Alfred Stieglitz
[Photographer and curator, b. 1864, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1946, New York.]
Every Tom, Dick and Harry could, without trouble, learn how to get something or other on a sensitive plate, and this is what the public wanted—no work and lots of fun. Thanks to the efforts of these persons hand camera and bad work became synonymous.
(1897) 
Don’t be afraid. Just go ahead—photograph, photograph, photograph. That’s the only way you’ll learn.
I was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth is my obsession.
(1921)
I hate to look at the future and see myself as a dried up teacher of photography.
(On being forced to earn money teaching at Columbia and the Brooklyn Museum, 1908)
Just as we stand before the door of a new social era, so we stand in art too before a new medium of expression—the true medium (abstraction).
(1912)
My ideal is to achieve the ability to produce numberless prints from each negative, prints all significantly alive, yet indistinguishably alike, and to be able to circulate them at a price not higher than that of a popular magazine, or even a daily paper.
The placing in the hands of the general public a means of making pictures but with little labor and requiring less knowledge has of necessity been followed by the production of millions of photographs. It is due to this fatal facility that photography as a picture-making medium has fallen into disrepute.
(1899)
You may call this a crowd of immigrants... To me it is a study in mathematical lines, in balance, in a pattern of light and shade.
(On his photograph The Steerage.)
