White’s work is characterized by its simplicity, deep feeling for nature, and love for abstract photography. His haunting images are often described as mystical or ethereal and are filled with metaphors that challenge us to think about our world differently.

White’s photographic style was formed during his exchanges with Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, and Ansel Adams. His conversations with Stieglitz, in particular, spurred his “meditations” about photography as a way to translate visual form into what he called the “suprasensual.”

For White, the photograph was a “mirage” and the camera was a “metamorphosing machine.”

White was also a founding member and editor of Aperture magazine, and from 1953 to 1957 he was the curator of exhibitions at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House.

Below, we have listed 40 of our favorite Minor White quotes to inspire and help advance your photography skills.

Minor White Quotes

Photography is a language more universal than words.

I’m always mentally photographing everything as practice.

I asked if I could be a photographer, and [Alfred] Stieglitz said: ”Well, have you ever been in love?” and I said: “Yes,” and he said: “Then you can be a photographer.”

The spring-tight line between reality and photography has been stretched relentlessly, but it has not been broken. These abstractions… have not left the world of appearances; for to do so is to break the camera’s strongest point – its authenticity.

When I look at pictures I have made, I have forgotten what I saw in front of the camera and respond only to what I am seeing in the photographs.

At first glance a photograph can inform us. At second glance it can reach us.

Camera Quotes

Let the subject generate its own photographs. Become a camera.

How astounding is camera! With its unique ability to register continuous value or tone, camera can sanctify even the ugly and the dead, clarify the ordinary, and, in a moment, turn a hundred-and-eighty degrees to play iconoclast.

When gifts are given to me through my camera, I accept them graciously.

Camera and eye are together a time machine with which the mind and human being can do the same kind of violence to time and space as dreams.

Minor White on Nature

I have often photographed when I am not in tune with nature but the photographs look as if I had been. So I conclude that something in nature says, ‘Come and take my photograph.’ So I do, regardless of how I feel.

Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts.

I seek out places where it can happen more readily, such as deserts or mountains or solitary areas, or by myself with a seashell, and while I’m there get into states of mind where I’m more open than usual. I’m waiting, I’m listening. I go to those places and get myself ready through meditation. Through being quiet and willing to wait, I can begin to see the inner man and the essence of the subject in front of me… Watching the way the current moves a blade of grass – sometimes I’ve seen that happen and it has just turned me inside out.

Creativity and Spirituality

To see through, not merely with, the eye, to perceive with the inner eye, and by an act of choice to capture the essence of that perception. This is the very core of the creative process.

The state of mind of a photographer while creating is a blank… For those who would equate “blank” with a kind of static emptiness, I must explain that this is a special kind of blank. It is a very active state of mind really, a very receptive state of mind, ready at an instant to grasp an image, yet with no image pre-formed in it at any time. We should note that the lack of a pre-formed pattern or preconceived idea of how anything ought to look is essential to this blank condition. Such a state of mind is not unlike a sheet of film itself – seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second’s exposure conceives a life in it. (Not just life, but “a” life).

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.

While we cannot describe its appearance (the equivalent), we can define its function. When a photograph functions as an equivalent, we can say that at that moment, and for that person the photograph acts as a symbol or plays the role of a metaphor for something that is beyond the subject photographed.

No matter how slow the film, spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen.

To get from the tangible to the intangible… a paradox of some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the visual facts upon which he is utterly dependent, a paradox is the only possible tool. And the talisman paradox for unique photography is to work ‘‘the mirror with a memory’’ as if it were a mirage, and the camera a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor… Once freed of the tyranny of surfaces and textures, sub-stance and form can use the same to pursue poetic truth.

When the photograph is the mirror of the man, and the man is the mirror of the world, then the Spirit might take over.

Photo Sequence and Montage

A sequence of photographs is like a cinema of stills. The time and space between photographs is filled by the beholder, first of all from himself, then from what he can read in the implications of design, the suggestions springing from treatment, and any symbolism that might grow from within the subject itself.

Before he has seen the whole, how unusually perceptive and imaginative the person must be to evolve the entire sequence by meditating on its single, pair, or triplet of essential images.

Sequences originate for me from some hidden place. Though I habitually play photographs against each other, or words against images in pairs, triplets, or rows of four with expectations of magic, sequences originate from within. And I prefer to let them. In fact I cannot seriously do otherwise than photograph on impulse and let whatever words will, flow spontaneously.

To engage a sequence we keep in mind the photographs on either side of the one in our eye.

In putting images together I become active, and excitement is of another order – synthesis overshadows analysis.

It is curious that I always want to group things, a series of sonnets, a series of photographs; whatever rationalizations appear, they originate in urges that are rarely satisfied with single images.

Before he has seen the whole, how unusually perceptive and imaginative the person must be to evolve the entire sequence by meditating on its single, pair, or triplet of essential images.

The Photo as a Self-Portrait

When I looked at things for what they are I was fool enough to persist in my folly and found that each photograph was a mirror of myself.

…all photographs are self-portraits.

Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence.

The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.

The camera is first a means of self-discovery and a means of self-growth. The artist has one thing to say – himself.

Quotes for Better Photography

There’s no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class. I’m always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don’t give a damn how it got made.

…innocence of eye has a quality of its own. It means to see as a child sees, with freshness and acknowledgment of the wonder; it also means to see as an adult sees who has gone full circle and once again sees as a child – with freshness and an even deeper sense of wonder.

Creativity with portraits involves the invocation of a state of rapport when only a camera stands between two people… mutual vulnerability and mutual trust.

The photographer has the power and the talent to make his model come to life. In his creative state he works with, not from the model. In his creativity he is, and when he is, his model can be.

Very often I try to find something that matches a feeling I have. On the other hand, a lot of times I photograph with nothing specific in mind. I just play it as it comes. If it’s good, fine. I find ‘letting it happen’ relaxing, a playful vacation. Stimulating pictures almost always result.

The secret, the catch, and power lies in being able to use the forms and shapes of objects in front of the camera for their expressive-evocative qualities… the ability to see the visual world as the plastic material for the photographer’s expressive purposes.

Sometimes we work so fast that we don’t really understand what’s going on in front of the camera. We just kind of sense that, ‘Oh my God, it’s significant!’ and photograph impulsively while trying to get the exposure right. Exposure occupies my mind while intuition frames the images.

What’s your Favorite Minor White Quote?

Have a favorite Minor White 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 Minor White’s photography, visit his archive on the Princeton website.

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

More Quote Articles:

• Edward Weston Quotes
• Ansel Adams Quotes
• Alfred Stieglitz Quotes
• Landscape Photography Quotes

The post 40 Inspirational Minor White Quotes on Intuition and Found Photography appeared first on Photogpedia.

His work is held in the public collections at some of the most prestigious galleries including the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern. Gursky has twice earned the distinction of the world’s most expensive photographer: In 2006, 99 Cent II (1999) sold for $3.35 million. Five years later, Rhine II (1999) sold for $4.3 million.

In this article we’ll be sharing our favorite 42 Andreas Gurksy quotes on art photography, subjects, technique and process, printing and much more.

Andreas Gursky Quotes

For me, vision is an intelligent form of thought.

I read a picture not for what’s really going on there, I read it more for what is going on in our world generally.

Since the photographic medium has been digitized, a fixed definition of the term “photography” has become impossible.

A word is worth a thousand images.

It is not pure photography, what I do.

My photographs are ‘not abstract.’ Ultimately, they are always identifiable. Photography in general simply cannot disengage from the object.

People keep trying to find a matrix for the perfect image, but it’s intuition, it’s not something that can be taught.

Gursky on Subjects

Try to understand not just that we are living in a certain building or in a certain location, but to become aware that we are living on a planet that is going at enormous speed through the universe. For me it’s more a synonym. I read a picture not for what’s really going on there, I read it more for what is going on in our world generally.

I only pursue one goal: the encyclopedia of life.

I am never interested in the individual, but in the human species and its environment.

My preference for clear structures [within my photographic practice] is the result of my desire, perhaps illusory, to keep track of things and maintain my grip on the world.

My pictures really are becoming increasingly formal and abstract. A visual structure appears to dominate the real events shown in my pictures. I subjugate the real situation to my artistic concept of the picture.

So much has been written about my work with reference to painting, that my works look like paintings. In a way that’s right. But in another way it’s completely not right, because I insist I am a photographer, and if there is quality in my work, it is because I am a photographer, it is not because it’s something that reminds you of something else.

My images are about the way we travel through space on our planet. And the universe is huge and we are so limited in our perception

Paradoxically, this view of the Rhine cannot be obtained in situ; a fictitious construction was required to provide an accurate image of a modern river. On his photograph Rhein II

Gursky Quotes on Ideas and Research

The issues of our time – climate change, the exploitation of natural resources, working conditions, the monopolisation of distribution structures – they’re all themes in my work. But I don’t have solutions to offer. Everyone knows that Amazon represents turbo-capitalism, but it’s for the viewer to come to their own conclusions. I keep awareness of the problems simmering without losing sight of the beauty and complexity of the world so that interest in it doesn’t disappear.

I am a passionate newspaper reader every day, so many of my ideas come from reading newspapers, or looking in magazines or at TV, so that’s the reason why my images are connected to what’s going on in the world.

These days, I no longer go places without a plan, hoping to simply discover things. My process is much more conceptual and research-based.

I collect images which surround us and, from time to time, I check all the images and then, because it is difficult to make a decision – because I don’t have the time or energy to follow everything that seems interesting – it’s a gamble to say okay, this project, I think we should start doing research on it.

Normally, the way I work is that I’m doing research in the media, I find my location, do further research and then I’m asking for permissions. Then I travel to this place and I’m doing my work.

I think I’m a very slow worker, so I focus on one picture and the background of the original idea for why I choose this location or this space is always a reference to a picture that I did before, but then I change the content a bit.

Andreas Gursky Photography Techniques

I compare my work to that of a writer. He writes from what he remembers and his different impressions. In a way, a writer has the freedom to connect different thoughts, and this is the way I work with photography. It is not a straight documentary but the details that are going together, they come from the real world and they exist.

I am making images, and to make an image you have to follow certain rules so that it becomes an image.

For example, I’m working on an image, which is not in the exhibition, which shows the construction of an ocean liner. This is a subject that exists in the world. Millions of people have seen it. And I have an idea of how to show it: it sounds simple if I say it – the size of the boat is so big that our imagination is not strong enough to [encompass] it. But I have a conceptual idea to show this boat in a way you haven’t seen it. If I was still working in analogue, if I didn’t have the abilities to alter or construct images, then I couldn’t make such pictures, because in this case it will be more invention.

Even if a picture is completely invented or built, it’s necessary that you could imagine that it’s a realistic location or place. I am not happy if the picture looks completely surreal. Even if I am working with montage, I want that you don’t see it.

All my pictures are based on a direct visual experience from which I develop an idea for a picture, which is subjected to testing in the studio and eventually worked on and precised at the computer.

Digital Technology and Post-Production

Editor note: Gursky’s final images are built up from multiple images, each slightly different, parts from one added to or replacing another, until he has something that satisfies him.

Digital technology, gives me a lot of possibilities and freedom to work. When I did my straight photographs in the 1980s, it was really tough to find those images. You can’t find a location like Salerno on any [old] day. Because I didn’t know what I was looking for. It was just by chance that I found that image. But once you have made one like that, you look for similar locations and you start to repeat yourself and it becomes more difficult. So now I have [many more] possibilities.

In the early 1990s, I began to work digitally, combining shots, excising certain details, repeating others. The final works were no longer simple straightforward shots, like Salerno, but constructed images. My focus is on the expanse rather than the detail. Critics talk about me always capturing scenes from a raised perspective, but my ceiling images were taken from below, and my Formula 1 work from straight on.

