PHOTOGRAPHERS ON PHOTOGRAPHY
After a day-long workshop on the subject of digital photography, I began to want to know what some of the world's best known photographers have had to say about photography. I found most of the quotes at the following WEB site, and I give credit to the people who did research to find them:
http://www.photoquotes.com/default.aspx?charAlpha=z

"There is no such thing as bad light."
---Ernst Haas

"Wherever there is light, one can photograph."
---Alfred Stiegliz

“Not everybody trusts painting but people believe photographs.”
---Ansel Adams

"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

"A good photograph is like a good hound dog, dumb, but eloquent."
---Eugene Atget

"The very secret of life for me...was to maintain in the midst of rushing events an inner tranquillity. I had picked a life that dealt with excitement, tragedy, mass calamities, human triumphs and suffering. To throw my whole self into recording and attempting to understand these things, I needed an inner serenity as a kind of balance."
---Margaret Bourke-White

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

"A photographer's main instrument is his eyes. Strange as it may seem, many photographers choose to use the eyes of another photographer, past or present, instead of their own. Those photographers are blind"
---Manuel Alvarez Bravo

"Of course, it’s all luck."
---Henri Cartier-Bresson

"Luck is the attentive photographer's best teacher."
---John Szarkowski


“It is a peculiar part of the good photographer's adventure to know where luck is most likely to lie in the stream, to hook it, and to bring it in without unfair play and without too much subduing it.”
---James Agee, writer and photographer

"I'm paid to be lucky and that means making your own luck - getting yourself in the right position, in front of the right subject at the right time, and in the right light."
Michael Yamashita

" Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I'm going to take tomorrow."
---Imogen Cunningham

"If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time."
---Robert Doisneau

"Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing."
---Marcel Duchamp

"When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear."
---Alfred Eisenstaedt

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

"A technically perfect photograph can be the world’s most boring picture."
---Andreas Feininger

"Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference."
---Robert Frank

"If it's a likeness, alone, it's not a success. If, through my portraits, you can come to know the subjects more meaningfully, if it synthesizes your feelings toward someone whose work has imprinted itself on your mind--if you see a photograph and say, 'Yes, this is the person,' with a little new insight--that is a beautiful experience."
---Yousuf Karsh

"When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph."
---Annie Leibovitz

"I'm looking for the unexpected. I'm looking for things I've never seen before."
---Robert Mapplethorpe

"I think you reveal yourself by what you choose to photograph, but I prefer photographs that tell more about the subject. There's nothing much interesting to tell about me; what's interesting is the person I'm photographing, and that's what I try to show. ... I think each photographer has a point of view and a way of looking at the world... that has to do with your subject matter and how you choose to present it. What's interesting is letting people tell you about themselves in the picture."
---Mary Ellen Mark

"The best part of us is not what we see, it's what we feel. We are what we feel. We are not what we look at . . .. We're not our eyeballs, we're our mind. People believe their eyeballs and they're totally wrong . . .. That's why I consider most photographs extremely boring--just like Muzak, inoffensive, charming, another waterfall, another sunset. This time, colors have been added to protect the innocent. It's just boring. But that whole arena of one's experience--grief, loneliness--how do you photograph lust? I mean, how do you deal with these things? This is what you are, not what you see."
---Duane Michals

"Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already."
---Helmut Newton

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

"Photographing a cake can be art."
---Irving Penn

"A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph."
---Man Ray

"Photography has no dark sides."
---August Sander

"...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude."
---Susan Sontag

"No photographer is as good as the simplest camera."
---Edward Stichen

"Anything more than 500 feet from the car just isn't photogenic."
---Brett Weston

"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."
---Edward Weston

"I am always mentally photographing everything as practice."
Minor White

"Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed."
---Garry winogrand