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

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

Imogen Cunningham Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cunningham on Subjects

[My] taste lay somewhere between reality and dreamland.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Portrait Photography Quotes

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

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

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

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

Related: 150+ Portrait Photography Quotes

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

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

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

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

Cunningham Quotes for Better Photography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s your Favorite Imogen Cunningham Quote?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Strand Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Documentary Photography Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Photographing People

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

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

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

Strand on Subject Matter

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

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

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

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

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

Photography Technique

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

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

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

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

All good art is abstract in its structure.

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

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

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

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

Paul Strand Quotes for Better Photography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s your Favorite Paul Strand Quote?

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

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

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

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

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• Alfred Stieglitz Quotes
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The post 40 Inspirational Paul Strand Quotes: The Voyage of Discovery appeared first on Photogpedia.

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

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

Andre Kertesz Quotes

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

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

Photography is my only language.

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

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

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

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

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

Kertesz on Subjects

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

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

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

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

I do not document anything, I give an interpretation.

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

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

Kertesz Quotes on Technique

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

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

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

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

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

Have confidence in the inventions and transformations of chance.

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

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

What’s your Favorite Andre Kertesz Quote?

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

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

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

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Recommended book: Andre Kertesz: His Life and Work

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

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Below we have listed 30 of the best quotes from the man who was nicknamed, “The Eyes of Paris” by Henry Miller, to inspire, motivate and help take your photography to the next level.

Brassai Quotes

The thing that is magnificent about photography is that it can produce images that incite emotion based on the subject matter alone.

In photography you can never express yourself directly, only through optics, the physical and chemical process.

To me photography must suggest, not insist or explain.

I don’t invent anything. I imagine everything… most of the time, I have drawn my images from the daily life around me. I think that it is by capturing reality in the humblest, most sincere, most everyday way I can, that I can penetrate to the extraordinary.

Basically, my work has been one long reportage on human life.

There are two gifts which every man of images needs to be a true creator: a certain sensitivity to life, to living things, and at the same time, the art which will enable him to capture that life in a certain specific way. I’m not talking about a pure aesthetics…

André Kertész has two qualities that are essential for a great photographer: an insatiable curiosity about the world, about people, and about life, and a precise sense of form.

My ambition has always been to show the everyday city as if we were discovering it for the first time.

Brassai on Subjects

We should try, without creasing to tear ourselves constantly by leaving our subjects and even photography itself from time to time, in order that we may come back to them with reawakened zest, with the virginal eye. That is the most precious thing we can possess.

I like living beings; I like life, but I like to capture it in such a way that the photo does not move. I don’t really like the snapshot, the Leica with its 39 views, all of which distract attention.

As a photographer, I never restricted myself to a particular subject. I photographed whatever happened to catch my attention: faces, street scenes, landscapes, or any one of the thousands of chance events of everyday life. Art and artists were a part of my own day-to-day life in Paris.

My images were surreal simply in the sense that my vision brought out the fantastic dimension of reality. My only aim was to express reality, for there is nothing more surreal than reality itself. If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary.

In the absence of a subject with which you are passionately involved, and without the excitement that drives you to grasp it and exhaust it, you may take some beautiful pictures, but not a photographic oeuvre.

I need the subject to be as conscious as possible that he is taking part in an event… in an artistic act. I need his active collaboration.

The precise instant of creation is when you choose the subject. (meaning that the essential thing occurs at the moment when he, the photographer, meets the reality he wishes to capture.

Quotes about Art and Photography

I have always refused to specialise. I’ve always done many different kinds of things: photos, drawings, sculpture, films, books … In the end, it is hard to have many different talents, because each one wants to monopolise you … All you can do is try to alternate between them, following your instincts … I’m not afraid that I might be wasting my energy … I want to be free.

I’ve always hated specialisation. That’s why I’ve constantly changed the medium in which I express myself… That way I can breathe, I can see things anew.

Do you know what Picasso said when he looked at my drawings in 1939? “You’re crazy, Brassai. You have a gold mine and you spend your time exploiting a salt mine!” The salt mine was – naturally – photography!

Only photography could provide the intensity and expressive power…

The purpose of art is to raise people to a higher level of awareness than they would otherwise attain on their own.

I wanted to paint. But life in Paris was so interesting, that I couldn’t bear to lock myself away and get on with my artwork… I was much more interested in everything which I saw at night. Those images haunted me…

Brassai Quotes for Better Photography

There are many photographs which are full of life but which are confusing and difficult to remember. It is the force of an image which matter.

