Ansel Adams   "A good photograph is knowing where to stand."  
Ansel Adams   "A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into."  
Jacques-Henri Lartigue   "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."  
Dorothea Lange
- quoted in: Los Angeles Times
(13 Aug. 1978).
  "The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera."  
Imogen Cunningham
"Dialogue With Photography"
by Paul Hill, ISBN: 0948797665
page: 240
  "The thing that’s fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike."  
Sarah Moon   “I wanted to make moody images. That meant working with very little light. So I had no option; I had to use fast films - that dictated my pictures being grainy. I did not choose the technique first.
When I make a picture I always choose the light before I choose the technique”


   
Ansel Adams   "There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer. "

   
Robert Doisneau   "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."

   
Authur Fellig
(Weegee)
  "When you find yourself beginning to feel a bond between yourself and the people you photograph, when you laugh and cry with their laughter and tears, you will know you are on the right track."

   
Jacques-Henri Lartigue   "Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true."

   
Henri Cartier-Bresson   "Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important."

   
Henri Cartier-Bresson
on photojournalism,
Amercan Photo,
September/October 1997,
page: 76
  "Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should? While we're working, we must be conscious of what we're doing. Sometimes we have the feeling that we've taken a great photo, and yet we continue to unfold. We must avoid however, snapping away, shooting quickly and without thought, overloading ourselves with unnecessary images that clutter our memory and diminish the clarity of the whole."

   
Diane Arbus
"Diane Arbus : A Biography "
by Patricia Bosworth
ISBN: 0393312070

  "A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know."

   
Diane Arbus   "The thing that's important to know is that you never know."

   
Diane Arbus
"Photography Year 1973"
<Life Library of Photography>
by Time Life (Editor)
page: 35

  "Nothing is ever the same as they said it was."    
Diane Arbus
"Diane Arbus : An Aperture Monograph"
by Diane Arbus, Stan Grossfeld
ISBN: 0893816949

  "I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them."

   
Mason Resnik
1998

  "When asked what you would consider the perfect getaway, say 'a week alone in a darkroom' and mean it."    
Ansel Adams   "It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment."

   
Robert Capa

  "If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough."    
Edward Steichen   "Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper. The photographer begins with the finished product."

   
Edward Steichen   "The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself. And that is the most complicated thing on earth."

   
Mary Ellen Mark   "I think you have to have a real point of view that's your own. You have to tell it your way. And, I think that it's a mistake to shoot for a specific magazine's point of view because it's never going to be as good. You have to shoot for yourself and photograph the way you believe it."

   
Walker Evans   "It's the way to educate your eyes. Stare. Pry. Listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long."

   
W. Eugene Smith   "The world just does not fit conveniently into the format of a 35mm camera."

   
Diane Arbus
"On Photography" by Susan Sontag
ISBN: 0385267061
  "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."
   
Diane Arbus   "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."

   
William McCleery
- in reference to Weegee
in 'Naked City'

  "He will take his camera and ride off in search of new evidence that his city, even in her most drunken and disorderly and pathetic moments, is beautiful."

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

   
Brett Weston   "The taint of age can be very beautiful. The wreckage of man-made objects is something more beautiful than the new. Rust and weathering adds a patina of . . . well, I call it 'elegant shit'…"

   
Brett Weston
In an interview with David Graham
View Camera magazine,
July 1989

  "Anything more than 500 yds from the car just isn't photogenic."

(Attributed to Brett Weston referring to working with a 10X8 view camera..)
   
Berenice Abbott   "Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself."

   
Robert Heinecken   "There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph."

   
John Berger   "A photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it."

   
         
         
         
         
OTHER IDENTITY

       
         
Friedrich Nietzsche
1844 - 1900
  "'He who considers more deeply knows that, whatever his acts and judgements may be, he is always wrong."

- on 'the human lot'. From Human, All too Human : 'Man Alone With Himself'

   
   
   
Modest Mouse
- Issac?
(1996)
  "I'm not sure who I am. I'm not sure who I am but I know who I've been."

From 'This is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About' (1996)
Track: Make Everyone Happy/Mechanical Birds

   
         
         

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