If you do so much post-production, it takes such a long time to finish a picture. Normally, I don’t have the distance after this process to get the right feeling: is it a good picture, an okay picture, or a bad picture? So I need the pictures around me to prove the quality of the picture.

Space and Distance

Distance is also an important factor, which is something else I inherited from the Bechers. If a photojournalist was commissioned to document a scene, they would get much closer. But by always keeping a distance, I allow the viewer to come up with their own opinion. While my images are all comprised of many details – which you can explore in depth because of the high resolution – that’s not what they are about. Each one is always a world of its own, created.

Space is very important for me but in a more abstract way, I think. Maybe to try to understand not just that we are living in a certain building or in a certain location, but to become aware that we are living on a planet that is going at enormous speed through the universe.

My images are a lot about space, but that doesn’t mean it’s space that is unlimited. Space for me is a metaphor for the way we as mankind travel through space at home and on our planet. And the universe is huge and we are so limited in our perception and this is one of the things I want to show in my image.

The Final Print and the Market

I don’t have many choices in producing my work, so I take the photograph but the final result is always this [C-print mounted on] Plexiglas and it’s framed. On the one hand, I am happy that I found a solution that works very well for presentation; but on the other hand, I wish I could work with different materials. I’m a bit jealous of painting, where you have surface and the smell of paint. In my case, it’s always the same. So maybe this is the background for at least trying to make a difference between the sizes.

I love paintings, I collect paintings, and I am jealous because the material I use, the surface of the acrylic glass, is very boring for me. The plastic is not a very sexy material. But it is the only material we can use for making very huge photographs. And if it’s a good picture, you don’t notice the plastic any more.

The American Abstract Expressionists fascinate me. The distinction between photography and painting is still that the viewer always reads photography as what is presented, whereas painting is about the presentation as such. That has always been a guidepost for me. It is interesting to me that someone looking at my work tends to be stunned initially by being first confronted with visual phenomena that cannot be immediately classified.

In the last years, I always produce the big works because I am accustomed to the size and because I normally work a very long time for one picture, and because I am showing in museums that ask for big sizes. The post-production sometimes takes a year and I am not working on so many different pictures at one time. In the last years, my production was more than before, but sometimes it is only three or four pictures a year.

The whole market situation was a topic that might have been important to me. What matters is now, and the fact that I made some money back then is what permits me to be completely free and independent in my work now.

Quotes for Better Photography

In retrospect I can see that my desire to create abstractions has become more and more radical. Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what’s behind something.

I stand at a distance, like a person who comes from another world.

I believe that there’s also a certain form of abstraction in my early landscapes: for example, I often show human figures from behind and thus the landscape as observed “through” a second lens.

I’m always telling my students: you won’t get anywhere sitting at a table thinking. You learn by doing. That’s how you move forward. And even if you do something wrong, the result may be much more interesting than what you went looking for.

One sometimes unconsciously makes the right decision.

What’s your Favorite Andreas Gursky Quote?

Have a favorite Andreas Gursky 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 Andreas Gursky’s photography, check out the image archive on his official 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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Edward Weston Quotes

I find myself every so often looking at my ground glass as though the unrecorded image might escape me!

This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock. Significant representations – not interpretation.

Photography suits the temper of this age – of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately.

Photography to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasurable it my be.

When money enters in, – then, for a price, I become a liar, – and a good one I can be whether with pencil or subtle lighting or viewpoint. I hate it all, but so do I support not only my family, but my own work.

If I have any ‘message’ worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no short cuts in photography.

The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don’t know what to do with it.

Learning to See and Discovery

The photographer’s most important and likewise most difficult task is not learning to manage his camera, or to develop, or to print. It is learning to see photographically – that is, learning to see his subject matter in terms of the capacities of his tools and processes, so that he can instantaneously translate the elements and values in a scene before him into the photograph he wants to make.

I start with no preconceived idea – discovery excites me to focus – then rediscovery through the lens – final form of presentation seen on ground glass, the finished print previsioned completely in every detail of texture, movement, proportion, before exposure. The shutter’s release automatically and finally fixes my conception, allowing no after manipulation – the ultimate end, the print, is but a duplication of all that I saw and felt through my camera.

…through this photographic eye you will be able to look out on a new light-world, a world for the most part uncharted and unexplored, a world that lies waiting to be discovered and revealed.

The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer’s understanding of his subject and mastery of his process.

As great a picture can be made as one’s mental capacity–no greater. Art cannot be taught; it must be self-inspiration, though the imagination may be fired and the ambition and work directed by the advice and example of others.

A painter of prolific imagination might not be able to execute a hundredth of his ideas on canvas in a lifetime because of the time consumed by his recording process. But for the photographer seeing and recording are almost simultaneous. His output is limited only by his ability to see. For this reason it has always been my belief that an experienced photographer, given the means to devote himself entirely to creative expression, should be able to produce a tremendous amount of valuable work.

Weston on Finding Subjects

Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.

My true program is summed up in one word: life. I expect to photograph anything suggested by that word which appeals to me.

Anything more than 500 yards from the car just isn’t photogenic.

Very often people looking at my pictures say, ‘You must have had to wait a long time to get that cloud just right (or that shadow, or the light).’ As a matter of fact, I almost never wait, that is, unless I can see that the thing will be right in a few minutes.

But if I must wait an hour for the shadow to move, or the light to change, or the cow to graze in the other direction, then I put up my camera and go on, knowing that I am likely to find three subjects just as good in the same hour.

The camera should be used for a recording of life,for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.

I see no reason for recording the obvious.

Landscape and Nature Photography

[Weston defines photography as] a way of self-development, a means to discover and identify oneself with all the manifestations of basic forms – with nature, the source.

It seems so utterly naive that landscape – not that of the pictorial school – is not considered of “social significance” when it has a far more important bearing on the human race of a given locale than excrescences called cities.

Should we use “abstract” in describing a photograph ?… The most abstract line or form, of necessity is based on actuality – derived from nature, even as God is pictured a glorified man… To keep one’s feet planted to terra firma is to keep the head poised and receptive.

l do not wish to impose my personality upon nature (any of life’s manifestations), but without prejudice or falsification to become identified with nature, to know things in their very essence, so that what I record is not an interpretation – my idea of what nature should be but a revelation – a piercing of the smoke screen artificially cast over life by irrelevant, humanly limited exigencies, into an absolute, impersonal recognition.

Edward Weston on Portrait Photography

[Weston’s definition of a portrait photograher] …to reveal the individual before his camera, to transfer the living quality of that individual to his finished print…Not to make road maps but to record the essential truth of the subject; not to show how this person looks, but to show what he is.

Success in photography, portraits especially, is dependent on being able to grasp those supreme instants which pass with the ticking of a clock, never to be duplicated – so light, balance – expression must be seen – felt as it were – in a flash, the mechanics and technique being so perfected in one as to be absolutely automatic.

Ultimately success or failure in photographing people depends on the photographer’s ability to understand his fellow man.

Related: 150+ Portrait Photography Quotes

Edward Weston Quotes on Composition

Composition is the strongest way of seeing.

To compose a subject well means no more than to see and present it in the strongest manner possible.

When subject matter is forced to fit into preconceived patterns, there can be no freshness of vision. Following rules of composition can only lead to a tedious repetition of pictorial cliches.

Now to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk. Such rules and laws are deduced from the accomplished fact; they are the products of reflection.

Weston on Experimentation

I would say to any artist: ‘Don’t be repressed in your work, dare to experiment, consider any urge, if in a new direction all the better.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera’s eye may entirely change my idea.

Photography has certain inherent qualities which are only possible with photography – one being the delineation of detail… why limit yourself to what your eyes see when you have such an opportunity to extend your vision?

The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?

I want the stark beauty that a lens can so exactly render presented without interference of artistic effect.

The prejudice many photographers have against colour photography comes from not thinking of colour as form. You can say things with colour that can’t be said in black and white… Those who say that colour will eventually replace black and white are talking nonsense. The two do not compete with each other. They are different means to different ends.

One does not think during creative work, any more than one thinks when driving a car. But one has a background of years – learning, unlearning, success, failure, dreaming, thinking, experience, all this – then the moment of creation, the focusing of all into the moment. So I can make ‘without thought,’ fifteen carefully considered negatives, one every fifteen minutes, given material with as many possibilities. But there is all the eyes have seen in this life to influence me.

What’s your Favorite Edward Weston Quote?

Have a favorite Edward Weston 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 Weston’s remarkable photography, check out the image archive on the Edward Weston Gallery 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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Galen Rowell Quotes

My interest in photography did not begin with a burning desire to see the world through a camera. It evolved through an intense devotion to wilderness that eventually shaped all parts of my life and brought them together.

At the heart of all photography is an urge to express our deepest personal feelings – to reveal our inner, hidden selves, to unlock the artist. Those of us who become photographers are never satisfied with just looking at someone else’s expression of something that is dear to us. We must produce our own images, instead of buying postcards and photo books. We seek to make our own statements of individuality.

Still photographs are better matched to the brain’s long-term way of holding information than any other form of mass communication. The best photographs can capture a whole era in an image or two. Even the finest human mind never recalls everything from previous experience. Memory is a sieve that keeps the nuggets and releases the rubble; I wanted my photography to do the same.

Memory selects single important images, just as the camera does. In that manner both are able to isolate the highest moments of living.

Still photography will hold its present hallowed place in the world of art and communication only as long as it respects the natural integrity of the world it depicts and doesn’t overtly try to compete with high-tech media.

Photography is powered by passion of individual photographers. At the most basic level all photographers are trying to do the same thing: make images that preserve their most deeply felt visual experiences. To deviate from this pursuit of personal truth, regardless of how much money or fame may be at stake, is to risk losing that all-important source of power forever.

Each time I pick up a camera I’m trying to say something. I’m trying to communicate my view of the world and to share those high moments when what I see and what I feel are a single experience. The best images come from a blend of technical discipline and creative thought, a meld of left-brain/right-brain action. Only then can a photographer merge, for an instant, his camera’s way of seeing the world with his own.

Photographs are like gems: the real and the synthetic are often physically indistinuishable, but there is no question to the ultimate value. A photograph that depicts a moment of real life, whether that of a human activity or of the natural world, is of a higher order than the most perfect replication created by or for the camera with luck removed from the formula.

Landscape and Nature Photography

I think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued.

Ever since the 1860s when photographers traveled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment.

These days, most nature photographers are deeply committed to the environmental message

I’m exchanging molecules every 30 days with the natural world and in a spiritual sense I know I am a part of it and take my photographs from that emotional feeling within me, rather than from an emotional distance as a spectator.

The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I’m searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.

The most interesting parts of the natural world are the edges, places where ocean meets land, meadow meets forest, timberline touches the heights.

A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy.

… photographers do not merely look, they see. To see, instead of to look at, the desert through a photograph is to make its essential values come alive without resorting to gimmicks such as heavily filtered colors or yellow taxicabs. Unless a landscape is intended as an abstraction, it needs to be absolutely rooted in the integrity of the natural scene.

Photography has traditionally carried with it a cachet of fact, an illusion of captured reality. Today this quality is increasingly endangered by ever more sophisticated ways of manipulating images.

I began to realize that the camera sees the world differently than the human eye and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.

Galen Rowell on Looking for Light

I almost never set out to photograph a landscape, nor do I think of my camera as a means of recording a mountain or an animal unless I absolutely need a ‘record shot’. My first thought is always of light.

