chief problem is to find a form that adequately represents the reality.

It has always been my belief that the true artist, like the true scientist, is a researcher using materials and techniques to dig into the truth and meaning of the world in which he himself lives; and what he creates, or better perhaps, brings back, are the objective results of his explorations. The measure of his talent – of his genius, if you will – is the richness he finds in such a life’s voyage of discovery and the effectiveness with which he is able to embody it through his chosen medium.

If Ansel Adams gets a thousand dollars a print, I want ten thousand.

Honesty no less than intensity of vision is the prerequisite of a living expression. This means a real respect for the thing in front of the photographer. This is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation through the use of straight photographic methods.

The artist is one who makes a concentrated statement about the world in which he lives and that statement tends to become impersonal – it tends to become universal and enduring because it comes out of something very particular.

Photographing People

It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.

I like to photograph people who have strength and dignity in their faces; whatever life has done to them, it hasn’t destroyed them. I gravitate towards people like that.

With the eye of the machine, Stieglitz… has shown that the portrait of an individual is really the sum of a hundred or more photographs. He has looked with three eyes and has been able to hold, by purely photographic means, space-filling, tonality and tactility, line and form, that moment when the forces at work in a human being become most intensely physical and objective. In thus revealing the spirit of the individual he has documented the world of that individual, which is today.

Strand on Subject Matter

Subject matter is extremely important to the artist, because until he talks about something that really means something to him, the audience cannot see anything important or interesting.

I’ve always wanted to be aware of what’s going on around me, and I’ve wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time.

On the whole, I am attracted to those artists who are interested in a large panorama, and not to those who are concerned with their personal likes and dislikes. I am attracted to those who are more interested in everything that exists outside of themselves. That is the final source of all the best in art and it’s a source which has hardly been tapped.

Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningness. If you let other people’s vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

The material of the artist lies not within himself nor in the fabrications of his imagination, but in the world around him. The element which gives life to the great Picassos and Cezannes, to the paintings of Van Gogh, is the relationship of the artist to context, to the truth of the real world. It is the way he sees this world and translates it into art that determines whether the work of art becomes a new and active force within reality, to widen and transform man’s experience. The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.

Photography Technique

The camera machine cannot evade the objects which are in front of it. When the photographer selects this movement, the light, the objects, he must be true to them. If he includes in his space a strip of grass, it must be felt as the living differentiated thing it is and so recorded. It must take its proper but no less important place as a shape and a texture in relationship to the mountain tree or what not, which are included.

We do not photograph some large conception of humanity, but rather go very deeply into a single person, and penetrate very deeply and derive a larger meaning. One person who has been studied very deeply and penetratingly can become all persons. Therefore, it seems to me, that art is very specific and not at all general.

The decision as to when to photograph, the actual click of the shutter, is partly controlled from the outside, by the flow of life, but it also comes from the mind and the heart of the artist. The photograph is his vision of the world and expresses, however subtly, his values and convictions.

Cartier-Bresson has said that photography seizes a ‘decisive moment’, that’s true except that it shouldn’t be taken too narrowly…does my picture of a cobweb in the rain represent a decisive moment? The exposure time was probably three or four minutes. That’s a pretty long moment. I would say the decisive moment in that case was the moment in which I saw this thing and decided I wanted to photograph it.

All good art is abstract in its structure.

The camera machine cannot evade the objects which are in front of it. No more can the photographer. He can choose these objects, arrange and exclude, before exposure, but not afterwards… Your photography is a record of your living, for any one who really sees.

And if you can find out something about the laws of your own growth and vision as well as those of photography you may be able to relate the two, create an object that has a life of its own, which transcends craftsmanship. That is a long road, and because it must be your own road nobody can teach it to you or find it for you. There are no shortcuts, no rules.

The photographer’s problem, therefore, is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium, for it is precisely here that honesty, no less than intensity of vision, is the prerequisite of a living expression. This means a real respect for the thing in front of him, expressed in terms of chiaroscuro through a range of almost infinite tonal values which lie beyond the skill of human hand.

The thing I see is outside myself – always. I’m not trying to describe an inner state of being.

Paul Strand Quotes for Better Photography

I don’t care how you photograph – use the kitchen mop if you must, but if the product is not true to the laws of photography… you have produced something that is dead.

When you put a photograph on the wall it either works as a totality or it doesn’t and all the excuses, rationale, and captions underneath will not make it any better.

The unintelligence of present-day photographers, that is of so-called pictorial photographers, lies in the fact that they have not discovered the basic qualities of their medium.

Whether a watercolor is inferior to an oil [painting], or whether a drawing, an etching, or a photograph is not as important as either, is inconsequent. To have to despise something in order to respect something else is a sign of impotence.

I read the other day that Minor White said it takes twenty years to become a photographer. I think that is a bit of an exaggeration. I would say, judging from myself, that it takes at least eight or nine years. But it does not take any longer than it takes to learn to play the piano or the violin. If it takes twenty years, you might as well forget about it!

You may see and be affected by other people’s ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzche meant when he said, ‘I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him.’ He knew how insidious other people’s ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own personal vision.

