Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Very often I try to find something that matches a feeling I have. On the other hand, a lot of times I photograph with nothing specific in mind. I just play it as it comes. If it’s good, fine. I find “letting it happen” relaxing, a playful vacation. Stimulating pictures almost always result.
Aleksander Rodchenko
[Artist, designer, architect, b. 1891, St. Petersburg, d. 1956, Moscow.]
One has to take different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again.
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
Those who feel nothing, or not completely at the
time of exposure, relying upon subsequent manipulation to reach an unpremeditated end, are predestined to failure.
Horst Faas
[Photojournalist, b. 1933, Berlin, Germany, d. 2012, Munich, Germany.]
I try to express with the camera what the story is, to get to the heart of the story with picture. In battle I look at things first in terms of people, second in terms of strategies or casualties... To tell a story, you don’t photograph one hundred dead civilians to prove there were one hundred dead civilians. You photograph one dead civilian with an expression on his face that says, “This is what it’s like if you’re a dead civilian in Vietnam.”
George Bernard Shaw
[Writer, critic, and dramatist, b. 1856, Dublin, d. 1950, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England.]
On the whole, I greatly prefer photographers who value themselves on being photographers, and aim at characteristically photographic technique instead of a sham brush-and-pencil one.
(1901)
Dorothea Lange
[Photographer, b. 1895, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1965, San Francisco.]
Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion... the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.
Kansuke Yamagata
[Photographer and poet, b. 1914, Nagoya, Japan, d. 1987, Nagoya.]
I purposely don’t give advice regarding technique. I tell young photographers not to look at photography magazines. Rather, they should develop their own way of seeing.
Helen Levitt
[Photographer, b. 1918, New York, d. 2009, New York.]
It would be mistaken to suppose that any of the best photography is come at by intellection; it is like all art, essentially the result of an intuitive process, drawing on all that the artist is rather than on anything he thinks, far less theorizes about.