To keep from going stale you must forget your professional outlook and rediscover the virginal eye of the amateur.

After twenty years you can begin to be sure of what camera will do.

In any case, I always took people by surprise, for they never knew at what exact moment I was going to take the shot… In addition, given the kind of equipment available at that time, I often needed artificial light: so I would have someone to help me who would be holding a magnesium flare. As a result, no one knew when I was going to press the shutter.

I’ve always felt that the formal structure of a photo, its composition, was just as important as the subject itself… You have to eliminate every superfluous element, you have to guide your own gaze with an iron will.

If you take your inspiration from nature, you don’t invent anything, because what you want to do is to interpret something. But still, everything passes through your imagination. What you produce at the end is very different from the reality you started with.

Photography in our time leaves us with a grave responsibility. While we are playing in our studios with broken flowerpots, oranges, nude studies and still lifes, one day we know that we will be brought to account: life is passing before our eyes without our ever having seen a thing.

A negative doesn’t mean anything for a photographer of my type. It’s the printing by its creator alone that matters. On his stipulation that none of his photographs be printed posthumously

Chance is always there. We all use it. The difference is a poor photographer meets chance one out of a hundred times and a good photographer meets chance all the time.

What’s your Favorite Brassai Quote?

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

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

To learn more about Brassai’s photography, check his profile and photos on the Museum of Modern Art website.

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

Related Quote Articles:

• Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes
• Robert Frank Quotes
• Bill Brandt Quotes
• Street Photography Quotes

The post 30 Brassai Quotes on Capturing Everyday Life appeared first on Photogpedia.

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?

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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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The post 37 Edward Weston Quotes on Mastering the Art of Photography appeared first on Photogpedia.

If you haven’t done so already, we recommend reading our Irving Penn master profile article to learn more about his legendary career and photography philosophy.

Irving Penn Quotes

I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That’s the curse of being a photographer.

Make things manageable enough to record them, to prune away anything inconsequential… Because less is more.

The greatest privilege I’ve had in photography is a change of diet.

I feed on art more than I ever do on photographs. I can admire photography, but I wouldn’t go to it out of hunger.

Brodovitch was the first person to show me the mystical quality of photographs.

I myself have always stood in the awe of the camera. I recognize it for the instrument it is, part Stradivarius, part scalpel.

Using simple equipment and daylight alone is for me a pleasure and a replenishment.

I am a professional photographer because it is the best way I know to earn the money I require to take care of my wife and children.

Photographing a cake can be art too.

Whatever the photograph – a description of the battlefield, a portrait of a Hollywood celebrity, the turn of collar on the latest fashion, images for a small edition book, or images to sell soap – all of them are equally important.

A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart, leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.

Penn on Portrait Quotes

I try to find a person at a very serene, true, and fairly restful moment.

In portrait photography, there is something more profound that we seek inside a person while being painfully aware that a limitation of our medium is that the inside is recordable only insofar as is apparent on the outside.

What I really try to do is photograph people at rest, in a state of serenity.

I am going to find what is permanent in this face. Truth comes with fatigue. He displays himself just as he is, just as he did not want to look.

We don’t call them shoots here. We don’t shoot people. It’s really a love affair.

I think we agree on one thing, that the important thing is to get past the public facade. The person who arrives at the studio, as everybody knows, armed with an image of himself, he’s prepared to tell you how he wants to be. He’s not going to say it in so many words, because for the most part, he’s a fairly sophisticated person, but he has a facade, he’s prepared, a certain id, and of external armor. The job of a photographer, working for a publication, and we work for similar circumstances, gives for the sake of the reader, to get past this facade.

Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is the one they would like to show the world. Very often what lies behind the façade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.

Most of the time the ones who dislike the pictures the most confirm to me that the picture has hit home and is probably truer than I know. Nobody minds a boring picture, they mind a picture that has gotten to the soft core.

Irving Penn Quotes on Fashion Photography

In 1952, Liberman said to me, I must cut back on the work you do for Vogue. The editors don’t like it. They say the photographs burn on the page. After some years, I began to understand that what they wanted of me was simply a nice, sweet, clean-looking image of a lovely young woman. I began to do that, and that’s when I became valuable to them and had 200 to 300 pages a year. Up to that point, I had been trying to make a picture. Then I began to try to make a commodity. That’s what I’ve been doing in fashion photography ever since.

