Alfred Stieglitz
[Photographer and curator, b. 1864, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1946, New York.]
The great geniuses are those who have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience.
My photographs are a picture of the chaos in the world, and of my relationship to that chaos. My prints show the world’s constant upsetting of man’s equilibrium, and his eternal battle to reestablish it.
Technically perfect, pictorially rotten.
(Stieglitz’s standard comment on photographs he rejected for publication in The American Amateur Photographer
.)
In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.
If you can imagine photography in the guise of a woman and you’d ask her what she thought of Stieglitz, she’d say: He always treated me like a gentleman.
When I photograph I make love.
There is much, too much, back-patting in the ranks of photography.
(1897)
Something happens, it’s a thousandth part of a fleeting second. It’s up to the photographer to capture that on film, because like a dying day, the thing will never come back again.
(Quoted by Weegee, 1958)