When the light is right and everything is working for me, I feel as tense as when making a difficult maneuver high on a mountain. A minute – and sometimes mere seconds – can make the difference between a superb image and a mundane one.

When the magic hour arrives, my thoughts center on light rather than on the landscape. I search for perfect light, then hunt for something earthbound to match with it.

Most amatuer photographers think of landscapes simply as objects to be photographed. They tend to forget that they are never photographing an object, but rather light itself. Where there is no light, they will have no picture; where there is remarkable light, they may have remarkable image picture.

It is easy to forget that light to photographers, like language to writers, is their ony means of artistic expression. Without an understanding of language, combined with imagination and intuition, occassional strings of lyrical words are little more than intermittent accidents. So are photographs made without understanding the language of light.

Different Types of Light

As soon as I see that the shadows are gone in an outdoor situation, I know I have soft light and a contrast ratio well within the limits of my film. I can photograph faces without fear of having them go partially black; I can shoot forest detail that would otherwise be splotched with light and dark spots , beyond hope of rendering as a color image.

The clean, even colors that come in nature under a cloudy-bright sky are not found in shadows on clear days or under dark storm clouds. They happen only when nature’s umbrella is white, a situation that can be caused by clouds, fog, light rain, or snow. If I am on assignment and these conditions present themselves, I shift gears to take advantage or the light and consequently make some of my most important outdoor images of people. I f I am in the mountains, I look for the colors of flowers and meadows to come alive. When the air is clear beneath the clouds, there is the potential for making a classic landscape, with mountains in the background and a softly lit foreground scene that doesn’t overpower the whole.

Rainbows are most commonly seen during magic hours because of their optical geometry. They form a halo around the antisolar point, the place directly opposite the sun. Because the primary are of a rainbow lies in a forty-two-degree radius around this point, it is not visible above the horizon unless the sun itself is low in the sky. A full display of a rainbow commonly occurs minutes before sunset when the sun pops out under a layer of clouds after a storm to illuminate falling rain in the distance.

At its best backlighting simplifies what might otherwise be a busy or confusing situations by allowing unnecessary details to drop away in the shadows. Forests can look very complex and uninteresting until backlighting creates beams of light, called crepuscular rays, that have corresponding exaggerated shadows. These “God beams” are among the most beautiful of common opical phenomena.

Sunrise and Sunset Photos

When the magic hour arrives, my thoughts centre on light rather than the landscape. I search for the perfect light, then hunt for something earthbound to match it with. The best images that result from this process look like visual riddles with unexpected answers; and like verbal riddles, visual riddles have been created by starting with answers then working backward.

Some of my favorite images were made after sunset or before sunrise. To work only in direct light is to miss a feast of subtle twilight colors that often become far more vivid on film than they appear to the eye, plus the chance to simulate night photography with some daylight still present.

I treat sunrises and sunsets similarly. Those who travel with me on photo trips often hear my battlecry, “Let’s unset the sunset, ” just before I drive, hike, or run to the higher ground, racing the shadow of last light. A photographer who deals with two or three sunsets a day has more chances to be lucky than a personn who settles for just one.

You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn’t waste either.

Mountain Light

The publication of Mountain Light: In Search of the Dynamic Landscape in 1986 put my philosophy on the line with the story behind my work. Before Mountain Light the many magazines I had worked for never let me say what really motivated my work, and how different my style of participatory photography is compared to that of an observer with a camera who is not part of the events being photographed. It is the difference between a landscape viewed as scenery from a highway turnout and a portrait of the earth as a living, breathing being that will never look the same twice.

Recommended book: Mountain Light: In Search of the Dynamic Landscape

Photogpedia is an Amazon Associate and earns from qualifying purchases.

Author note: I purchased Rowell’s book used for less than $15. It’s one of the best photography books I own. The book not only features Rowell’s brilliant photography, but also a ton of great information about landscape technique and working on assignment for National Geographic. This is a must own book for all landscape and adventure photographers.

Composition Quotes

In my opinion composition comes boils down to nothing more than pleasing the eye. A good inuitive sense goes a lot further than a headful of rules.

Over the years I have developed a method to avoid thinking in terms of halves, thirds, quarters or the golden [ratio] as I compose a landscape: I always begin by spontaneously balancing the features I have chosen by intuition. I look for the most important convergence of light or form and try to decide where to place it in my picture. If a certain framing feels right, I go with it. Only when it doesn’t, or when I have too many other factors to consider, so I use a rigid procedure to achieve a blanaced composition that does not appear contrived.

Another great rule of composition that I follow faithfully is to include nothing at the edges of my images that will interrupt my viewer’s eye, unless I want such an element there to lead the eye towards the subject (as with a strong diagonal or an S curve). When the main events are in the interior of a photo, the viewer’s eye should be able to run around the perphery without finding anything distracting. Continuous tones without bright highlights or unobtrusive patterns make ideal borders.

Even the most beautiful elements in nature – sunsets, waterfalls, clouds, and rainbows – don’t look their best in photographs when singled out. They are invariably more interesting when juxtaposed against their surroundings; they need something else to locate them in the universe. The balance of the splendid against something ordinary is contrary to a photographers natural inclination. We tend to either single something out or include too many ordinary things.

In photo workshops, I have found that at least 90 percent of the students make a basic compositional mistake. Their best pictures are invariably improved by cropping the foreground. Why? Because we look at a scene with our eyes, our three dimensional vision takes into account the fact that things close to us appear larger because of natural perspective distortion. When we make a photograph, however, we are translating a three-dimensional vision into two, and the foreground will always look overemphasized unless we take that factor into account beforehand.

Adventure Photography and Mountain Life

When I go to the mountains, I intuitively know my place in the world much better through these experiences. The more intense they are, the better I know myself, and the more I am able to challenge myself.

My interest in photography did not begin with books or mentors, or with any burning desire to see the world through a camera. It evolved from an intense devotion to mountains and wilderness that eventually shaped all the parts of my life and brought them together.

I began taking pictures in the natural world to be able to show people what I was experiencing when I climbed and explored in Yosemite in the High Sierra.

We mountaineers always live with the feeling that we came on the scene too late.

My mountaineering skills are not important to my best photographs, but they do add a component to my work that is definitely a bit different than that of most photographers.

Contray to what some people may imagine, my photography style does not depend on athletic aability. Most of my best images have come about precisely because of the non-athletic component in my mountain experiences. Even during the most ambitious adventures, I have free time to contemplate my surroundings, from camps, trails, and ledges. Many of [my] photographs… were made in locations readily accessible to people whose reasons for being in the wilderness are distinctly non-athletic.

I am intent on preserving the integrity of still photography… I recognize that some of my photographs may seem unreal to people that have never experienced the many nuances of mountain light, but all are natural events. Those high moments of mountain experience, the ones that would burn themselves into my memory whether or not I have a camera, are what I want to put on film, or whatever media for recording still images may emerge in years to come.

I remember when an editor at the National Geographic promised to run about a dozen of my landscape pictures from a story on the John Muir trail as an essay, but when the group of editors got together, someone said that my pictures looked like postcards.

Often when I walked alone in the mountains, I tried to make sense out of the two halves of my life. What went on in the city during the week seemed chaotic and unrelated to the events in my mountain world.

Photo Essays and Writing

The reason that I keep writing is that all my most powerful messages about the fates of wild places that I care about need to have words as well as images.

Theres no question that photographs communicate more instantly and powerfully than words do, but if you want to communicate a complex concept clearly, you need words, too.

Today, I’m very careful not to mention very specific locations when I write or give captions.

In John Muir’s time those who traveled through the mountains recorded their experiences in words or sketch pads. Muir did both, but his words are better remembered. If he were alive today, I have little doubt that he would be a wilderness photographer.

… whether I consider myself a writer or a photographer: “I spend two-thirds of my time on writing and one-third on photography; two-thirds of my income is from photography, one-third from writing.” By practicing both trades at once I was able to compare them and thereby gained a new understanding of the startling effects they have had on one another over the last century.

Galen Rowell on Equipment

Some of the time I use a tripod for static scenes and long telephotos, while other times – when I need to go very light ib wilderness adventures – I make do as best I can without one. The same principle holds true for all my photo equipment. The fact I own an item – a lens, a filter, or a tripod – doesn’t mean I use it all the time. Sometimes I take it in the field with me and never use it; it may stay in the car or at basecamp.

The most commonly used lens in my collection is a [Nikon] 24mm f/2.8. It is a carefully weighted compromise that gives me just enough interplay of foreground and background while keeping parallax distortion within control. A 28mm lens is simply not wide enough to give me the feeling I want most of the time.

I use the Nikon Series E 75-150 zoom almost as much as the 24mm lens. Its relatively fast f/3.5 aperture and light weight make it a perfect short telephoto for outdoor use.

The reason 35mm image doesn’t look like the 4-by-5 image is more of a result of method than of equipment. When I come across a still landscape that moves me, I pretend my Nikon is a bigger camera. I heft it onto a tripod, fool with composition for long minutes, shoot at f/16 to maximize depth of field, and get results that resembles in every respect what I would have gotten with a bigger camera, except the size of the film grain in enlargement. Images made in this manner regularly stand up to poster-size enlargements.

Rowell died in 2002 in a plane crash while returning from a photography workshop in Alasaka. Sadly, the pioneering outdoor photographer wasn’t around to see the photography world make the switch from film to digital. Here’s what Rowell said about the future of cameras a decade before:

Small, portable digital cameras that exceed the performance of an off-the-shelf Nikon using 35mm slide film are further away from current reality than the proposed NASA manned Mars mission, although I expect both to happen sometime during my lifetime.

To see a full list of Rowell’s cameras, lenses and filters, check out the Galen Rowell’s Camera Bag page on the Mountain Light website.

Galen Rowell Quotes for Better Photography

My advice for climbers or photographers is to really tune into your own passions and not just what other people are doing or aren’t doing. Figure out what works for you, what turns you on, what gives you the greatest amount of energy and feeling of satisfaction.

One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it… If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only too make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better.

Before I press the shutter release, I think about the validity of my subject. Photographs can lie as surely as words, and just as with writing, making a photogaph implies that the photographer understands what his photograph says. My rule of thumb is to hold back from making an exposure unless it directly involves me either intellectually or emotionally, or in both ways.

And most of my early pictures failed but about one in a 100 somehow looked better than what I saw.

Photography was a means of visual expression to communicate what I had seen to people who weren’t there. At first I was disturbed that 99 percent of my images didn’t look as good as what I had seen. The other one percent, however, contained some element–a beam of light, a texture, a reflection–that looked more powerful on film than to my eye. Without this I never would have been drawn toward photography as a career. I became fascinated with trying to consistently combine photographic vision and a visualization in my mind’s eye to make images that exceeded the normal perception before my eyes.

What I mean by photographing as a participant rather than observer is that I’m not only involved directly with some of the activities that I photograph, such as mountain climbing, but even when I’m not I have the philosophy that my mind and body are part of the natural world.

I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn’t have a personal vision or doesn’t communicate emotion fails.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of paying close attention to poor photos as well as to good ones, for it is in the rejects that our own conceptual errors are the most apparent. Too many of us get back our slides, pull out the good ones and banish the rest.

Luck plays a role in all great photographs, especially those in the natural world; yet it is not to be found in the indexes of photography manuals or on the agendas of photography classes and workshops. Luck is what makes photography an entirely different medium from art forms based only on planned creative acts.

Photography succeeds not when the original vision is created photographically, but when the photograph is able to evoke or re-create a similiar vision in the mind of each viewer. If the re-creation is not understood or not relevant or not powerful enough, the image fails. But if the special unity of composition found by the photographer triggers strong emotions, the image has a chance of success.