I always thought we were selling dreams, not clothes.

Many photographers feel their client is the subject. My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I’m trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader. The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.

A fashion picture is a portrait just as a portrait is a fashion picture.

The Master of Studio Photography

I found pictures trying to show peoples in their natural circumstances generally disappointing [but] feel secure in the artificial circumstances of the studio [accepting] for myself a stylization that I felt was more valid than a simulated naturalism

In the studio, too, I like it to be in no way grand. Nor do I feel grand, because I’m full of doubts still about the ability to get the picture I’m going to take.

I’ve tried a few times to depart from what I know I can do, and I’ve failed. I’ve tried to work outside the studio, but it introduces too many variables that I can’t control. I’m really quite narrow, you know.

I share with many people the feeling that there is a sweetness and constancy to light that falls into a studio from the north sky that sets it beyond any other illumination. It is a light of such penetrating clarity that even a simple object lying by chance in such a light takes on an inner glow, almost a voluptuousness.

Penn and the Print

Sometime in 1964, I realized that I was a victim of a printmaking obsession, a condition that persists today.

The printed page seems to have come to something of a dead end for all of us.

A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.

Over the years I must have spent thousands of hours silently brushing on the liquid coatings, preparing each sheet in anticipation of reaching the perfect print.

What’s your Favorite Irving Penn Quote?

Have a favorite Irving Penn quote from the list? Let us know in the comments 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 Irving Penn’s photography, we recommend reading our Irving Penn master profile article. To see more of Penn’s remarkable work, check out the image archive on the Irving Penn Foundation 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:

• Richard Avedon Quotes
• Yousuf Karsh Quotes
• Annie Leibovitz Quotes
• 150+ Portrait Photography Quotes

The post 30 Brilliant Irving Penn Quotes to Bookmark appeared first on Photogpedia.

In his six decade career, Penn was able to combine the precision of seeing with the invention of form.

Penn was not only an exceptional portraitist and a master of still life, but he was also a great innovator of fashion photography.

His fashion work bridged the gap between art and commerce and helped redefine the language of fashion photography in the process.

He shot a remarkable 165 cover photos for Vogue over sixty years – making him the most prolific photographer in the magazine’s history.

He was one of the first photographers to shoot against a simple plain background – a technique that is now used in every studio around the world.

Penn’s ability to use light, shadow, and space to produce still lifes and portraits that are both evocative and provocative is masterful.

In this article, we’ll be taking a closer look at the work of one of the great masters of twentieth-century photography, Mr. Irving Penn.

Related: 30 Brilliant Irving Penn Quotes to Bookmark

Editor note: If you find our Irving Penn profile helpful then we would be grateful if you could share it with others. Thanks for your continued support.

A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart, leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.

Irving Penn

Irving Penn Biography

Name: Irving Penn
Nationality: American
Genre: Portrait, Fashion, Nudes, Still-life, Advertising, Travel
Born: 16 June 1917 – Plainfield, New Jersey
Died: 7 October 2009 (92 years old)

Early Career

Penn started his career as a designer before transitioning across to photography. He studied under Alexey Brodovitch at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts, Philadelphia) from 1934 to 1938.

Brodovitch recognized Penn’s talent and invited him to work at Harper’s Bazaar on some design projects during school vacations.

After graduating, Penn worked as a freelance designer in New York from 1938 to 1940. During this time, he purchased his first camera, a Rolleiflex, and wandered the streets of New York on weekends taking photographs. A few of his early images were printed as illustrations in Harper’s Bazaar.

From 1940 and 1941 he worked as an advertising designer for the Saks Fifth Avenue department store. However, the young Penn wished to explore the world and decided to head to Mexico in 1941. He traveled by train, on short trips across the southern United States.

In Mexico, Penn painted for a year in a studio in Coyoacán, a suburb of Mexico City, and took photographs. Dissatisfied with his paintings, though, he destroyed them and returned to New York.

Irving Penn and Vogue

In 1943, Penn was hired by Alexander Liberman, the art director of Vogue, as his assistant. Liberman recognized Penn’s photographic talent and urged him to pursue a career in photography.

Penn’s first cover, an elegant still-life, appeared in the October 1943 edition of the magazine. Penn would eventually photograph 165 covers for Vogue over sixty years.

