André Kertész
[Photographer, b. 1894, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1985, New York.]

 The camera is my tool. Through it I give reason to everything around me. 
 Two seconds are a thousand years. 
 In 1900, I saw an illustrated magazine and decided I wanted to do the same with my camera as it had with drawings. After my baccalaureate in 1912, I bought a camera. It became for me a little notebook, a sketchbook. I photographed things that surrounded me—human things, animals, my home, the shadows, peasants, the life around me. I always photographed what the moment told me. 
 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. 
 Photography cannot make nature more beautiful. Nature is the most beautiful thing in the world. You can show the beauty, illustrate it, but it is never the real beauty—very far from it. 
 I gave him [Brassaï] a crash course on night photography: what to do, how to do it, and how long the exposures had to be. Later he started to copy my style in night photography and that, more or less, was the type of work he did for the rest of his life. 
 Of course a picture can lie, but only if you yourself are not honest or if you don’t have enough control over your subject. 
 As with every art, in photography the most important thing is that we feel fully what we are doing. 
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