In the clip below, Rowell explains how he captures his remarkable photos. Also, check out episode 30 (opens in new tab) where he shares his top tips for photographing the great outdoors.

What’s your Favorite Galen Rowell Quote?

Have a favorite Galen Rowell 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 learn more about Rowell’s landscape and outdoor photography, check out the Mountain Light website. Unfortunately the gallery links on the website don’t seem to be working, however you can still view his images using the Internet Archive website.

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

Related Quote Articles:

• Ansel Adams Quotes
• Edward Weston Quotes
• Michael Kenna Quotes
• Nature and Landscape Photography Quotes

The post 65 Galen Rowell Quotes on Landscapes and Mountain Life appeared first on Photogpedia.

Edward Steichen Quotes

A photograph is worth a thousand words, provided it is accompanied by only ten words.

Once you really commence to see things, then you really commence to feel things.

When that shutter clicks, anything else that can be done afterward is not worth consideration.

Long before the birth of a word language the caveman communicated by visual images. The invention of photography gave visual communication its most simple, direct, universal language.

Usefulness has always been attractive in the art of photography.

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face – the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited; and the wealth and confusion that man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.

You know… that a blank wall is an appalling thing to look at. The wall of a museum – a canvas – a piece of film – or a guy sitting in front of a typewriter. Then, you start out to do something – that vague thing called creation. The beginning strikes awe within you.

Every other artist begins (with) a blank canvas, a piece of paper… the photographer begins with the finished product.

When I first became interested in photography… my idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don’t give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each to himself. And that is the most complicated things on earth and almost as naïve as a tender plant.

Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyonwith a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed.

Steichen on Portraits and Nude Photography

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.

A portrait must get beyond the almost universal self-consciousness that people have before the camera. If at some moment of reality… did not happen, you had to provoke it in order to… awaken a genuine response.

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

The people in the audience looked at the pictures, and the people in the pictures looked back at them. They recognized each other.

In none of these figures is the face visible. For many years everyone had prejudices against posing in the nude, and even professional models usually insisted, when they posed for nude pictures, that their faces be not shown.

Equipment and Light Quotes

No photographer is as good as the simplest camera.

I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself – mysterious and ever-changing light with its accompanying shadows rich and full of mystery.

Some day there may be… machinery that needs but to be wound up and sent roaming o’er hill and dale, through fields and meadows, by babbling brooks and shady woods – in short, a machine that will discriminately select its subject and, by means of a skillful arrangement of springs and screws, compose its motif, expose the plate, develop, print, and even mount and frame the result of its excursion, so that there will be nothing for us to do but to send it to the Royal Photographic Society’s exhibition and gratefully to receive the ‘Royal Medal’

Steichen on Printing

It is rather amusing, this tendency of the wise to regard a print which has been locally manipulated as irrational photography – this tendency which finds an esthetic tone of expression in the word faked. A manipulated print may be not a photograph. The personal intervention between the action of the light and the print itself may be a blemish on the purity of photography. But, whether this intervention consists merely of marking, shading and tinting in a direct print, or of stippling, painting and scratching on the negative, or of using glycerine, brush and mop on a print, faking has set in, and the results must always depend upon the photographer, upon his personality, his technical ability and his feeling. BUT long before this stage of conscious manipulation has been begun, faking has already set in.

In the very beginning, when the operator controls and regulates his time of exposure, when in dark-room the developer is mixed for detail, breadth, flatness or contrast, faking has been resorted to. In fact, every photograph is a fake from start to finish, a purely impersonal, unmanipulated photograph being practically impossible. When all is said, it still remains entirely a matter of degree and ability.

Edward Steichen Quotes on Art

Art for art’s sake is dead, if it ever lived.

The use of the term “art medium” is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

Today I am no longer concerned with photography as an art form. I believe it is potentially the best medium for explaining man to himself and to his fellow man.

I don’t care about making photography an art. I want to make good photographs. I’d like to know who first got it into his head that dreaminess and mist is an art. Take things as they are; take good photographs and the art will take care of itself.

Experimentation and Finding your Style

The precision of his (Harry Callahan) skill places his work beyond the tentative and the experimental stage. He is continually searching and exploring both himself and his surroundings. and in this exploration of the realm of places, people and things, contrasts and relationships, Callahan is no respecter of conventional technical formula or code. His delicate sense of pattern is an integral part of his photography and not a thing by itself.

There is only one optimist. He has been here since man has been on this earth, and that is man himself. If we hadn’t had such a magnificent optimism to carry us through all these things, we wouldn’t be here. We have survived it on our optimism.

If it were possible for any one person or group of persons to go through a photographic finishing plant’s work at the end of a day, you could probably pull out the most extraordinary photographic exhibition we’ve ever seen. On almost any subject. The trouble is to find the things.

To make good photographs, to express something, to contribute something to the world he lives in, and to contribute something to the art of photography besides imitations of the best photographers on the market today, that is basic training, the understanding of self.

It is an error common to many artists, [who] strive merely to avoid mistakes, when all our efforts should be to create positive and important work. Better positive and important with mistakes and failures than perfect mediocrity.

What’s your Favorite Edward Steichen Quote?

Have a favorite Edward Steichen 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 see more of Steichen’s timeless photography, check out his biography and image archive on the MoMA 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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• Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes
• Ansel Adams Quotes
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• The 100 Greatest Photography Quotes

The post 30 Timeless Edward Steichen Quotes to Advance your Photography appeared first on Photogpedia.

If you haven’t done so already, we recommend reading our Michael Kenna master profile article to learn more about his photography style, techniques, cameras, use of film and much more.

Michael Kenna Quotes

Getting photographs is not the most important thing. For me, it’s the act of photographing. It’s enlightening, therapeutic, and satisfying because the very process forces me to connect with the world. When you make four-hour exposures in the middle of the night, you inevitably slow down and begin to observe and appreciate more what’s going on around you. In our fast-paced, modern world, it’s a luxury to be able to watch the stars move across the sky.

Perhaps most intriguing of all is that it is possible to photograph what is impossible for the human eye to see – cumulative time.

In photography, it’s not difficult to reach a technical level where you don’t need to think about the technique any more. I think there is far too much literature and far too much emphasis upon the techniques of photography. The make of camera and type of film we happen to use has little bearing on the results.

There is no one way of photographing anything. I don’t believe there is even one best way of photographing any given subject.

The golden rule in the arts, as far as I am concerned, is that all rules are meant to be broken.

I would strongly encourage anybody embarking on photography as a career to embrace and enjoy the whole process. Being a photographer can be a wonderful way to experience the world.

Easier is not necessarily better.

I am not interested in describing and copying what I see. I am interested in a collaboration with the subject matter.

Landscape Photography Quotes

As a landscape photographer we should be open to possibilities, for one thing often leads to another.

I often think of my work as visual haiku. It is an attempt to evoke and suggest through as few elements as possible rather than to describe with tremendous detail.

I don’t think it is even possible to define what a good photograph is, so it is difficult to instruct anybody how to make one. Beauty and aesthetics are subjective, and very much in the mind of the beholder.

I encourage playfulness and experimentation with both the camera and subject matter. Sometimes there is an obvious perspective, but it is important never to be satisfied with that.

I try not to make conscious decisions about what I am looking for. I don’t make elaborate preparations before I go to a location. Essentially I walk, explore, discover and photograph.

Michael Kenna Quotes on Finding Locations

I often use the analogy of a theatre stage. I prefer to photograph the stage before the characters appear, and after they leave.

Essentially, I look for what is interesting to me, out there in the three-dimensional world, and translate or interpret so that it becomes visually pleasing in a two-dimensional photographic print. I search for subject matter with visual patterns, interesting abstractions, and graphic compositions.

I enjoy places that have mystery and atmosphere, perhaps a patina of age, a suggestion rather than a description, a question or two. I look for memories, traces, evidence of the human interaction with the landscape. Sometimes I photograph pure nature, sometimes urban structures.

Parks and gardens are the quintessential intimate landscapes. People use them all the time, leaving their energy and memories behind. It’s what’s left behind that I like to photograph.

In my photographic work, I’m generally attracted to places that contain memories, history, atmospheres, and stories. I’m interested in the places where people have lived, worked, and played. I look for traces of the past, visual fingerprints, evidence of activities – they fire my imagination and connect into my own personal experiences.

I gravitate towards places where humans have been and are no more, to the edge of man’s influence, where the elements are taking over or convering man’s traces.

Different assignments, different places, require different approaches. Sometimes I take minutes in a location, at other times days. There are many places that I have returned to over several years. When I photograph, I look for some sort of resonance, connection, spark of recognition.

Patience and Time

Approaching subject matter to photograph is like meeting a person and beginning a conversation. How does one know ahead of time where that will lead, what the subject matter will be, how intimate it will become, how long the potential relationship will last? Certainly, a sense of curiosity and a willingness to be patient to allow the subject matter to reveal itself are important elements in this process.

Most people are content just to take instant photographs and put them out into the world very quickly and easily. There are always going to be some who take the time and delve deeper. It’s a bit like using Garageband on the computer. You can make music very quickly, but to really master an instrument takes years.

Instant gratification in photography is not something that I need or desire. I find that the long, slow journey to the final print captivates me far more.

Most of my work involves slowing down rather than speeding up. I prefer to look at prints than scans, and I prefer to look at original silver prints rather than digital prints. I prefer to look at fewer images, but spend time with those individual images.

Returning to the Same Location

The first time, I usually skim off the outer layer and end up with photographs that are fairly obvious. The second time, I have to look a little deeper. The images get more interesting. The third time it is even more challenging and on each subsequent occasion, the images should get stronger, but it takes more effort to get them.

I prefer to think of photography as a never ending journey with infinite possibilities. I love to return to places to re photograph. Nothing is ever the same. The options are endless.

Accidents and Chance

Life is about turning up. The more you get yourself out there, whether you wake up at 5:00 a.m. to pouring rain or not, the more you’re likely to experience the wonderful happenings that are going on all around you. Sometimes the most interesting visual phenomena occur when you least expect it. Other times, you think you’re getting something amazing and the photographs turn out to be boring and predictable. So I think that’s why, a long time ago, I consciously tried to let go of artist’s angst, and instead just hope for the best and enjoy it. I love the journey as much as the destination. If I wasn’t a photographer, I’d still be a traveler.

There can be no doubt that probability increases with practice. Fortune favours the brave, fortune favours the prepared mind, and fortune favours those who work the hardest.

One needs to fully accept that surprises sometimes happen and complete control over the outcome is not necessary or even desirable.

Many of my stronger photographs are the result of my option not to pre-visualize. I believe that it’s important to allow the possibility of an accident and not be too controlling.

We have infinite options of how to photograph something. That extends into the darkroom afterwards. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t gone over to digital. I prefer the slowness, the unpredictability, the complications. You never know what you have. It’s like the excitement of opening up a Christmas package when you get your negatives back.

For me, this is one of the advantages of not using digital, I never know when I have a good photograph! I practice doubt as a way to push myself into alternative compositions by selective focus, different speeds of exposure, and unusual perspectives.

Night Photography

There are many characteristics associated with night photography that make it fascinating. We are used to working with a single light source, the sun, so multiple lights that come from an assortment of directions can be quite surreal, and theatrical. Drama is usually increased with the resulting deep shadows from artificial lights. These shadows can invite us to imagine what is hidden. I particularly like what happens with long exposures, for example, moving clouds produce unique areas of interesting density in the sky, stars and planes produce white lines, rough water transforms into ice or mist, etc. Film can accumulate light and record events that our eyes are incapable of seeing. The aspect of unpredictability inherent with night exposures can also be a good antidote for previsualization…

Camera Equipment and Film

I have a backpack and that determines how many cameras I carry. I insist that I can carry what I use to photograph as I don’t usually have an assistant. The backpack can hold two 120 camera bodies, two film backs, and two viewfinders. One is metered through the lens and the other one is a waist level.