During the war years, Penn served as an ambulance driver and photographer in the American Field Service with the British Army in India and Italy.

In 1948, following a photographic assignment for Vogue in Peru, Penn stayed behind to spend Christmas in the historic city of Cuzco. There he photographed the indigenous peoples, creating works that are simultaneously still-life’s and portraits.

Between Vogue assignments, Penn continued to experiment with his work. In 1949, he began photographing the female nude and created prints using a complex bleaching technique for the first time.

Penn married fashion model and muse Lisa Fonssagrives in 1950. His photographs of her frequently show her slim elegance, placed in the center of the frame with few props.

Finding his Style

Penn also worked on a series of “small trades” people. For the project, he visited New York, Paris, and London and photographed unrecognized tradespeople including young butchers, a coalman, a telegraph messenger, pastry cooks, and even a balloon seller, all posing formally in their work clothes and holding the tools of their trade.

It was this series that saw the genesis of what was to become characteristic of his portrait style: subjects posed against a plain background. He also placed his subjects in corner of the frame and lighted subjects from the side.

In the late ’60s, Penn put together a traveling studio for a series of ethnographic essays for Vogue. From 1967 to 1971, he traveled to Dahomey, Cameroon, Nepal, Morocco, and New Guinea. 

Penn used his signature style – plain background and a single source light – to photograph these ethnographic images, resulting in a unique body of work that looked completely different from anything seen before.

Penn’s mastery of still life and ability to transform everyday objects to the realm of art was particularly seen in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1977. The museum exhibited photographs of twisted paper, a paper cup, and cigarette butts, which Penn printed using platinum paper.

Throughout his career, Penn photographed celebrities, politicians, and artists, including Alfred Hitchcock, Audrey Hepburn, Pablo Picasso, Grace Kelly, Henry Kissinger, Gore Vidal, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Yves St. Laurent.

Mature Period and Legacy

Penn’s creativity flourished during the last decades of his life. His studio in New York continued to be busy with advertising, magazine and personal work, as well as exhibition and print projects.

His innovative portraits, still life, fashion, and beauty photographs continued to appear in Vogue right up until the end of his life.

After the death of Lisa in 1992, Penn found solace in his work and in the structure of his studio schedule, and he would paint in his spare time. In 1997, he donated prints and archival material to the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 2009, Penn died in New York, at the age of 92. During his lifetime, he established The Irving Penn Foundation and published several books including Moments Preserved (1960), Passage (1991), Still Life (2001), and A Notebook at Random (2004)

His work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and many more galleries. He was represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York City.

Photography Style

• Master of studio photography
• Less is more, simplification and elimination
• Capturing authenticity
• Use of plain background, single color or theatre curtain
• Black and white for portraiture
• Color for beauty and still-life
• Use of conventional north light (single source sidelight: either natural, tungsten or strobe) 
• High contrast printing, a strong play between dark and light

Irving Penn worked across a variety of genres throughout his long career. In the next section, we’ll try to breakdown each genre and Penn’s working methods in more detail.

The greatest privilege I’ve had in photography is a change of diet.

Irving Penn

Portraiture

Penn’s distinctive style came from shooting his subjects in the studio and taking them out of their natural environment.

His subjects were posed against a plain background, typically a theater curtain found in Paris that he kept in his studio throughout his career.

Subjects are lighted from the side from either by window light or a single light source that is used to replicate the look of Penn’s favored northern light (see lighting section below.)

He applied the same approach whether he was photographing aborigine tribesmen, movie stars, or even the Hells Angels.

In portrait photography, there is something more profound that we seek inside a person while being painfully aware that a limitation of our medium is that the inside is recordable only insofar as is apparent on the outside.

Irving Penn

In the 1940s, Penn placed his sitters in a narrow corner space, which was created by angling two-stage flats to touch along their vertical edges. The set, both physically and psychologically confined the sitters, resulting in unique portraits.

Finding his Portrait Style

A decade later, Irving Penn adopted a new direct, close-up approach to photographing subjects. He used the same backdrop for all his portraits. He was a big believer in “simplification and elimination.”

Penn wanted his portraits to be both complete and profound, like the works of painters Goya, Daumier, and Toulouse-Lautrec who he greatly admired.

I feed on art more than I ever do on photographs. I can admire photography, but I wouldn’t go to it out of hunger.

Irving Penn

The reason Penn used a simple background was to isolate his subjects, so the images were free from distraction and surplus information. This allowed the viewer to concentrate on the subject and the subject only.