Did I express my personality? I think that’s quite unimportant because it’s not people’s selves but what they have to say about life that’s important.

I go and get the camera and do it. Photography is a medium in which if you don’t do it then, very often you don’t do it at all, because it doesn’t happen twice. A rock will probably always be more or less there juts the way you saw it yesterday. But other things change, they’re not always there the day after or the week after. Either you do it or you don’t. Certainly with things as changeable as shy and landscape with moving clouds and so on, if they look wonderful to you on a certain day and if you don’t do it then, you may never see them again for the rest of your life. So as a photographer you become very conscious – at least I do – that everything is in movement.

What’s your Favorite Paul Strand Quote?

Have a favorite Paul Strand quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. If you’ve found the article helpful, then we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers.

To see more of Paul Strand’s photography, check out his image archive on the V&A Museum website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Check out the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

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Andre Kertesz was a pioneer of street photography and a remarkable still life photogapher. In a career that spanned seven decades, he captured everyday life with poetic beauty and elevated ordinary objects to exquisite art.

Below we’ve listed 23 of our favorite quotes from one of the most influential photographers in the history of medium to inspire and help take your photography to the next level.

Andre Kertesz Quotes

The camera is my tool. Through it I give a reason to everything around me.

I can’t talk about my style. It us kind of difficult for me. I don’t like styles. I only like taking photos and expressing myself through them.

Photography is my only language.

I am not a surrealist. I am only a realist. All this group – surrealists – use my name. No, no, I am realist.

Of course a picture can lie, but only if you are not honest with yourself…

I attribute to photography the task of recording the real nature of things, their interior, their life. The photographer’s art is a continuous discovery which requires patience and time. A photograph draws its beauty from the truth with which it’s marked. For this very reason I refuse all the tricks of the trade and professional virtuosity which could make me betray my career.

As soon as I find a subject which interests me, I leave it to the lens to record it truthfully. Look at the reporters and at the amateur photographer! They both have only one goal; to record a memory or a document. And that is pure photography.

The most valuable things in a life are a man’s memories. And they are priceless.

Kertesz on Subjects

I am a lucky man. I can do something with almost anything I see. Everything is still interesting to me.

You do not have to imagine things; reality gives you all you need.

Everything is a subject. Every subject has a rhythm. To feel it is the raison d’être. The photograph is a fixed moment of such a raison d’être, which lives on in itself.

Because I’m forever a beginner who discovers the world again and again.

I do not document anything, I give an interpretation.

People in motion are wonderful to photograph. It means catching the right moment… when one thing changes into something else.

The moment always dictates in my work. What I feel, I do. This is the most important thing for me, Everybody can look, but they don’t necessarily see. I never calculate or consider; I see a situation and I know that it’s right, even if I have to go back to get the proper lighting.

Kertesz Quotes on Technique

Technique isn’t important. Technique is in the blood. Events and mood are more important than good light and the happening is what is important.

If you want to write you should learn the alphabet. You write and write and in the end you hava a beautiful, perfect alphabet. But it isn’t the alphabed that is important. The important thing is what you are writing, what you are expressing. The same thing goes for photography. Photographs can be technically perfect and even beautiful, but they have no expression.

I am an amateur and I intend to stay that way for the rest of my life.

I do what I feel, that’s all, I am an ordinary photographer working for his own pleasure. That’s all I’ve ever done.

I like high shots. If you are on the same level, you lose many things.

Have confidence in the inventions and transformations of chance.

Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph.

I just walk around, observing the subject from various angles until the picture elements arrange themselves into a composition that pleases my eye.

What’s your Favorite Andre Kertesz Quote?

Have a favorite Andre Kertesz quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. If you’ve found the article helpful, then we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers.

To see more of Andre Kertesz’s photography, check out the Kertesz image archive on the Artsy.net website.

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Recommended book: Andre Kertesz: His Life and Work

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Visit the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

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Dorothea Lange Quotes

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

Art is a by-product of an act of total attention.

I realize more and more what it takes to be a really good photographer. You go in over your head, not just up to your neck.

Put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

I would like to see photographers become responsible and photography to realize its potential.

To be good, photographs have to be full of the world.

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

Documentary Photography Quotes

For me documentary photography is less a matter of subject and more a matter of approach. The important thing is not what is photographed but how.

It is not a factual photograph per se. The documentary photograph carries with it another thing, a quality in the subject that the artist responds to. It is a photograph which carries the full meaning of the episode or the circumstance or the situation that can only be revealed – because you can’t really recapture it – by this other quality. There is no real warfare between the artist and the documentary photographer. He has to be both.

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history.

This benefit of seeing… can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image… the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.

When you are doing a lot of hard fast field work, it’s a physical necessity to forget every day. You can’t try to remember it in any continuity. You get so burdened if you try to do it the other way. You can’t dictate to your material… We found our way in, slid in on the edges. We used our hunches. And it was hard, hard living.

Walker Evans is, in my opinion, an extraordinary man. He had extraordinary eyesight. There is always a little twist in it somewhere, there is a bitterness, not always, I take that word out, and there is an edge, a bitter edge to Walker. That I sensed; and it’s pleasurable to me. I like that bitter edge. He seemed very straight and very true. I don’t care if he’s a son-of- a-gun.