It’s possible to think of photography as an act of editing, a matter of where you put your rectangle pull it out or take it away. Sometimes people ask me about films, cameras and development times in order to find out how to do landscape photography. The first thing I do in landscape photography is go out there and talk to the land – form a relationship, ask permission, it’s not about going out there like some paparazzi with a Leica and snapping a few pictures, before running off to print them.

Craft is important, but cameras for their own sake are not. A sense of aesthetics, a connection with the subject matter, an enquiring, and an inquisitive mind, these factors outweigh whatever equipment we use.

If I had to give advice to other photographers, I would first suggest quickly getting over the camera equipment questions. In my humble opinion, the make and format of a camera is ultimately low on the priority scale when it comes to making pictures.

Of course, the whole photographic process has been made much faster, cleaner and far more accessible to people by digital innovations, which is really great. Everybody now has a camera, often as part of our phone, and most of these cameras require little to no technical training. An enormous variety of apps also enable us to take short cuts to finished images. We hardly need to even think anymore.

Everybody now has a camera, whether it is a professional instrument or just part of a phone. Landscape photography is a pastime enjoyed by more and more. Getting it right is not an issue. It is difficult to make a mistake with the sophisticated technology we now have. Making a personal and creative image is a far greater challenge.

I believe that every photographer, every artist, should choose materials and equipment based on their own vision. I don’t believe that non-digital is necessarily better than digital, or the reverse for that matter. They are just different, and it is my preference and choice to remain with the traditional silver process, at least for the time being.

Black and White Photography

We see in colour all the time. Everything around us is in colour. Black and white is therefore immediately an interpretation of the world, rather than a copy.

I use black and white film. For the most part, I use Kodak Tri-X. 400asa film. One of the nice things about this film is that it hasn’t changed much since I first started 40 years ago. It’s like an old friend; It’s flexible and forgiving, and easy to work with. That’s why I still use it. I also use other films depending on which country I am in and where I can buy the films. Tri-X is my old stand by.

I don’t have anything against colour. It is just not my first preference. I have always found black and white photographs to be quieter and more mysterious than those made in colour.

I find black and white to be more malleable and mysterious than color; it is more an interpretation of reality than a reflection of reality.

For me, the subtlety of black and white inspires the imagination of the individual viewer to complete the picture in the mind’s eye. It doesn’t attempt to compete with the outside world. I believe it is calmer and gentler than colour, and persists longer in our visual memory.

Michael Kenna Darkroom and Print Quotes

I believe printmaking is a critical component of the photographic process and I will always try to do it myself. The negative is raw material, which a skilled and creative printmaker can mold in a thousand different ways. There are many technical and aesthetic decisions to be made along the way, the sum of which makes a print unique and very personal.

Small prints have a greater feeling of intimacy – one looks into the print. Large prints are more awesome – they are something a viewer looks out at. I believe in fitting the print size to one’s particular vision and prefer the more intimate engagement of the smaller image.

Influences and Style Quotes

I sincerely believe it is normal and healthy to study the work of other artists, and even imitate other’s efforts, as a means to explore one’s personal vision. It has been thus throughout history in all mediums of creative expression. One advances by “standing on the shoulders of giants”. The perspective becomes a lot clearer from such high ground.

On my own journey, I have actively tried to see through the eyes of many well known photographers, including but not limited to Atget, Bernhard, Brandt, Callahan, Cartier Bresson, Giacomelli, Misrach, Scheeler, Steiglitz, Sudek, Sugimoto, Weston (Brett) and many others. I have gone to places where they have photographed and have consciously and unconsciously emulated their style and subject matter.

Other artists, in many mediums, have greatly helped my own development as a photographer. As small tokens of appreciation, I have often credited those influences openly by including their names in the titles of work. I have done this out of basic courtesy and respect. I do not feel that I have ever stolen from these artists.

My advice to any budding artist is never to be satisfied with imitating others. This is but a means to an end. A serious artist will work with intensity to discover themselves, their own personal vision. I believe this is a fundamental aspect of the creative path.

There are many aspects about what and why we photograph: visual pleasure, personal empathy, intellectual stimulation, technical excellence, etc. Serious photographers and artists will try to create works that are original. Over a career period they may develop a singular identity in their images.

The photographer Ruth Bernhard used to tell me that this is like asking somebody how they evolved their signature. It is not something I’ve ever worked on consciously. I think style is just the end result of personal experience. It would be problematic for me to photograph in another style. I’m drawn to places and subject matter that have personal connections for me and I photograph in a way that seems right. Where does it all come from, who knows?

I believe that we photographers don’t benefit very much with answers from other photographers. What is more beneficial is to ask questions of ourselves and see what thoughts float out from within.

I believe that photographers should be passionate, determined, disciplined and ready to seek out their own styles and identities.

What’s your Favorite Michael Kenna Quote?

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

If you would like to learn more about Michael Kenna’s photography, we recommend reading our Michael Kenna profile article. To see more Kenna’s remarkable landscape work, check out the image archive on his official website.

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).

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

More Quote Articles:

• Ansel Adams Quotes
• Don McCullin Quotes
• Bill Brandt Quotes
• Landscape Photography Quotes

The post 52 Michael Kenna Quotes for Better Landscape Photography appeared first on Photogpedia.

If you enjoy this article or find it helpful, we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers.

If you’re a fan of Ansel Adams and landscape photography we also recommend checking out our Nature and Landscape Photography Quotes article.

Ansel Adams Quotes

Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.

A photograph is usually looked at – seldom looking into.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things.

Photography is an investigation of both the outer and the inner worlds. The first experiences with the camera involve looking at the world beyond the lens, trusting the instrument will ‘capture’ something ‘seen.’ The terms shoot and take are not accidental; they represent an attitude of conquest and appropriation. Only when the photographer grows into perception and creative impulse does the term make define a condition of empathy between the external and the internal events.

I believe photography is a tool to express our positive assessment of the world. A tool to acquire ultimate happiness and belief.

I am probably afraid that some spectator will not understand my photography – therefore I proceed to make it really less understandable by writing defensibly about it.

We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium.

Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.

Ansel Adams on What Makes a Great Photograph

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

To the complaint, ‘There are no people in these photographs”, I respond, “There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.”

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

In a strict sense photography can never be abstract, for the camera is incapable of synthetic integration.

A photograph is not an accident – it is a concept. It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative.

I can’t verbalize the internal meaning of pictures whatsoever. Some of my friends can at very mystical levels, but I prefer to say that, if I feel something strongly, I would make a photograph, that would be the equivalent of what I saw and felt.

I can look at a fine art photograph and sometimes I can hear music.

A photograph is an instrument of love and revelation that must see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live in all things.

(Art) is both the taking and giving of beauty; the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

I know some photographs that are extraodrinary in their power and conviction, but it is difficult in photography to overcome the superficial power or subject; the concept and statement must be quite convincing in themselves to win over a dramatic and compelling subject situation.

A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.

To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things.

Impression is not enough. Design, style, technique, – these, too, are not enough. Art must reach further than impression or self-revelation. Art, said Alfred Stieglitz, is the affirmation of life. And life, or its eternal evidence is everywhere.

Some photographers take reality as the sculptors take wood and stone and upon it impose the dominations of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and elevation.

A true photograph need not be explained, nor can be contained in words.

Lessons in Landscape Photography

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

Bad weather makes for good photography.

Photograph not only what you see but also what you feel.

In some photographs the essence of light and space dominate; in others, the substance of rock and wood, and the luminous insistence of growing things.

In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.

Notebook. No photographer should be without one.

Emphasis on technique is justified only so far as it will simplify and clarify the statement of the photographer’s concept.

To visualize an image (in whole or in part) is to see clearly in the mind prior to exposure, a continuous projection from composing the image through the final print.

I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term -meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching – there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.

I usually have an immediate recognition of the potential image, and I have found that too much concern about matters such as conventional composition may take the edge off the first inclusive reaction.

The “machine-gun” approach to photography – by which many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good – is fatal to serious results.

You don’t take a photograph, you make it.

Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer – and often the supreme disappointment.

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.

Adams on Finding your Subject

I never know in advance what I will photograph. I go out into the world and hope I will come across something that imperatively interests me. I am addicted to the found object. I have no doubt that I will continue to make photographs till my last breath.

Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.

When I’m ready to make a photograph. I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.

I am sure the next step will be the electronic image, and I hope I shall live to see it. I trust that the creative eye will continue to function, whatever technological innovations may develop.

Simply look with perceptive eyes at the world about you, and trust to your own reactions and convictions. Ask yourself: “Does this subject move me to feel, think and dream? Can I visualize a print – my own personal statement of what I feel and want to convey – from the subject before me?

In my mind’s eye, I visualize how a particular… sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.

Remember: Every coincidence is potentially meaningful. How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world. Photography can teach you to improve your awareness level.

Stieglitz would never say that certain objects of the world were more or less beautiful than others – telegraph poles, for instance, compared with oak trees. He would accept them for what they are, and use the most appropriate objects to express his thoughts and convey his vision.

No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.

I know the importance of highly trained awareness of the “moment” and the immediate and intuitive response of the photographer. It should be obvious to all that photographers whose images possess character and quality have attained them only by continued practice and total dedication to the medium.

Ansel Adams Quotes on Nature

It is my intention to present – through the medium of photography – intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.

There are no forms in nature. Nature is a vast, chaotic collection of shapes. You as an artist create configurations out of chaos. You make a formal statement where there was none to begin with. All art is a combination of an external event and an internal event… I make a photograph to give you the equivalent of what I felt. Equivalent is still the best word.

No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied – it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.

Both the grand and the intimate aspects of nature can be revealed in the expressive photograph.

Both can stir enduring affirmations and discoveries, and can surely help the spectator in his search for identification with the vast world of natural beauty and wonder surrounding him.

Myths and creeds are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth in the world.

As the fisherman depends upon the rivers, lakes and seas and the farmer upon the land for his existence, so does mankind in general depend upon the beauty of the world about him for his spiritual and emotional existence.

Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.

It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.

Let us leave a splendid legacy for our children. Let us turn to them and say, this you inherit: guard it well, for it is far more precious than money. Once destroyed, nature’s beauty cannot be repurchased at any price.

I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful – an endless prospect of magic and wonder.

The Darkroom and Printing

The negative is comparable to the composer’s score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.

These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago… I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me.

Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.

I expect to retire to a fine-grained heaven where the temperatures are always consistent, where the images slide before ones eyes in a continual cascade of form and meaning.

All I can do in my writing is to stimulate a certain amount of thought, clarify some technical facts and date my work. But when I preach sharpness, brilliancy, scale, etc., I am just mouthing words, because no words can really describe those terms and qualities it takes the actual print to say, ‘Here it is.

Black and White Photography

Our lives at times seem a study in contrast… love and hate, birth and death, right and wrong… everything seen in absolutes of black and white. Too often we are not aware that it is the shades of grey that add depth and meaning to the starkness of those extremes.

One sees differently with color photography than black-and-white… in short, visualization must be modified by the specific nature of the equipment and materials being used.

Ansel Adams Quotes on the Camera

Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film. Your bright eyes and easy smile is your museum.

It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.

Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film. Your bright eyes and easy smile is your museum.

I am always surprised when I see several cameras, a gaggle on lenses, filters, meters, etc, rattling around in a soft bag with a complement of refuse and dust. Sometimes the professional is the worst offender!

The [35mm] camera is for life and for people, the swift and intense moments of life.

You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.

The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it.

What’s your Favorite Ansel Adams Quote?

Have a favorite Ansel Adams 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).

If you would like to learn more about Ansel Adams and his legendary photography, then check out the Ansel Adams Gallery website.

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

More Quote Articles:

• Don McCullin Quotes
• Michael Kenna Quotes
• Bill Brandt Quotes
• The 100 Greatest Photography Quotes

The post 75 Ansel Adams Quotes for Better Landscape Photography appeared first on Photogpedia.

If you haven’t done so already, we recommend reading our Sir Don McCullin master profile article to learn more about his remarkable career, photographs, techniques and much more.

Don McCullin Quotes

I feel at the edge of my journey with photography now. I’m older, more knowledgeable, but I’m never satisfied, never arriving, always looking for something better to come. I’m a lost soul without photography.

The camera was a key to open up my life. It was like opening a huge window to the world. It gave me education, it gave me hope, it gave me travel, and in the end, after giving me all those things, it started taking things away from me. It took my mind away from me, it took things back from me. You don’t own those things in the beginning. You don’t own yourself in the beginning, you’re just dumped on this earth and you have to stand up and try to walk and try to get through it.

Digital cameras are extraordinary. I have a darkroom and I still process film, but digital photography can be a totally lying kind of experience, you can move anything you want… the whole thing can’t be trusted really.

Photography is the truth if it’s being handled by a truthful person.

I only use a camera like I use a toothbrush. It does the job.

The Life of a Photographer

Frankly, I didn’t really know anything about photography. I’d just been taking snaps. I had to learn very quickly. But after that famous picture of the gang was published in The Observer, I was offered every job in England – just because of that one picture.

Photography has been very, very generous to me, but at the same time has damaged me.

I feel shabby – because I’ve made a name, quite a good name, out of photography. And I still find myself asking the same questions: Who am I? What am I supposed to be? What have I done?

It’s the photographs that keep me going, physically and mentally. I just want to leave excellence behind; this is what controls me, and I like that, because it has brought me to this stage.

…there is guilt in every direction: guilt because I don’t practice religion, guilt because I was able to walk away, while this man was dying of starvation or being murdered by another man with a gun. And I am tired of guilt, tired of saying to myself: “I didn’t kill that man on that photograph, I didn’t starve that child.” That’s why I want to photograph landscapes and flowers. I am sentencing myself to peace.

You can’t go around kidding yourself that your photographs in a few papers will change the world. They can’t and they haven’t. I dispair about the human race. The press only shows the bums, the killers and the arms dealers and people like that. Good news never sold a newspaper.

My life has always been about adventures. Being on edge all the time helps my photography.

I need a challenge. My greatest fear is sitting and staring out of a window without the passion to do anything anymore.

Art and Titles

I’m not an artist. I’ve been struggling against that word all my life. The American photographers all want to be called artists. I’m a photographer and I stand by it.

I am not an artist. Today, every photographer in America – if not the world – wants to be called an “artist”, which is bullshit. Why do you need a title? All you need to do is to take good pictures and offer them to people.

I have a strong creative desire but I’m not trying to be an artist. I don’t need titles. I hate the title, ‘artist’. I just describe myself as a photographer. I have a good nose for news. It’s about knowing your trade.

I think, the more of a student I am, the better it will be for my work because it means once you have too many accolades you don’t try harder. I would never allow myself to think that I don’t have to try harder. I like the idea of always learning, always trying to do better. The word “master” sits uneasy on my terms.

Don McCullin’s Quotes for Better Photography

Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.

I look for drama – drama is the key factor in all my work.

I realized that you could shoot photographs until the cows came home but they have nothing to do with real humanity, real memories, real feelings.

There is no doubt that my photographs have a very strong religious overtone, they are like twentieth century icons. When human beings are suffering, they tend to look up, as if hoping for salvation. And that’s when I press the button.

A sense of timing is the most important part of the life of a professional photographer. I have an uncanny way of being at the right place at the right time. And if the time is not right, I can be patient, stay in that place for hours, willing things to come.

Photography’s a case of keeping all the pores of the skin open, as well as the eyes. A lot of photographers today think that by putting on the uniform, the fishing vest, and all the Nikons, that that makes them a photographer. But it doesn’t. It’s not just seeing. It’s feeling.

Photography will screw you every time it gets a chance to screw you, every time you put a roll into the camera… Sometimes I come back and find that the film has been damaged or that the camera’s back has been leaking. I don’t get angry, I don’t smash the camera, I just laugh and think: “It didn’t respect me, I wasn’t meant to have it.”

I think I am lucky if I can produce one good picture every year.

We don’t live in a black and white world, but once you see a black and white photograph, it haunts you. I have done a few pictures of wars in colour, but they don’t work – they feel too cosy – while black and white photographs will penetrate your memory.

Photography isn’t about just pushing that button. It’s about the experience of being there.

Don McCullin Quotes on Photojournalism

I had long been uncomfortable with my label of war photographer, which suggested an almost exclusive interest in the suffering of other people. I knew I was capable of another voice.

The real truth of life is on the streets. Photograph the daily lives of people, and how they exist, and how they fight for space and time and pleasure.

Although I take my work seriousily I cannot take myself seriously. When you think of it, everything has happened by accident. I have always believed that I don’t own my photography, rather that it owns me. It gave me a life, an extraordinary life which could never be repeated. I feel as if the gift of seeing what is really going on in the world is mine only so long as I put it to proper use. There is nothing to be claimed and nothing to regret, except that we go on treating our fellow human beings so badly.

I spent six weeks photographing homeless people. I think it’s the best thing I ever photographed. I went every day, parked my car up about a mile away, wore really old clothes, and carried a Nikon F under my overcoat. Then I would gradually bring the camera out. They’d all start shouting and jumping, “What the fuck are you doing?!” I liked both the danger and the challenge of it; they were quite violent people, but no one ever tried it on with me.

It’s not important that I record every tragedy that goes on in the world. But I decided to try a couple of shots. And I did something despicable. I wound the car window down and took the photographs from inside. Then I hated myself for not having the decency and courage to at least get out and do something…

You cannot walk on the water of hunger, misery, and death. You have to wade through to record them.

Seeing, looking at what others cannot bear to see is what my life is all about.

I met an Englishwoman in Africa. She said she became a doctor because she saw one of my pictures. That’s all I want – just one doctor in Africa.

Our once great newspapers, which told us what went on in the world even when we couldn’t affect it, have become instruments of a promotional culture, little more than catalogues advising us what to consume. This is not a great age in which to be a photojournalist.

War and Conflict Photographer

I’m like an old junkie, in a way. You don’t stick syringes in your arm – you go straight for the most important part of your body, the brain. You are destroying it the moment you go to your first war.

I don’t believe you can see what’s beyond the edge unless you put your head over it; I’ve many times been right up to the precipice, not even a foot or an inch away. That’s the only place to be if you’re going to see and show what suffering really means… I’ve spent fourteen years getting on and off aeroplanes and photographing other people’s conflicts. I will never get on another aeroplane and go photograph another country’s war.

Soldiers firing rifles in war make ordinary pictures because without the action, the smell and the noise, you have no truth…

You can only demand respect from the energies around us if you practice respect yourself.

It is the photographer’s job to show some of [the horror of war], to say: this is what it’s like on the ground, this is what war does to you.

I have always said that when I go to war I try not to miss a thing. I shot the things that other photographers walked by.

I had a great respect for film and knew you mustn’t spoil or abuse it. I always used to go to Vietnam with thirty rolls of Tri-X film – nothing more, nothing less.

Somebody may have been killed by the wayside and his body is rotting away and nobody cares that it was a human being and it was a person – a living person. I care, and I am going to photograph it- as horrible as it looks, I’m going to photograph it.

I used to concentrate on the battle, on the soldiers in the front, but of course, that was never the true story. The true story for me later developed into the suffering of civilians.

I don’t want to die for a few pictures. I want to live for every sunrise I can clap my eyes on; I want to see my family get older; I want to see the world try and get a bit more peaceful and understanding, which unfortunately I don’t think I’ll ever see.

Sometimes it felt like I was carrying pieces of human flesh back home with me, not negatives. It’s as if you are carrying the suffering of the people you have photographed.

A lot of people write to me, “I want to be a war photographer,” and it sickens me in a way. The desire to view death and suffering as a spectacle or adventurous career opportunity is perverse, especially when photographers only train their lenses on the problems of others. O.K., if you want to be a war photographer you don’t have to get in a plane and go to somebody else’s country. There’s a lot of poverty and misery and suffering in your own. I’ve been there.

Even in battle photography I go over on my back and read the exposure. What’s the point in getting killed if you’ve got the wrong exposure.

Don McCullin Quote from Interview with British Journal of Photography, March 2010

McCullin on Landscape Photography

People say “I love your landscapes”, but people shouldn’t love any war picture I’ve taken. When they say “love” they don’t mean it like that – they mean they were moved by it.

Landscapes freed me from the emotional garbage that I was carrying. I could go out into the landscape and have no reason to have any moral thoughts. But in the end, while taking these photographs, I suddenly realised that, there, everything I was looking at had a political dimension too: dairy farms closing, more land being taken up for housing… So even my landscapes are political, and not just in Britain. My landscapes have also recently been incorporating the destruction of Palmyra and similar places, which are totally politicised.

Related: Nature and Landscape Photography Quotes

I like photographing the English landscape in the winter, because it’s naked and it’s cold and it’s lonely, and I feel lonely doing it – and yes, I feel as happy as anything. There’s no politics, there’s no one saying: “get off my land!” No one’s pointing a gun at me. It’s almost as if I’m drinking from the flower, as if I’m drinking the pure nectar of freedom.

The great thing about landscape is that you owe nothing to fear. It’s all yours, no one can say you’re doing the wrong thing morally, there’s not a human being that can come up and say, “Why are you taking my picture?”

McCullin on Printing and the Darkroom

The darkroom can be cruel. You have to talk your way through your printing, alone, sometimes you turn the radio on and listen to trash music. When I finish, I wash everything meticulously, I dust everything, it’s like paying a homage to the spiritual power that could destroy me. And I won’t let it. Something else will destroy me – but it won’t be the darkroom, it won’t be photography. I am very strong, nearly ninety nine percent of me is strong and fortified all around. But I am sure there is a crack, somewhere behind me, in my make-up, where the damage will get in and destroy me.

I am sometimes accused by my peers of printing my pictures too dark. All I can say is that it goes with the mood of melancholy that is induced by witnessing at close quarters such intractable situations of conflict and joylessness.

I live in this house with 60,000 negatives in these filing cabinets and several thousand prints, and they are all based on quite nasty subject matter. I’ve felt that when I’m asleep upstairs at night these ghosts get out of the filing cabinets and they contaminate the house.

When I look at the work of Alfred Stieglitz, I see so many tones. I’ve printed so many pictures, and worked in the darkroom for so long, I know my tones. The darkroom is an amazing, wonderful, and cunning place – it’s a place of mind-searching. By dodging and burning, I engage in the landscape work; there’s definitely some cunning goings-on in that darkroom.

People have always said that the darkroom is my womb, and I suppose that’s true. I like the consistency of the dark. It keeps me safe. I know that when I’m out taking photographs, I’m already thinking about being home and printing my images. But I’ve never betrayed what I set out to do. I just keep doing what I’m doing.