This may be the reason the majority of his portraits are black and white, as color tends to add another element within the frame that could potentially distract the viewer.

Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is the one they would like to show the world. Very often what lies behind the façade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.

Irving Penn

Fashion

Instead of shooting on location or using elaborate props like many early fashion photographers, Penn instead drew attention to the clothing and accessories and photographed models, as he did with his portraiture, isolated against simple backdrops.

Make things manageable enough to record them, to prune away anything inconsequential… Because less is more.

Irving Penn

As one of the first photographers to emphasize style over context, he helped to revolutionize the genre of fashion photography.

A fashion picture is a portrait just as a portrait is a fashion picture.

Irving Penn

Penn was infamous for making his models repeat the same gesture, movement, or position for an entire morning. When his models showed signs of fatigue, he would then get down to business.

I am going to find what is permanent in this face. Truth comes with fatigue. He displays himself just as he is, just as he did not want to look.

He was also known to take a lot of photographs – sometimes over a hundred rolls per photoshoot. His assistants were certainly kept busy.

It should also be noted that his studio was a calm and professional place of work – Penn was an artist painting with light. He had already sketched out the idea, had the image he wanted in his head, and now had to mount the image on film.

Former Vogue Editor-in-Chief Diana Vreeland once said: “Irving Penn’s studio is like a cathedral. David Bailey’s studio is like a nightclub.”

Nudes

Penn began photographing nudes in 1949 about the same time his career as a fashion photographer was established. His approach to nudes was completely different from his commercial work though.

He devised a technique of bleaching and re-developing each print to create high contrast areas that enhance the texture and volume of the image.

In terms of the images, his models are positioned either seated or lying down, and they are mostly tightly framed. He also used a lot of top light. There is a mysterious quality to his nude images, which makes them incredibly powerful.

Still Life

Penn’s fascination with still life is evident in the dramatic range of photography he has produced in this genre.

His first assignment as a Vogue studio photographer was a still-life cover, and over the years he completed many striking still-life product shots.

Penn began taking still-life photos of flowers in the 1960s. This led to a book of floral studies, Flowers, published in 1980. He said he was drawn to flowers considerably “after they’ve passed the point of perfection.”

In the 1970s, Penn continued the theme of visual imperfection and produced a series of still-life’s using memento mori objects (a reminder of the inevitability of death) such as cigarette butts, old clothing, and decaying fruit and vegetables.

He successfully challenged the traditional idea of what we consider beautiful, giving common street trash the full studio treatment. Ironically, these photographs are the antithesis of the consumer products Penn shot commercially.

Photographing a cake can be art too.

Irving Penn

What Camera Did Irving Penn Use?

• Rolleiflex
• Deardorff Large format view (4-by-5-inch and 8-by-10-inch models)
• Leica
• Nikon F
• Banquet Large Format

Penn purchased his first camera, a twin-lens medium format Rolleiflex around 1938 after graduating. He continued to use the same model right until the end of his career, some sixty years later.

For his studio work for Vogue, Penn frequently used a Deardorff large format view camera (both the 4×5 and 8×10 models).

Penn began using a 35mm Leica camera for his travel assignments for Vogue in 1950.

In the late 1950s, Penn switched from Leica to a Nikon, trading the rangefinder-style Leica camera for the newer single-lens reflex design and the telephoto lens.

In a burst of romantic passion for this new apparatus (forgetting gratitude to the Leica and with even a certain amount of disloyalty) I diverted myself of all our studios elaborate and superb Leica equipment, taking a terrible financial beating in the process, not finding a panacea and exchanging one set of headaches for another.

Irving Penn

Penn would later come to appreciate the flexibility of the new system and continue to use it for the rest of his career.

In 1979, Penn picked up a Banquet camera, a large format view camera, that was popular in the early twentieth century for taking group portraits in formal situations.

What Film Did Penn Use?

Penn mainly used Kodak black and white film for his portraits, either Super XX, Plus-X, or Tri-X (it seems any Kodak film with an X). For his fashion, beauty, and still-life photography he preferred to use color film.

After looking at my notes and reviewing his contact sheets it looks like he used both Fuji and Kodak for his color work. For his later studio photography, he used Kodak Ektachrome E200 slide-film.

