I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term--meaning that the creation of a simple photo...graph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching--there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do--that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I ...felt very perverse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things.... But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to th...e natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Too many photographers try too hard. They try to lift photography into the realm of Art, because they have an inferiority complex ...about their Craft. You and I would see more interesting photography if they would stop worrying, and instead, apply horse-sense to the problem of recording the look and feel of their own era.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifeti...me of pleasure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigge...r and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera--and himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to po...or suffering humanity than anything else that has "cast up" in my time or is like to--this art by which even the "poor" can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn't it be acting favourably on the morality of the country?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »