Some of my favorite photographers discuss their craft
“The work I care about is terribly simple. I observe, I try to entertain, but above all I want pictures that are emotional. Little else interests me in photography.”
–Elliott Erwitt
“When the minute comes to taking the picture, I’m not thinking about that at all. It’s sort of like a reservoir that’s in me that’s operating but I’m not thinking about it when I actually have the camera in my hand. I’m really guided by my unconscious.”
–Elsa Dorfman
“In my work, I am guided by what moves and surprises me. Photographs can be enigmatic. They sometimes work because of what is in the frame, and sometimes because of what is not. There is no formula for taking pictures. It’s a mysterious process; an endless challenge.”
–Mary Ellen Mark
“Photography is not at all seeing in the sense that the eye sees…. Our vision is in a constant state of flux, while the camera captures and fixes forever a single, isolated, condition of the moment.”
–Edward Weston
“We don’t take photographs with our cameras, we take them with our hearts and our minds. They are a reflection of ourselves, what we are, and what we think.”
–Arnold Newman
“It’s always been my philosophy to make art out of the everyday and the ordinary…It never occurred to me to leave home to make art.”
–Sally Mann
“Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other people’s pictures too–photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community.”
–Robert Adams
“Stop worrying about the nature, design or qualifications of your equipment. Master your equipment so you know how to get the shot you want, but above all, search for the reason to be taking the pictures. Why do we shoot pictures?”
–Leonard Nimoy
“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.”
–Ansel Adams.
“The shorebreak is my comfort zone. I absolutely love it. It’s always different. The light, the colors, the water, the sand and what happens to it. And to be there to capture it and share it with the world… what a dream.”
–Clark Little
“When I make a photograph, I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order, unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder.”
–Aaron Siskind
“When I was a young photographer at Rolling Stone, I learned that what I did mattered. This may have been because I was published, but whether you’re published or not, you have to care about what you do. You might even seem to be obsessed about it.”
–Annie Leibovitz
“I won’t go anywhere where I’m not confident.”
–Bruce Gilden
“I photograph what interests me all the time. I live with the pictures to see what that thing looks like photographed.”
–Garry Winogrand
“Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure. If man wishes to express himself photographically, he must understand, surely to some extent, his relationship to life. I am interested in relating the problems that affect me to some set of values that I am trying to discover and establish as being my life. I want to discover and establish them through photography.”
–Harry Callahan