In his book, World’s in a Small Room, Penn states that most of his photography in the book was shot on Kodak Tri-X and exposed at 160 ASA, or 80 to 125 ASA for very dark skins. Development was usually in Ethol UFG for 3 to 5 minutes at 68F.

Irving Penn Lighting Technique

Penn’s lighting would change depending on what genre of photography he was shooting and the location.

Below I’m going to try and cover Penn’s portrait lighting in detail (or as best as I can). His fashion photography would require another article.

Whenever possible, Penn would try and use natural north light, which is also favored by artists. This makes sense as he was heavily influenced by painters.

I share with many people the feeling that there is a sweetness and constancy to light that falls into a studio from the north sky that sets it beyond any other illumination. It is a light of such penetrating clarity that even a simple object lying by chance in such a light takes on an inner glow, almost a voluptuousness.

Irving Penn

In many of his pictures, the lighting is fairly directional and comes from one side, which creates a dramatic fall-off across the frame.

Penn makes everything extremely hard for himself. He employs no gadgets, no special props, nothing but the simplest lighting – probably a one-source light coming from the side of the sitter’s head.

Cecil Beaton, writing in 1975

Lighting Method

To achieve this, he used either window light or his portable studio. In his studio, he had floor to ceiling glass and large skylights installed.

If the light wasn’t strong enough (or there wasn’t any window light available) then he would augment the existing light or replicate window light with either tungsten, strobes, and even cheap hardware clamp lights. Whatever got the job done and gave him the quality of light he needed.

In my windowless New York studio, I designed a bank of tungsten to more or less simulate a skylight. The bank was constructed in a metal frame moved by hand pulley on a ceiling track. I found this to be an agreeable light for the formalized arrangements of people and still-life’s I meant to photograph. A drawback of course was the considerable heat of the bulbs and the long exposure times required. For still life’s, exposures could sometimes be hours long.

Irving Penn

Penn began experimenting with strobe lighting as early as 1952 when he was first introduced to the technology by colleague Leslie Gill.

He also used scrims, flags, drapes, mirrors, umbrellas, and reflectors to shape and control the light.

Editor note: If you have anything further you wish to add, specifically to do with Penn’s technique (lighting, printing, etc) then send us an email so we can update the article.

Platinum Printing Process

In 1964, Penn used the platinum/palladium printing process for the first time – a printing technique that was popular at the turn of the century.

The process involved applying platinum rather than silver on the printing paper. He would then expose and develop the negative then repeat until satisfied with the print.

After he perfected the technique, Penn went back and reprinted a lot of his earlier work.

Sometime in 1964, I realized that I was a victim of a printmaking obsession, a condition that persists today.

Irving Penn

Here is a short video from his former assistant that explains the technique:

Other Resources

Recommended Irving Penn Books

Disclaimer: Photogpedia is an Amazon Associate and earns from qualifying purchases.

• Irving Penn: Centennial
• Passage
• A Career in Photography

Irving Penn Videos

On Location in Morocco, 1971

The Portraits of Irving Penn – The Art of Photography

Irving Penn Photos

Looking for more Irving Penn photos? Then head over to the Irving Penn archive and The Met Museum.

Further Reading

Alexey Brodovitch Workshop Transcript – Conversation between Richard Avedon and Irving Penn from 1964 session. The legendary photographers discuss their photography style, projects, and commercial work.

Irving Penn Notebook – Copy of Penn’s notebook. Despite being difficult to read, it’s worth printing to help understand his process better.

The Art Institute of Chicago: Irving Penn Archives – Lots of great information about the master photographer that you won’t find anywhere else.

Fact Check

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Related Articles

• Richard Avedon: The Million Dollar Man
• Yousuf Karsh: The Master of Portrait Photography
• Horst P Horst: The Photographer of Style

Sources

Irving Penn is Difficult, Can’t you Tell, New York Times, 1991
Obituary, The Guardian, 2009
Irving Penn: Small Trades , The J Paul Getty Museum, 2009
Centennial, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017
Irving Penn at the Met, Vogue, 2017
How Irving Penn ‘changed the way people saw the world, Christies, 2020
Celebrating the work of Irving Penn, The Guardian, January 2021

The Irving Penn Foundation
Irving Penn Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago

Richard Avedon and Irving Penn Workshop Transcript, 1964
Passage, Knopf, 1991
A Career in Photography, Bullfinch, 1997
Irving Penn: Centennial, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017
Encyclopedia of Twentieth-century Photography, Routledge, 2005

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