My own approach is based upon three considerations. First – hands off ! Whenever I photograph I do not molest or tamper with or arrange. Second – a sense of place. I try to picture as part of its surroundings, as having roots. Third – a sense of time. Whatever I photograph, I try to show as having its position in the past or in the present.

Lange used the following quote from the painter Francis Bacon as her credo for her documentary photography work:

The contemplation of things as they are, without error of confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.

Francis Bacon

Lange on Subjects

As photographers, we turn our attention to the familiarities of which we are a part. So turning, we in our work can speak more than of our subject – we can speak with them; we can more than speak about our subjects – we can speak for them. They, given tongue, will be able to speak with and for us. And in this language will be proposed to the lens that with which, in the end, photography must be concerned – time, and place, and the works of man.

It came to me that what I had to do was to take pictures and concentrate on people, only people, all kinds of people, people who paid me and people who didn’t.

Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion… the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.

I am trying here to say something about the despised, the defeated, the alienated. About death and disaster, about the wounded, the crippled, the helpless, the rootless, the dislocated. About finality. About the last ditch.

Dorothea Lange Quotes for Better Photography

You know, so often it’s just sticking around and being there, remaining there, not swooping out in a cloud of dust: sitting down on the ground with people, letting children look at your camera with their dirty, grimy little hands, and putting their fingers on the lens, and you just let them, because you know that if you will behave in a generous manner, you are apt to receive it, you know?

I’ve never not been sure that I was a photographer any more than you would not be sure you were yourself. I was a photographer, or wanting to be a photographer, or beginning – but some phase of photographer I’ve always been.

Every image he sees, every photograph he takes, becomes in a sense a self-portrait. The portrait is made more meaningful by intimacy – an intimacy shared not only by the photographer with his subject but by the audience.

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.

Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.

What’s your Favorite Dorothea Lange Quote?

Have a favorite Dorothea Lange quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. If you’ve found the article helpful, then we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers.

To see more of Dorothea Lange’s photography, check out her image archive on the Museum of Modern Art website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Visit the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

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The post 25 Classic Dorothea Lange Quotes on Documentary Photography appeared first on Photogpedia.

Parks was a man committed to social equality, and he saw photography as a weapon to move people to action and change lives. He became the first black photographer on staff at Life magazine in the late 1940s and continued to work for the magazine for over 20 years.

Although Parks’ greatest achievements as a photographer were his enduring documentary photographs, he also cultivated a reputation as a fashion photographer in the 50s and 60s.

Parks was often referred to as a renaissance man. In addition to his photography work, he was also a groundbreaking filmmaker, writer and composer.

He was the first black director to make a major Hollywood studio film, with the release of The Learning Tree in 1969. In 1971, Park directed his landmark film, Shaft, an action-packed thriller that gave America its first black hero. The film is credited as one of the first blaxploitation films.

In this article, we have listed 30 Gordon Parks quotes to inspire, motivate and help take your photography to the next level. Hopefully, these words of wisdom from one of the all-time great photographers will encourage you to take a closer look at his incredible work.

Gordon Parks Quotes

The funny and sad thing is that photography is an art, but these guys have such an inferiority complex about it that all they do is tag on gold-plate words where they aren’t needed. If they’d only let it talk for itself.

Pictures I’ve made that have become the most important pictures, were pictures that I wished I never had to take – of people who were impoverished, people in need – and I suppose that I pointed my camera mostly at people who needed someone to say something for them. They couldn’t speak for themselves.

At first I wasn’t sure that I had the talent, but I did know I had a fear of failure, and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it.

Those people who want to use a camera should have something in mind, there’s something they want to show, something they want to say.

If you don’t have anything to say, your photographs are not going to say much.

The guy who takes a chance, who walks the line between the known and unknown, who is unafraid of failure, will succeed.

Documentary Photography Quotes

People in millenniums ahead will know what we were like in the 1930’s and the thing that, the important major things that shaped our history at that time. This is as important for historic reasons as any other.

Think in terms of images and words. They can be mighty powerful when they are fitted together properly.

I must attempt to transcend the limitations of my own experience by sharing, as deeply as possible, the problems of those I photograph.

I was born to a black childhood of confusion and poverty. The memory of that beginning influences my work today, It is impossible now to photograph a hungry child without remembering the hunger of my old childhood.

I suffered first as a child from discrimination, poverty… So I think it was a natural follow from that that I should use my camera to speak for people who are unable to speak for themselves.

I don’t know that I was any better equipped. I probably… in some instances I was, more than probably the white photographers because of an emotional something that probably I was closer to or akin to which has certainly been in my favour since. Some of those Negro stories that I’ve done for Life and Standard Oil and other places have dealt with poverty, dealt with the emotional aspect of everyday living, because my own life was packed, early life, was packed with so much of it.

I have for a long time, worked under the premise that everyone is worth something; that every life is valuable to our own existence. Consequently, I’ve felt it was my camera’s responsibility to shed light on any condition that hinders growth or warps the spirit of those trapped in the ruinous evils of poverty… To me they were ghosts of my own past.

I want my children and children’s children to be able to look at my pictures and know what my world was like. Even if it only helps a little bit toward this understanding, then I’ve done my job and done it well.

Parks on Subjects

The subject matter is so much more important than the photographer.

The photographer begins to feel big and bloated and so big he can’t walk through one of these doors because he gets a good byline; he gets notices all over the world and so forth; but they’re really… the important people are the people he photographs. They are what make him.

I’d become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what colour they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake. I thought I had the instinct toward championing the cause.

You know, the camera is not meant just to show misery. You can show beauty with it; you can do a lot of things. You can show – with a camera you can show things that you like about the universe, things you hate about the universe. It’s capable of doing both. And I think that after nearly 85 years upon this planet that I have a right after working so hard at showing the desolation and the poverty, to show something beautiful as well. It’s all there, and you’ve only done half the job if you don’t do that.

I feel it is the heart, not the eye, that should determine the content of the photograph. What the eye sees is its own. What the heart can perceive is a very different matter.

Higher Purpose and Change

The world must see the tragedy of poverty as it is, and feel all its drama. Everyone must face the problems of humanity. My way of facing these issues is through photography. It is important because it can show, without needing words, everything that is wrong and can be improved.

I had known poverty firsthand, but there I learned how to fight its evil – along with the evil of racism – with a camera.

I’ve known both misery and happiness, lived in so many different skins it is impossible for one skin to claim me. And I have felt like a wayfarer on an alien planet at times – walking, running, wondering about what brought me to this particular place, and why. But once I was here the dreams started moving in, and I went about devouring them as they devoured me.

I thought then [1941], and Roy Stryker eventually proved it to me, that you could not photograph a person who turns you away from the motion picture window, or someone who refuses to feed you, or someone who refuses to wait on you in a store. You could not photograph him and say “This is a bigot,” because bigots have a way of looking like everybody else.

I’ve been asked if I think there will ever come a time when all people come together. I would like to think there will. All we can do is hope and dream and work toward that end. And that’s what I’ve tried to do all my life.

The Camera as a Weapon for Fighting Evil

What the camera had to do was expose the evils of racism, the evils of poverty, the discrimination and he bigotry, by showing the people who suffered most under it. That was the way it had to be done.

I suffered evils, but without allowing them to rob me of the freedom to expand.

I have always felt as though I needed a weapon against evil.

You have a 45mm automatic pistol on your lap, and I have a 35mm camera on my lap, and my weapon is just as powerful as yours.

Gordon Parks to Black Panther militant Eldridge Cleaver

I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty. I could have just as easily picked up a knife or a gun, like many of my childhood friends did … most of whom were murdered or put in prison… but I chose not to go that way. I felt that I could somehow subdue these evils by doing something beautiful that people recognise me by, and thus make a whole different life for myself, which has proved to be so

What’s your Favorite Gordon Parks Quote?

Have a favorite Gordon Parks quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. If you’ve found the article helpful, then we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers.

To learn more about Parks’ life and photography work, check out the Gordon Parks Foundation website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Check out the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

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Walker Evans Quotes

I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered I didn’t need to. If the thing is there, why, there it is.

Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste, and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt.

Experience is very important. It comes only with time. I have time behind me so I venture to teach and say to students, “I don’t really know a hell of a lot more than you do except I’ve been around longer and I do have experience and if I can articulate it some of it will rub off and do you some good.” When I didn’t have experience that’s one thing I learned, that I needed it. It comes – talking to an experienced man is something; it’s not the same as having it but it’s better than not.

The meaning of quality in photography’s best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system; … our overwhelming formal education deals in words, mathematical figures and methods of rational thought, not in images.

Good photography is unpretentious.

With the camera, it’s all or nothing. You either get what you’re after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don’t think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.

The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.

Walker Evans Quotes

Walker Evans on Photography Style

As a boy I had a cheap little camera and I had gone through the hobby photography experience developing film in the bathroom and so on. And I think it came from painters. Several of my friends were painters. And I had a visual education that I had just given myself.

When I first made photographs, they were too plain to be considered art and I wasn’t considered an artist. I didn’t get any attention at all. The people who looked at my work thought, well, that’s just a snapshot of the backyard. Privately I knew otherwise and through stubbornness stayed with it…

I began to wonder – I knew I was an artist or wanted to be one – but I was wondering whether I really was an artist. I was doing such ordinary things that I could feel the difference. Most people would look at those things and say, ‘Well, that’s nothing. What did you do that for? That’s just a wreck of a car or a wreck of a man. That’s nothing. That isn’t art.’ They don’t say that anymore.

I think I was photographing against the style of the time, against salon photography, against beauty photography, against art photography. I was doing non-artistic and non- commercial work. I felt – and it’s true – I was on the right track. I sensed that I was turning new ground. At least I though I was mining a new vein, sort of instinctively knowing it but not in any other way aware of it.

