Ground Glass

Thanks to Speak, See, Remember for this very strange and interesting find. PhotoQuotes.com is a site, of you guessed it, quotes of well-known (and obscure) photogs. What is perhaps most compelling is that someone embarked on this rather monumental task of compiling, categorizing and posting these tidbit’s. Some profound, some illuminating and some just plain boring. I have cherry-picked some that I thought were worth a read.

I hope that these photographs are sterile, that there’s no emotional content. -Lewis Baltz

No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film. -Robert Adams

The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way. -Diane Arbus
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. -Diane Arbus

There are too many people studying it [photography] now who are never going to make it. You can’t give them a formula for making it. You have to have it in you first, you don’t learn it. The seeing eye is the important thing. -Imogen Cunningham

One advantage of the discovery of the Photographic Art will be, that it will enable us to introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to faithfully copy from nature. -William Henry Fox Talbot

From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour. -Julia Margaret Cameron

Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. -Walker Evans

Photography has no dark sides ! -August Sander

If you want to photograph a man spinning, give some thought to why he spins. Understanding for a photographer is as important as the equipment he uses. -Margaret Bourke-White

If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera. -Lewis Wickes Hine

The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt. -Henri Cartier-Bresson

Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing. -Marcel Duchamp

If you want reality take the bus. -David LaChapelle