Perfection – you’re striving towards the perfect print. In the darkroom, you can almost hear the applause, the accolade of this perfect print. If I know that I’ll be printing the next day, I go to bed at night worrying, and sometimes I actually scan the negative in my imagination whilst I’m lying in bed. I know all of my negatives – I know where they succeed, and where there’s trouble. It’s just terrible the way that photography is blackmailing me all the time. I’ve been blackmailed for the last sixty years of my life by photography, and it’s been the greatest love affair; it’s fantastic really.

What’s your Favorite Don McCullin Quote?

Have a favorite quote from the list? Do you know any other Sir Don McCullin quotes that would make a great addition to 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 Don McCullin’s photography and legendary career, we recommend reading our Don McCullin master profile article. To see more Sir Don’s work, check out the image archive on his official website.

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

More Quote Articles:

• Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes
• Steve McCurry Quotes
• Bill Brandt Quotes
• Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Quotes

The post 58 Don McCullin Quotes on Photography and Life appeared first on Photogpedia.

If you would like to know more about Brandt’s remarkable photography, then check out our Bill Brandt master profile article, which covers everything from his photography style to printing techniques and much more.

The Best Bill Brandt Quotes

The photographer must first have seen his subject or some aspect of his subject as something transcending the ordinary. It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep with him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveler who enters a strange country… they carry within themselves a sense of wonder.

If there is any method in the way I take pictures, I believe it lies in this. See the subject first. Do not try to force it to be a picture of this, that or the other thing. Stand apart from it. Then something will happen. The subject will reveal itself.

A photographer must be prepared to catch and hold on to those elements which give distinction to the subject or lend it atmosphere. They are often momentary, chance-sent things: a gleam of light on water, a trail of smoke from a passing train, a cat crossing a threshold, the shadows cast by a setting sun.

Sometimes they are a matter of luck; the photographer could not expect or hope for them. Sometimes they are a matter of patience, waiting for an effect to be repeated that he has seen and lost or for one that he anticipates.

Leaving out of question the deliberately posed or arranged photograph, it is usually some incidental detail that heightens the effect of a picture – stressing a pattern, deepening the sense of atmosphere. But the photographer must be able to recognize instantly such effects.

When I have seen or sensed – I do not know which it is – the atmosphere of my subject, I try to convey that atmosphere by intensifying the elements that compose it. I lay emphasis on one aspect of my subject and I find that I can thus most effectively arrest the spectator’s attention and induce in him an emotional response to the atmosphere I have tried to convey.

Bill Brandt Quotes on Photography Style

Towards the end of the war, my style changed completely. I have often been asked why this happened. I think I gradually lost my enthusiasm for reportage. Documentary photography had become fashionable. Everybody was doing it. Besides, my main theme of the past few years had disappeared; England was no longer a country of marked social contrast.

When you have done everything inside you, you cannot carry on unless you repeat yourself, and that’s not very interesting.

Photographers should follow their own judgment, and not the fads and dictates of others.

The good photographer will produce a competent picture every time whatever his subject. But only when his subject makes an immediate and direct appeal to his own interests will he produce work of distinction.

I did not always know just what it was I wanted to photograph. I believe it is important for a photographer to discover this, for unless he finds what it is that excites him, what it is that calls forth at once an emotional response, he is unlikely to achieve his best work… instinct itself should be a strong enough force to carve its own channel.

To achieve his best work, the young photographer must discover what really excites him visually. He must discover his own world.

Landscape Photography Quotes

To be able to take pictures of a landscape I have to become obsessed with a particular scene. Sometimes I feel that I have been to a place long ago, and must try to recapture what I remember.

When I have found a landscape which I want to photograph, I wait for the right season, the right weather, and right time of day or night, to get the picture which I know to be there.

Nude Photography Quotes

A good nude photograph can be erotic, but certainly not sentimental or pornographic.

When I began to photograph nudes, I let myself be guided by this camera, and instead of photographing what I saw, I photographed what the camera was seeing. I interfered very little, and the lens produced anatomical images and shapes which my eyes had never observed.

Brandt Portrait Quotes

I always take portraits in my sitter’s own surroundings. I concentrate very much on the picture as a whole and leave the sitter rather to himself.

[on color portraits] the results are always too soft, they lack impact. But I do think colour can improve a landscape, particularly when the colours are odd and incorrect. Colour is so much better when the hues are non-realistic.

In my portraits I try to avoid the fleeting expression and vivacity of a snapshot.

I think a good portrait ought to tell something of the subject’s past and suggest something of his future.

Bill Brandt Quotes on the Work

I hardly ever take photographs except on an assignment. It is not that I do not get pleasure from the actual taking of photographs, but rather that the necessity of fulfilling a contract-the sheer having to do a job-supplies an incentive, without which the taking of photographs just for fun seems to leave the fun rather flat.

I find that on an average I get three usable prints out of every spool… By temperament, I am not unduly excitable and certainly not trigger-happy. I think twice before I shoot and very often do not shoot at all. By professional standards I do not waste a lot of film; but by the standards of many of my colleagues, I probably miss quite a few of my opportunities. Still, the things I am after are not in a hurry as a rule.

It is essential for the photographer to know the effect of his lenses. The lens is his eye, and it makes or ruins his pictures. A feeling for composition is a great asset. I think it is very much a matter of instinct. It can perhaps be developed, but I doubt if it can be learned.

Printing and the Darkroom

I consider it essential that the photographer should do his own printing and enlarging. The final effect of the finished print depends so much on these operations. And only the photographer himself knows the effect he wants.

No amount of toying with shades of print or with printing papers will transform a commonplace photograph into anything other than a commonplace photograph.

Photography is still a very new medium and everything is allowed and everything should be tried. Photography has no rules. It is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved. And there are certainly no rules about the printing of a picture. Before 1951, I liked my prints dark and muddy. Now I prefer the very contrasting black-and-white effect. It looks crisper, more dramatic and very different from color photographs.

Brandt on Rules of Photography

I am not interested in rules and conventions … photography is not a sport. If I think a picture will look better brilliantly lit, I use lights, or even flash.

I am not very interested in extraordinary angles. They can be effective on certain occasions, but I do not feel the necessity for them in my own work. Indeed, I feel the simplest approach can often be most effective. A subject placed squarely in the centre of the frame, if attention is not distracted from it by fussy surroundings, has a simple dignity which makes it all the more impressive.

Most photographers would feel a certain embarrassment in admitting publicly that they carried within them a sense of wonder, yet without it they would not produce the work they do, whatever their particular field.

Photography is not a sport. It has no rules. Everything must be dared and tried!

What’s your Favorite Bill Brandt Quote?

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During his five-decade career, Brandt produced important work in all the major genres of photography: social documentary, landscape, nude, and portrait. 

While he pursued several subjects throughout his lifetime, Brandt tended to focus on one genre for an extended period before moving on to the next one. 

His witty pictures of social life in London during the 1930s and his compassionate photographs during the depression are some of his most memorable images.

Both a visual poet and a historian, his pictures capture and preserve a world that has disappeared forever.

In this article, we will aim to provide an introduction to Brandt’s work, with particular emphasis on his photography style and working methods. 

Related: 28 Bill Brandt Quotes to Learn From

Editor note: If you enjoy our Bill Brandt article and find it helpful, then we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers through your own blog, social media and forums.

The photographer must first have seen his subject or some aspect of his subject as something transcending the ordinary. It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep with him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveler who enters a strange country… they carry within themselves a sense of wonder.

Bill Brandt

Bill Brandt Biography

Name: Bill Brandt (born Hermann Wilhelm Brandt)
Nationality: British
Genre: Documentary, Photojournalism, Nude, Landscape, Portrait
Born: 2nd May 1904 – Hamburg, Germany
Died: 20th December 1983 (79 years old) – London, England

Early Life

Bill Brandt was born in Hamburg, Germany to a German mother and British father. His childhood was mostly spent in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. 

At the age of 16, he contracted tuberculosis and spent six years recovering in a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. It was during this time that he first took up photography. 

After being sent to Vienna for lung analysis in 1927 he met the Austrian writer, Dr. Eugenie Schwarzwald. She suggested that he should pursue a career in photography. 

Photography Career

Brandt followed her advice and secured an apprenticeship with the Austrian photographer Grete Kolliner. 

While working at the studio, Brandt took the portrait of Ezra Pound. The American poet was impressed with the image and recommended that Brandt go to Paris to work under Man Ray.

Brandt arrived in Paris to begin a three-month apprenticeship at the Man Ray Studio in 1929.

I had the good fortune to start my career in Paris in 1929. For any young photographer at that time, Paris was the centre of the world. Those were the exciting early days when the French poets and surrealists recognized the possibilities of photography. 

Bill Brandt

Although there was little direct teaching from Man Ray, Brandt was able to absorb the new developments in photography and various art movements in Paris. 

Brassai, Kertesz and Cartier-Bresson were all working in Paris, as well as Man Ray. Man Ray, the most original photographer of them all, had just invented the new techniques of rayographs and solarisation. I was a pupil in his studio and learned much from his experiments. 

Bill Brandt

Moving to England and Photojournalism

In 1931, Brandt moved to England at the age of 27 to work as a freelance photographer. 

He decided to pursue a career in photojournalism, a profession still in its infancy. However, Brandt was a photojournalist with a difference. For under the tutelage of Man Ray, Brandt had developed his own moody, surreal style.

Brandt began his career by documenting British life and the contrasts he saw in it. 

He used his family ties to document the wealthy alongside the poor. Many of these images were staged, with family and friends acting out the scenes he wished to create.

After several years of working on the project, he published his first book, The English at Home in 1936. 

The extreme social contrast during those years before the war was, visually, very inspiring for me. I started by photographing in London, the West End, the suburbs, the slums. 

Bill Brandt

Brandt’s documentary work occurred at the same time as the rise of the picture press in England and as a result, his photo series became synonymous with British life between wars. 

I photographed pubs, common lodging houses at night, theatres, Turkish baths, prisons and people in their bedrooms. London has changed so much that some of these pictures now have a period charm almost of another century.

Bill Brandt

The Industrial Depression

After several years of working in London, Brandt decided to travel to the north of England, where he photographed coal-miners during the industrial depression. 

My most successful picture of the series, probably because it was symbolic of this time of mass unemployment, was a loose-coal searcher in East Durham, going home in the evening. He was pushing his bicycle along a footpath through a desolate waste-land between Hebburn and Jarrow. Loaded on the crossbar was a sack of small coal, all that he had found after a day’s search on the slag-heaps. I also photographed the Northern towns and interiors of miners’ cottages, with families having their evening meal, or the miners washing themselves in tin-baths, in front of their kitchen fires.

Bill Brandt

London at Night and War Years

In 1938, Brandt published his second book, A Night in London. 

For the series, Brandt photographed the streets of London after dark, capturing the eerie beauty of the city. 

To light the scenes, he either used street lights or transportable tungsten lights (also known as photo floods). 

The war years were productive for Brandt. He photographed the empty streets, and the war-ravaged buildings of London during the early Blackouts, and the Blitz. 

In 1940, Brandt was commissioned by the government’s Ministry of Information to report on Londoners seeking refuge in underground air-raid shelters. 

The assignment produced some of Brandt’s finest work.

At night Brandt visited the overcrowded shelters (tube stations, church crypts, and cellars) and photographed families huddled in cold, uncomfortable spaces.

His use of artificial light and the contrast between shadow and light make these images incredibly powerful.

Post-War Years

After the war, Brandt decided to change his style and gradually moved away from photojournalism. He later reflected:

Towards the end of the war, my style changed completely. I have often been asked why this happened. I think I gradually lost my enthusiasm for reportage. Documentary photography had become fashionable. Everybody was doing it. Besides, my main theme of the past few years had disappeared; England was no longer a country of marked social contrast.