Detachment, lack of sentimentality, originality, a lot of things that sound rather empty. I know what they mean. Let’s say, “visual impact” may not mean much to anybody. I could point it out though. I mean it’s a quality that something has or does not have. Coherence. Well, some things are weak, some things are strong…

First of all, I tell [students] that art can’t be taught, but that it can be stimulated and a few barriers can be kicked down by a talented teacher, and an atmosphere can be created which is an opening into artistic action. But the thing itself is such a secret and so unapproachable.

It is easy to imagine fantasy as physical and myth as real. We do it almost every moment. We do this as we dream, as we think, and as we cope with the world about us. But these worlds of fantasy that we form into the solid things around us are the source of our discontent. They inspire our search to find ourselves.

Lettering and signs are very important to me. There are infinite possibilities both decorative in itself and as popular art, as folk art, and also as symbolism and meaning and surprise and double meaning. It’s a very rich field… I think in truth I’d like to be a letterer. And then broadly speaking I’m literary. The sign matters are just a visual symbol of writing.

Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

Walker Evans Quotes

Technique and Process

I work rather blindly. I have a theory that seems to work with me that some of the best things you ever do sort of come through you. You don’t know where you get the impetus and response to what’s before your eyes.

[On composition] I don’t think very much about it consciously, but I’m very aware of it unconsciously, instinctively. Deliberately discard it every once in a while not to be artistic. Composition is a schoolteacher’s word. Any artist composes. I prefer to compose originally, naturally rather than self-consciously. Form and composition both are terribly important. I can’t stand a bad design or a bad object in a room. So much for form. That way it’s placed is composition… when you stop to think about what an artist is doing one question is, what is the driving force, the motive?”

Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

It’s easy to photograph light reflecting from a surface, the truly hard part is capturing the light in the air.

I don’t believe in manipulation, if that’s what you mean, of any photographs or negatives. To me it should be strictly straight photography and look like it; not be painterly ever.

…nature photographs downright bore me for some reason or other. I think: ‘Oh, yes. Look at that sand dune. What of it?’

Photography is not cute cats, nor nudes, motherhood or arrangements of manufactured products. Under no circumstances it is anything ever anywhere near a beach.

I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.

Documentary Photography

I’m sometimes called a ‘documentary photographer’ but… a man operating under that definition could take a sly pleasure in the disguise. Very often I’m doing one thing when I’m thought to be doing another.

Documentary: That’s a sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear… The term should be documentary style… You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless.

The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative. By their fewness, and by the importance of the reader’s eye, this will be misunderstood by most of that minority which does not wholly ignore it. In the interests, however, of the history and future of photography, that risk seems irrelevant, and this flat statement necessary.

… that’s always been true with anything, whether there’s any technical need or not. For example, we’re all taught to write, and anybody can sit down and write something. Not everybody can sit down and write something that’s worth writing.

Interviewer: Do you think it’s possible for the camera to lie?
Walker Evans: It certainly is. It almost always does.

What I believe is really good in the so-called documentary approach to photography is the addition of lyricism. This quality is usually produced unconsciously and even unintentionally and accidentally by the cameraman.

Incidentally, part of a photographer’s gift should be with people. You can do some wonderful work if you know how to make people understand what you’re doing and feel all right about it, and you can do terrible work if you put them on the defense, which they all are at the beginning. You’ve got to take them off their defensive attitude and make them participate.

I never took it upon myself to change the world. And those contemporaries of mine who were going around falling for the idea that they were going to bring down the United States government and make a new world were just asses to me.

It’s too presumptuous and naïve to think you can change society by a photograph or anything else… I equate that with propaganda; I think that’s a lower rank of purpose.

Die knowing something. You’re not here long.

Walker Evans Quotes

What’s your Favorite Walker Evans Quote?

Have a favorite Walker Evans quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. If you’ve found the article helpful, then we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers.

To see more of Evans’s incredible photography, check out the Walker Evans image archive at the Museum of Modern Art.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Visit the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

Related Quote Articles:

• Robert Frank Quotes
• Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes
• Mary Ellen Mark Quotes
• Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Quotes

The post 34 Walker Evans Quotes on Documentary Photography and Visual Poetry appeared first on Photogpedia.

Klein was also an innovative fashion photographer and made several films, including the first ever Muhammad Ali documentary and a feature length satire on the fashion world, Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?

In this article we’ll be sharing our favorite William Klein quotes to help to your photography to the next level. If you find the article helpful, we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers.

William Klein Quotes

Every photograph, I look at the contact, it brings back memories of everything, how I was feeling, tired, full of beans, photography is like that.

You look at a contact sheet with a magnifying glass and you see a shot, suddenly it all comes back – that was a nice day, you wanted a walk, your feet were hurting, you felt that you would hit on something.

I think there are two kinds of photography… If you look at modern photography, you will find, on the one hand the Weegees, the Diane Arbuses, the Robert Franks – funky photographs. And then you have the people who go out in the woods. Ansel Adams, Weston. It’s like black and white jazz.

I liked Cartier-Bresson’s pictures, but I didn’t like his set of rules. So I reversed them. I thought his view that photography must be objective was nonsense. Because the photographer who pretends he’s wiping all the slates clean in the name of objectivity doesn’t exist.

