Paul Strand
[Photographer, b. 1890, New York, d. 1976, Oregeval, France.]

 I think it is very important for young photographers to find out about the whole development of the graphic arts, not simply come along and show photographs that could not stand up to a Cezanne for a second. You cannot claim that photography is an art until your work can hang on the same wall. 
 We do not photograph some large conception of humanity, but rather go very deeply into a single person, and penetrate very deeply and derive a larger meaning. One person who has been studied very deeply and penetratingly can become all persons. Therefore, it seems to me, that art is very specific and not at all general. 
 I photographed these people [on New York streets] because I felt they were all people whom life had battered into some sort of extraordinary interest and, in a way, nobility. 
 You see, the extraordinary thing about photography is that it’s a truly popular medium... But this has nothing to do with the art of photography even though the same mechanical devices are used. Thoreau said years ago, “You can’t say more than you see.” No matter what lens you use, no matter what the speed of the film is, no matter how you develop it, no matter how you print it, you cannot say more than you see. That’s what that means, and that’s the truth. 
 America has been expressed in terms of America without the outside influences of Paris art schools or their dilute offspring here... [photography] found its highest esthetic achievement in America, where a small group of men and women worked with honest and sincere purpose, some instinctively and a few consciously, but without any background of photographic or graphic formulae much less and cut and dried ideas of what is Art and what isn't: this innocence was their real strength. Everything they wanted to say had to be worked out by their own experiments: it was born of actual living. (1917) 
 Gums, oils, soft-focus lenses, these are the worst enemies, not of photography, which can vindicate itself easily and naturally, but of photographers. The whole photographic past and present, with few exceptions, has been weakened and sterilized by the use of these things. (1923) 
 All good art is abstract in its structure. 
 The days slip by within this magical repetition of sun and storm and cold starlit nights... so, that if one had not made a few photographs... they might be a dreamlike mirage. (From Taos, 1931, to Alfred Stieglitz) 
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