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Quotes by Photographer
"The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each to himself. And that is the most complicated thing on earth."
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"Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment."
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"Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space."
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"I think San Francisco is the best place in the whole world for an easy life."
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"As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs."
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"Regardless of how you feel inside, always try to look like a winner. Even if you are behind, a sustained look of control and confidence can give you a mental edge that results in victory."
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"There are no rules and regulations for perfect composition. If there were we would be able to put all the information into a computer and would come out with a masterpiece. We know that's impossible. You have to compose by the seat of your pants."
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"I don't think at that time I realized how important it was and how important it was for me to be here and carry on that legacy in our family of being a photographer."
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"I always say that I don't want to be sentimental, that the photographs shouldn't be sentimental, and yet, I am conscious of my sentimentality."
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"I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself."
Work,
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"And I remember that the editors wanted to have a witness to say that this was really the case, because it was a very sharp picture of the just the face, the head of the fetus inside the womb."
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"The war correspondent has his stake - his life - in his own hands, and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute."
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"I never question what to do, it tells me what to do. The photographs make themselves with my help."
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"That's my ambition: that you look at the pictures and realize what complex, fascinating, interesting people every single one of my subjects is."
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"In my photography, color and composition are inseparable. I see in color."
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"It's that I don't like white paper backgrounds. A woman does not live in front of white paper. She lives on the street, in a motor car, in a hotel room."
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"Being born, especially being born a person of color, is a political act in itself."
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"When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence."
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"Never in the history of fashion has so little material been raised so high to reveal so much that needs to be covered so badly."
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"I'm always mentally photographing everything as practice."
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"I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do - that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse."
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"I dream that someday the step between my mind and my finger will no longer be needed. And that simply by blinking my eyes, I shall make pictures. Then, I think, I shall really have become a photographer."
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"Born Berlin 1931, Germany, father a British diplomat, mother an American artist. Educated at various schools all over the world. 1958 Settled down to live in London. 1966 Became interested in photography through photographing my young children. No formal training."
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"My use of the medium - photography - is in some ways traditional."
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"There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit."
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"A virulent, aggressive minority has decided that Americans don't know themselves what it is they should see, and need to be protected by people who are wiser than they are, even if they are only a tiny sliver of the population."
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"I'd go down to the end of my street, to a garage that had a certain feeling about it, or a particular light; I'd take a picture of a friend who needed a head shot. That's how I learned, instead of having school assignments and learning camera techniques."
10
"In my work, I explore my own Catholic obsessions."
10
"Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance. Always, I am on the threshold."
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"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."
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"A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there - even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity."
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"Millions of men have lived to fight, build palaces and boundaries, shape destinies and societies; but the compelling force of all times has been the force of originality and creation profoundly affecting the roots of human spirit."
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"Men are but children of a larger growth, Our appetites as apt to change as theirs, And full as craving too, and full as vain."
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"People in millenniums ahead will know what we were like in the 1930's and the thing that, the important major things that shaped our history at that time. This is as important for historic reasons as any other."
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"I didn't want to travel. I didn't want to leave my family. I heard all these stories from Dad about not having Edward around when he was young, and I didn't want that to happen."
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"Of course, today at the Karolinska Institute, I am working with some top experts - even some Nobel prize winners. They have the latest news and I have the technique."
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"I felt no pressure that my grandfather was famous and my uncle was famous."
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"I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important."
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"I was poor. When you're poor you work, and when you're rich you expect somebody to hand it to you. So I think being reasonably poor is very good for people."
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"So I went to Chicago in 1940, I think, '41, and the photographs that I made there, aside from fashion, were things that I was trying to express in a social conscious way."
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"All I need is my brains, my eyes and my personality, for better or for worse."
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"When I work, and in my art, I hold hands with God."
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"The goal of art was the vital expression of self."
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"Americans have an abiding belief in their ability to control reality by purely material means... airline insurance replaces the fear of death with the comforting prospect of cash."
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"I never expected that. I didn't aim for that. All I wanted was to get some nice pictures of trains at night."
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