Anybody who pretends to be objective isn’t realistic.

How can photography be non-committal? Cartier-Bresson chooses the photograph this subject instead of that, he blows up another shot of the subject, and he chooses another one for publication. He’s making a statement. He’s making decisions and choices every second. I thought, if you’re doing that, make it show.

I have a special relationship with God. And when I take the right photograph, God gives me a little bing! in the camera. And then I know I’m on the right track.

I find if I look back that half of everything I’ve done is chance.

My photographs are the fragments of a shapeless cry that tries to say who knows what… What would please me most is to make photographs as incomprehensible as life.

Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn’t look like somebody else’s work.

William Klein Quotes

Klein on Street Photography

I went out on the street and I just photographed the shit out of New York. I was free to do what I wanted and I didn’t know that I was doing anything revolutionary. I was fascinated with faces, and I would go into crowds and really take photographs point-blank and nobody would look at me.

Robert Capa said, “If you’re photograph is not good, it’s because you’re not close enough.” I heard that many years after the way I had discovered how I wanted to take photographs or film.

I was very consciously trying to do the opposite of what Cartier-Bresson was doing. He did pictures without intervening. He was like the invisible camera. I wanted to be visible in the biggest way possible.

I was taking pictures for myself. I felt free. Photography was a lot of fun for me. First of all I’d get really excited waiting to see if the pictures would come out the next day. I didn’t really know anything about photography, but I loved the camera.

I wanted to “own” what I was seeing. By accumulating documents about people I came across in the streets, or by combining people, objects around them, places… I was under the impression that I owned all that, that everything belonged to me, that it was mine. Later, the darkroom allowed me to express this ownership on a sheet of light-sensitive photographic paper. So, there was this relationship, and this “photographic shot” side that was not unpleasant. We point, we cock, we shot… And that’s it, to a certain extent, it’s like killing the subject by owning him, by freezing the subject in time and space. Do we not say “shoot” in English?

With all these so-called great photographers – Cartier-Bresson and Doisneau – everything is so hunky dory.

Rather than catching people unaware, they show the face they want to show. Unposed, caught unaware, they might reveal ambiguous expressions, brows creased in vague internal contemplation, illegible, perhaps meaningless. Why not allow the subject the possibility of revealing his attitude toward life, his neighbor, even the photographer? Both ways are valid to me.

In any case, very often people did things I couldn’t have organized or imagined. A mother points a toy gun at her child’s temple. Maybe I asked her to do it, I honestly forget. But lets say I did, out of some perverse inspiration. At the same time, though, she holds the child’s hand in the most tender, touching way.

The way a subject reacts to the camera can create a kind of happening. Why pretend the camera isn’t there? Why not use it? Maybe people will reveal themselves as violent or tender, crazed or beautiful. But in some way, they reveal who they are. They’ll have taken a self-portrait.

A lot of people in my photographs either look at me, or there is somebody to the side who is looking at the group and saying, “What is this guy photographing?” It wasn’t usual at that time. This was 1955, ’54. It was kind of surprising for a lot of people to see me photographing them.

I feel like I’m doing something that’s worthwhile. I feel like I’m showing something other people haven’t shown. I don’t get to talk to the people who I photograph, I just go, along, banging away. So I don’t really have a relationship with them. A lot of people think it’s very important. I don’t. It’s like love at first sight. I have an impression when I see somebody, and I have an idea of who they are, or what they are.

I’m not innvisible, but I don’t make a deal out of taking photographs, so people don’t really feel my presence… I do things very normally and find that’s the best way to work.

I don’t roam around with a camera and never did. I took pictures in spurts, for my books, for some assignments or on special occasions. Like people who take out their cameras for Christmas and birthdays. Each time, like them, probably, I feel it’s the first time and as if I would have to relearn the moves. Luckily, it comes pretty fast, like riding a bike.

Photographing Cities

The idea of having these cities as the subject of the book was something that came naturally. It became a specialty of mine to do books on cities. So I did about seven cities.

Having lived in France for several years, I thought I had one eye that was European and one that was a street-smart New Yorker.

If I went to Moscow, it’s because I wanted to see how people in a socialist country [were] living, and I hope that the photographs I took would make sense to people… to Russians… to everybody.

I’ve noticed that in general the Paris of photographers… was romantic, foggy and above all, ethnically homogeneous. But for me, Paris was, as much as and perhaps more than New York, a melting pot. A cosmopolitan city, multicultural and totally multiethnic, whatever Le Pen thinks.

In Tokyo [the camera] was more of a mask, a disguise. I had only the vaguest clue to what was going on. I wasn’t there to judge anything. I was an outsider and felt pretty uncomfortable sometimes. Have you ever eaten an official Japanese dinner for four hours on your knees? It was different in New York.

I would say looking back that the book I did [on] New York was my favorite.

William Klein Quotes

Klein’s New York Book

I thought New York had it coming, that it needed a kick in the balls. When I returned to New York, I wanted to get even. Now I had a weapon, photography.