Bill Brandt

The second half of Brandt’s career brought him further acclaim. 

His photos were more experimental and characterized by a mysterious and brooding quality that provided a fresh look on some of the most common genres: portraiture, landscape and the nude.

[For] whatever the reason, the poetic trend of photography, which had already excited me in my early Paris days, began to fascinate me again. it seemed to me that there were wide fields still unexplored. I began to photograph nudes, portraits, and landscapes. 

Bill Brandt

Brandt returned to portrait photography. Over the next three decades, his portraits of artists, writers, musicians and actors were published in Harper’s Bazaar. 

From 1945 onwards, Brandt took a series of landscape photographs for Lilliput magazine. The images were accompanied by excerpts from famous texts by British writers including Charles Dickens and Emily Brönte. 

Bill Brandt’s Nude Photography

Brandt’s most important images from this period though are the series of nudes taken between 1945 and 1961, which are considered to be his crowning artistic achievement. 

Influenced by the work of Man Ray, Henry Moore, and Picasso, Brandt’s early nude photos were taken typically in interiors and studios using an old Kodak camera with an extremely wide-angle lens (see Brandt’s camera section below).

His later nudes, which became increasingly more abstract and surreal, were taken on beaches of Sussex and northern and southern France.

Brandt’s Later Years

In the 1970s and 1980s, Brandt began to explore new processes. 

He created three-dimensional collages using rocks found on the beach, and started photographing in color for the first time in his career.

His later work was more experimental, and he drew heavily on his interest in surrealism art, and the influence of Man Ray’s work in the 1920s.

When you have done everything inside you, you cannot carry on unless you repeat yourself, and that’s not very interesting.

Bill Brandt

Brandt’s collages and color photographs were exhibited in London in the mid-1970s, and again ten years after his death in 1992.

His work from this period was never embraced by critics and is rarely included in retrospectives of his work.

Brandt spent his remaining years reissuing his work in a series of books and teaching photography at the Royal College of Art.

Bill Brandt died in London on 20 December 1983 at the age of 79.

Brandt’s Photography Legacy

Brandt’s work was published in magazines domestically and abroad including Lilliput, Picture Post and Harper’s Bazaar.

His books, which include A Night in London (1938), Camera in London (1948) and Perspective of Nudes (1961) are among the most influential photo books of the period. 

Brandt had his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1969. His work has since been the subject of major retrospectives in both the UK and abroad.

His photography is held in several public collections, including the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. 

Brandt’s work has influenced many photographers including Robert Frank, Sir Don McCullin, David Bailey and Roger Mayne.

In 1984, Bill Brandt was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum. He received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art in London and was also named an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain. 

Bill Brandt’s Style

• Black and white, contrasty
• Moody, atmospheric
• Dramatic, haunting
• Stark light, and use of shadows
• Mysterious, ambiguous
• Surreal, dream-like

Bill Brandt’s Working Methods

Landscape Photography

Bill Brandt’s landscape photos have a mysterious brooding beauty that is unique, yet widely imitated. He often visited the same place many times before capturing his image. Below he explains his process and the importance of patience:

To be able to take pictures of a landscape I have to become obsessed with a particular scene. Sometimes I feel that I have been to a place long ago, and must try to recapture what I remember. When I have found a landscape which I want to photograph, I wait for the right season, the right weather, and right time of day or night, to get the picture which I know to be there.

One of my favourite pictures of this time is Top Withens on the Yorkshire Moors. I was then trying to photograph the country which had inspired Emily Bronte. I went to the West Riding in summer, but there were tourists and it seemed quite the wrong time of the year. I liked it better, misty, rainy and lonely in November. But I was not satisfied until I saw it again in February. I took the picture just after a hailstorm when a high wind was blowing over the moors.

Bill Brandt

Nude Photography

Brandt focused on nudes for over three decades and considers it the climax of his creative photography and the most satisfying of his work. 

He began experimenting with nude photography in the late 1930s, although he didn’t publish any of these photos until 1961 with the release of his book Perspective of Nudes.

In 1944, Brandt purchased a mahogany and brass camera by Kodak with a Zeiss Protar wide-angle lens that gave his nude photographs an “altered perspective and a less conventional image.”

By using this antiquated equipment he was able to produce an image where the human form was heavily distorted and viewed in an unrealistically deep perspective. 

In 1977, Brandt began a second series of nudes, which appeared along with some earlier photographs in the book Nudes 1945-1980 (1981).

His early work featured naked models in domestic interiors and on the beaches of East Sussex and northern and southern France. While his later, more experimental and abstract nude work, was shot mainly in the Mediterranean.

Portrait Photography 

Although Brandt’s photography career began with his portrait of Ezra Pound in 1928, he didn’t return to the genre until the 1940s. 

Over the next 40 years, he took portraits of writers, actors, musicians and painters for Lilliput, Harper’s Bazaar and Picture Post.

Brandt liked to photograph his subjects in their homes or their own surroundings. He tended to avoid isolating his sitter’s face or focus on their expression. He also never placed them in the center of the frame.

I always take portraits in my sitter’s own surroundings. I concentrate very much on the picture as a whole and leave the sitter rather to himself. I hardly talk and barely look at him. This often seems to make people forget what is going on and any affected or self-conscious expression usually disappears. I try to avoid the fleeting expression and vivacity of a snapshot. A composed expression seems to have a more profound likeness. I think a good portrait ought to tell something of the subject’s past and suggest something of his future. 

Bill Brandt

The Darkroom

Bill Brandt enjoyed working in the darkroom and liked to experiment, making many prints of the same negative.

It takes a long time to produce a good print.

He wasn’t one for mass production. Each print was an original, printed and finished by Brandt with utmost care.

I consider it essential that the photographer should do his own printing and enlarging. The final effect of the finished print depends so much on these operations. And only the photographer himself knows the effect he wants. He should know by instinct, grounded in experience, what subjects are enhanced by hard or soft, light or dark treatment. But … no amount of toying with shades of print or with printing papers will transform a commonplace photograph into anything other than a commonplace photograph… It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do.

Bill Brandt

Manipulating the Negative

Brandt liked to manipulate his negatives in the darkroom and quite often cropped an image if it made for a better photograph. This technique can be seen below in his photo of Hadrian’s Wall.

Brandt also liked to combine elements of two negatives into a single print. This was long before the days of Photoshop layers and incredibly innovative for the time. 

An example can be seen in his photo, Early Morning on the River (1936). 

The image of the seagull, which would have been impossible to photograph with such clarity in low light, was montaged onto a separate photograph of London Bridge and the Thames in fog. Brandt added the morning sun to the image a few years later.

It is the result that counts, no matter how it was achieved. I find the darkroom work most important, as I can finish the composition of a picture only under the enlarger. I do not understand why this is supposed to interfere with the truth. Photographers should follow their own judgment, and not the fads and dictates of others. 

Bill Brandt

The Print

The bulk of his prints were made on 8 x 10 inch, single-weight glossy paper. From the mid-1950s, Brandt preferred to print on high contrast paper (typically grade 4 extra hard paper), which allowed him to intensify the black and whites.

Photography is still a very new medium and everything is allowed and everything should be tried. And there are certainly no rules about the printing of a picture. Before 1951, I liked my prints dark and muddy. Now I prefer the very contrasting black-and-white effect. It looks crisper, more dramatic and very different from color photographs.

Bill Brandt

Influences

Brandt worked as an apprentice under Man Ray for three months in 1927. He was heavily influenced by Ray’s experimental style of photography, as well as his use of extreme cropping and grain to create mood and drama. 

Brandt greatly admired the work of fellow photographer and close friend Brassaï. In fact, Brandt’s second book, A Night in London (1938) was based on Brassaï’s Paris de Nuit (1933). 

His post-war photography, in particular his nude series, was influenced by the film, Citizen Kane and the deep focus technique used by cinematographer Gregg Toland.

When Citizen Kane was first shown, I’d never seen a film in which real rooms were used and you could see everything, the ceiling, and terrific perspective, it was all there. It was quite revolutionary, Citizen Kane, and I was very much inspired by it and I thought: ‘I must take photographs like that.

Bill Brandt

Other influences include the films of Luis Buñuel and Alfred Hitchcock (his early work), Edward Weston’s dune landscape photos from the 1930s, the paintings of Salvadore Dalí, René Magritte, Picasso and Matisse, and the semi-abstract sculptures of Henry Moore. 

What Camera Did Bill Brandt Use?

• Hasselblad with Zeiss Biogon 38mm 
• Rolleiflex
• Kodak Camera (6.5 x 8.5 plate) with Zeiss Protar 8.5cm/f18 and 11 cm/f18 lenses.

For his photojournalism and portrait work, Brandt used a Rolleiflex. From the 1950s, he used a Hasselblad with a Zeiss Biogon 38mm super wide-angle lens for his landscape and nude photography.

Brandt used 400 ASA black and white film. He tested several 35 mm cameras but didn’t like the size of the viewfinder. 

I have tried several models but I find the viewfinder image far too small. I like to see a larger image in order to compose my picture. Composition is essential; good design is inseparable from a good picture. Unfortunately, very few young photographers seem to have any thought or sense of design. They just snap.

Bill Brandt

Kodak Camera and Wide-Angle

In 1945, Brandt picked up a nineteenth-century Kodak camera which he used for his nude photography series.

Feeling frustrated by modern cameras and lenses which seemed designed to imitate human vision and conventional sight, I was looking everywhere for a camera with a very wide angle. One day in a second hand shop, near Covent Garden, I found a 70-year-old wooden Kodak. I was delighted. Like nineteenth-century cameras it had no shutter, and the wide-angle lens, with an aperture as minute as a pinhole, was focused on infinity.

Bill Brandt

Using the fixed-focus camera with a wide-angle lens, allowed him to create heavily distorted images and “see like a mouse, a fish or a fly.” 

It had no shutter, the aperture in its wide-angle lens was as small as a pinhole, and it was permanently focused on infinity. It had been used by Scotland Yard for police record work and by auctioneers to make inventories. He loaded the camera with a fast film, and started experimenting. The image on the ground glass was so dim it was useless for pre-planning the picture. The camera had to do its own seeing. Each exposure was a gamble; a picture could never be duplicated. Yet he was immediately excited by the weird results. Perspective was so steep it created an entirely new feeling of picture space.

Other Bill Brandt Resources

Recommended Bill Brandt Books

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• Shadow and Light
• Bill Brandt: Photographs 1928-1983
• Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt 
• Bill Brandt: A Life

Bill Brandt Videos

BBC Masters of Photography: Bill Brandt (1983)

Bill Brandt Photos

You can view more Bill Brandt Photos on the Museum of Modern Art website.

Recommended Reading

Victoria and Albert Museum, Bill Brandt Section
The Bill Brandt Archive
Bill Brandt Statement on Photography, Camera in London, 1948 
Creative Camera Owner Magazine Article

Fact Check

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Related Articles

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Don McCullin: Sleeping with Ghosts

Sources

Museum of Modern Art, Bill Brandt Biography
Victoria and Albert Museum, Bill Brand Archive
International Photography Hall of Fame, Bill Brandt Induction
Bill Brandt: Behind the Camera, Philadelphia Museum of Art 
Michael Hoppen Gallery, Bill Brandt Biography

Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt 
Behind the Camera 
Bill Brandt: Photographs 1928-1983
Bill Brandt: A Life, Paul Delany, 2004
Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, 2005

Creative Camera Owner Magazine 1970s
Statement on Photography, Camera in London, 1948
Masters of Photography: Bill Brandt, BBC, 1983

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