Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.
The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.
Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.
Color tends to corrupt photography and absolute color corrupts it absolutely. Consider the way color film usually renders blue sky, green foliage, lipstick red, and the kiddies’ playsuit. These are four simple words which must be whispered: color photography is vulgar.
In order to put meaning back into our lives, we should recognize illusions for what they are, and we should reach out and touch the fabric of reality.
Good photography is unpretentious.
I’m sometimes called a ‘documentary photographer’ but… a man operating under that definition could take a sly pleasure in the disguise. Very often I’m doing one thing when I’m thought to be doing another.
The eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.
I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered that I didn’t need to. If the thing is true, why there it is.
It’s easy to photograph light reflecting from a surface, the truly hard part is capturing the light in the air.
Incidentally, part of a photographer’s gift should be with people. You can do some wonderful work if you know how to make people understand what you’re doing and feel all right about it, and you can do terrible work if you put them on the defense, which they all are at the beginning. You’ve got to take them off their defensive attitude and make them participate.
The meaning of quality in photography’s best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.
Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste, and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt.
… nature photographs downright bore me for some reason or other. I think: ‘Oh, yes. Look at that sand dune. What of it?’
Documentary: That’s a sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear… The term should be documentary style… You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless.
Do we know what we look like? Not really.
With the camera, it’s all or nothing. You either get what you’re after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don’t think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.
I wanted so much to write that I couldn’t write a word.
That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.
It is the way to educate your eye and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop.
Photography is not cute cats, nor nudes, motherhood or arrangements of manufactured products. Under no circumstances it is anything ever anywhere near a beach.
I work rather blindly. I have a theory that seems to work with me that some of the best things you ever do sort of come through you. You don’t know where you get the impetus and response to what’s before your eyes.
You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document, although it can adopt that style.
The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative. By their fewness, and by the importance of the reader’s eye, this will be misunderstood by most of that minority which does not wholly ignore it. In the interests, however, of the history and future of photography, that risk seems irrelevant, and this flat statement necessary.
I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.