Before my book on New York, I was a painter. When I came back to the city in 1954, after six years away, I decided to keep a photographic diary of my return. These were practically my first ‘real’ photographs. I had neither training nor complexes. By necessity and by choice, I decided that anything would have to go.

In a way its true I had a lot of old scores to settle. I was involved. According to the Henri Cartier-Bresson scriptures, you’re not to intrude or editorialize, but I don’t see how that’s possible or why it should be. I loved and hated New York. Why shut up about it?

The New York book was a visual diary and it was also kind of personal newspaper. I wanted it to look like the news. I didn’t relate to European photography. It was too poetic and anecdodtal for me… The kinetic quality of New York, the kids, dirt, madness… I tried to find a photographic style that would come close to it. So I would be grainy and contrasted and black. I’d crop, blur, play with the negatives. I didn’t see clean technique being right for New York. I could imagine my pictures lying in the gutter like the New York Daily News.

I saw the book I wanted to do as a tabloid gone berserk, gross, grainy, overinked, with a brutal layout, bull-horn headlines. This is what New York deserved and would get.

In rough neighborhoods in New York [sometimes]… it’s better not to look. So if you point a camera at a stranger, you’re almost breaking a tradition of not getting involved. Yet in a way, the camera erases involvement. Its accepted.

They didn’t know I might be photographing a hundred other things going on behind them – someone lurking in the background, a shadow, a reflection, posters, traffic, junk. [I’d say], ‘Hold it! Don’t move! Hey, look this way!’ People would say, ‘What’s this for?” I’d say, ‘The News.’ ‘The News! Wow! No shit!’ I didn’t much care.

In New York I took responsibility for the people I photographed. I felt I knew them – the people, the way they relate to each other, the streets, the buildings, the city. And I tried to make sense of it all. I just photographed what I saw though its true I used the camera as a weapon in New York.

It was a period of incredible excitement for me – coming to terms with myself, with the city I hated and loved, and with photography. Every day for months I was out gathering evidence. I made up the rules as I went along and they suited me fine.

I was a make believe ethnographer: treating New Yorkers like an explorer would treat Zulus – searching for the rawest snapshot, the zero degree of photography.

William Klein Quotes

Finding a Publisher for the Book

I spent six months in New York at that time and thought I had a book. So I went to publishers here, in New York, and got nowhere. Most of the people who looked at the photographs looked at the work and said “What kind of book is this? You make New York look like a slum.” I said, “Yeah, New York is a slum.” “What kind of New York are you showing me, everything black and awful?” I said, “No, you live on Fifth Avenue and your office is on Madison. You’ve never been to the Bronx, you’ve never been to Queens or Flatbush. This is the real New York.

In the 1950s I couldn’t find an American publisher for my New York pictures. Everyone I showed them to said, “Ech! This isn’t New York – too ugly , too seedy and too one-sided.” They said, “This isn’t photography, this is shit!”

The layout of my first book was directly inspired by a journal, a tabloid called “New York Daily News” and that was published every day in 3 million copies…That’s how I conceived all my other books, as an extension of a photographic journal across the globe.

The resulting book went against the grain thirty years ago. My approach was not fashionable then nor is it it today.

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Recommended book: William Klein: New York 1954-55

Klein’s New York book is one of the most influential photobooks ever published. His black and white, grainy images perfectly capture the energy of the city and take the viewer on a journey around the neighbourhoods of ’50s New York.

William Klein on Fashion Photography

Fashion came into my life by accident. Liberman had seen an exhibition that I had and he said, “I like what you are doing. Why don’t you come and talk to me at Vogue and we’ll see what we can do together.” I didn’t start making fashion photographs for Vogue. I was financed by Vogue to do this book on New York. As far as fashion was concerned, Liberman said to me at one point, “we are financing these wonderful photos you are taking in the street but we are a fashion magazine. So why don’t you try your hand at fashion?”

I had no idea how to start. I started to look at the fashion magazines, and what was being done. I discovered Penn and Avedon, and for me these were the ideal photographers. For me it was a golden era.

When I started to pose the question of how to take a fashion photograph, I would have to imagine certain things and I had a couple of ideas that I used. And I never used the technique I had of taking street photographs, because I thought that would cheapen the other work, so I tried to invent things which would be specifically fashion photographs, done in a specific way.

[On Vogue magazine fashion editors] I never went to those meetings – all those women with hats and thick glasses.

Mirrors. I thought that if I have mirrors, then I could shoot the girls on the mirrors. Shoot from the back and I would have a composite photograph.

I discovered working with a telephoto lens was something that I dug. Went out onto the streets with these girls, and told them to cross the street and mix in with traffic and people. And that was the first real, big assignment I gave myself.

I like these situations where things just developed.

[on his most famous fashion photo] I had these girls walking back and forth, doing double-takes because they more or less had the same dress. I was experimenting… with a tele-photo. Nobody could see me. I was half-way up the steps. These men didn’t understand. They thought they were hookers. They walked up and started feeling their ass. The editor from Vogue started panicking and she said, “We’re going to create a scandal.” So we had to stop.

All the photographic stores were besieged by photographers, buying telephoto lenses for their fashion shoots. I think it’s a good idea. I still think it’s a good idea.

[on Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?] The film isn’t about fashion, it’s about media. Fashion is part of media. It is also something which is pretty funny, graphic and inventive. I thought, “lets do a film on fashion.”

William Klein on Photography Technique

I photographed the panels, and the light wasn’t very good, so the exposure was long, and I had Jan my wife Jan, turn panels while I photographed, and I saw these geometrical forms, which blurred, and I thought, well, maybe this is something new. And I had the idea that if I had a negative, I could do anything with it.

Quite deliberately, I did the opposite to what was usually done. I thought that an absence of framing, chance, use of the accidental and a different relationship with the camera would make it possible to liberate the photographic image. There are some things that only a camera can do. The camera is full of possibilities as yet unexploited. But that is what photography is all about. The camera can surprise us. We must help it do so.

I would look at my contact sheets and my heart would be beating, you know. To see if I’d caught what I wanted. Sometimes, I’d take shots without aiming, just to see what happened. I’d rush into crowds – bang! Bang! I liked the idea of luck and taking a chance, other times I’d frame a composition I saw and plant myself somewhere, longing for some accident to happen.

Choosing location, maybe a symbolic spot, the light and perspective – and suddenly you know the moment is yours. It must be close to what a fighter feels after jabbing and circling and getting hit, when suddenly theres an opening, and bang! Right on the button. It’s a fantastic feeling.

If you look carefully at life, you see blur. Shake your hand blur is a part of life. But why must a photograph be a mirror?

I had neither training nor complexes. By necessity and choice, I decided that anything would have to go. A technique of no taboos: blur, grain, contrast, cock-eyed framing, accidents, whatever happens.

I have always loved the amateur side of photography, automatic photographs, accidental photographs with uncentered compositions, heads cut off, whatever. I incite people to make their self-portraits. I see myself as their walking photo booth.

Photography Equipment Quotes

When I started, I only had two lenses: a 50mm and a 135mm. I was very frustrated with the 50 mm and the telephoto lens. I could not put enough things, not enough people in the photo. So I went to a shop and the salesman made me try a 28mm. I immediately went outside and started taking pictures, and I was able to get as close as I wanted to things and people, whilst adding all I wanted in the frame, whilst staying sharp. It was my beginnings with a 28mm, it was a good length. I don’t know if it still exists.

The right filter, the right film, the right exposure – none of that interested me very much. I had only one camera to start with. Secondhand two lenses no filter, none of that. What interested me was getting something on film to put into an enlarger, maybe to get another picture. And I was in a big hurry. Once I got used to everything in New York I knew the trance would wear off. So I took pictures with a vengeance.

I used the wide-angle lens as a normal lens. I had no philosophy about it. When I looked in the viewfinder and realized I could see all the contradictions and confusion that was there with the wide-angle – that was what was great.

I photograph what I see in front of me, I move in close to see better and use a wide-angle lens to get as much as possible in the frame.

I’m not deliberately distorting. I need the wide-angle to get a lot of things into the frame. Take the picture of may day in Moscow. With a 50mm jammed between the parade and the side-walk, I would have been able to frame only the old lady in the middle. But what I wanted was the whole group – the tartars, the Armenians, Ukranians, Russians, an image of empire surrounding one old lady on a sidewalk as a parade goes by.

Most things I did with photography are considered acceptable today – except maybe this use of a wide-angle. It seemed more normal to me than the 50mm lens. You could even say the 50mm is an imposition of a limited point of view. But neither lens is really normal or correct. Because in life we see out of two eyes, whereas the camera has only one. So whatever lens is used, all photographs are deformations of what you actually see with your eyes.

The Anti-Photograph

In photography, I was interested in letting the machine loose, in taking risks, exploring the possibilities of film, paper, printing in different ways, playing with exposures, with composition and accidents. Its all part of what an image can be, which is anything. Good pictures, bad pictures – why not?

I came from the outside, the rules of photography didn’t interest me… there were things you could do with a camera that you couldn’t do with any other medium… grain, contrast, blur, cock-eyed framing, eliminating or exaggerating grey tones and so on. I thought it would be good to show what’s possible, to say that this is as valid of a way of using the camera as conventional approaches.

So who can pin down photography? We’re drunk with images. [Sontag’s] sick of it. I’m sick of it. But we’re moved by old amateur photographs because they aren’t concerned about theories of photography or what a picture must be. They’re just photographs without rules or dogma.

I have always done the opposite of what I was trained to do… Having little technical background, I became a photographer. Adopting a machine, I do my utmost to make it malfunction. For me, to make a photograph is to make an anti-photograph.

What’s your Favorite William Klein Quote?

Have a favorite William Klein quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. If you’ve enjoyed the article, we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers.

To see more of Klein’s remarkable street and fashion photography, check his artist profile at ArtNet.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Visit the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

Related Quote Articles:

• Daido Moriyama Quotes
• Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes
• Bill Brandt Quotes
• Street Photography Quotes

The post 70 William Klein Quotes: Rewriting the Rules of Photography appeared first on Photogpedia.