#Culture & customs

"I’ll do the printing myself until I die. Printing is a personal thing. I couldn’t print your work. You couldn’t print mine. It wouldn’t be the same. So when I die, I’ll have all of my negatives destroyed”

 

Brett Weston
(1911-1993)

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“Throughout my life I’ve never pursued anything. I just let things pursue me, they just show up. This is the way I’ve lead my life, not just in photography but in life”

 

~ Manuel Álvarez Bravo
(1902-2002)

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"I think life is too short not to be doing something which you really believe in."

~ Steve McCurry

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“Behind everything is an energy, a spirit, an essence. That gives it existence. Photography is a means to appreciate the many manifestations of my collective self. The camera is my vehicle of exploration in capturing images that make my heart smile. I’m collecting external mirrors of myself”

 

~ Chester Higgins Jr

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"We were spending our summer vacation near Aubagne where I photographed this older man playing boules. It is an ordinary scene, but I found the man very colorful in his postures.”

 

~ Willy Ronis
(1910 -2009)

 

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

~ William Butler Yeats
(1865 - 1939)

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"In the beginning, I had no thought of making the series [The North American Indian] large enough to be of any value in the future, but the thing has grown so that I now see its great possibilities, and certainly nothing could be of much greater value."

 

~ Edward S. Curtis
(1868–1952)

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“I just get the will to do it. I don’t plan a photograph in advance…. I work by impulse. No philosophy. No ideas. Not by the head but by the eyes. Eventually inspiration comes. Instinct is the same as inspiration and eventually it comes”

 

~ Manuel Álvarez Bravo
(1902-2002)

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“A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it”

 

~ Irving Penn
(1917-2009)

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"My collecting mantra is very simple: always be open and receptive, and only collect something that moves you or changes you in some way.  Collecting is like reading a great novel; you are one person before and one person after. That’s the litmus test on whether or not you should acquire an image. Does it haunt you?"

 

~ Peter Fetterman

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“I’ve entered into an unspoken, unwritten, and generally inscrutable pact with the people I have photographed and lived amongst. If I promise not to tell all I know about them, they will do the same for me”

~ Kurt Markus

(1947 - 2022)

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"Torii gates in Japan symbolize the Shinto belief that deities reside not just in shrines, temples churches, mosques, synagogues and other institutionalized religious structures, but in nature, in the earth, sky and water. These gates serve as reminders to respect and honor the land, the earth and our universe. Personally, I regard them almost as road signs directing me to slow down and smell the roses. Every individual will have their own interpretations, but when I see a Torii gate, I immediately want to free myself from unwanted distractions, focus on what is important, escape from the noise of the world, unclutter my “stuff" and prioritize life. These are heady and ambitious resolutions, usually quite forgotten when back in the “other” world. This particular Torii gate stands outside a small shrine on a sparsely populated island in Shikoku. I have photographed it three times so far, always cognizant that the experience of concentrated waiting and watching could be considered a form of meditation, appropriate to the location."

 

~Michael Kenna

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“A fantastic picture you do in a fraction of a second but to arrive to do this picture you must put your life in there, to give your time and to receive it from the community that you come to see”

 

~ Sebastião Salgado

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“Of course I am curious and when I arrive in a place I like to see and understand what happens around me. However, I need to travel slowly and I avoid plane trips. A photographer must not run but walk, tirelessly. Then he can seize what is on offer on the pavement, at the street corner, in life."

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908 - 2004)

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“I’m this little guy who walked around on this earth trying to find the place where pictures are waiting for him”

 

~ Josef Koudelka

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“When one takes a photograph, one doesn’t think about saying anything in particular. One doesn’t think about making a statement but rather of creating something visual which can later bear a meaning that one didn’t intend to transmit-depending on the viewer’s interpretation but not necessarily on the photographer’s”

~ Manuel Álvarez Bravo
(1902-2002)

“Photographs must be taken without an exchange of glances between the photographer and the subject. Without giving, without returning anything. I just shoot”

 

~ Marc Riboud
(1923-2016)

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“There are different ways of seeing. I have mine. For me to photograph a beautiful face, a misty landscape is somehow like listening to music or reading poetry. It helps me to live”

 

~ Marc Riboud
(1923-2016)

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“I was terrified, I didn’t think I even knew who he was. But the light was good”

~ Jane Bown
(1925-2014)

 

“War doesn’t determine who is right - only who is left”

~ Bertrand Russell

 

“In my artistic process I have tried to create images that invite the observer to examine by means of what I call “emotional contemplation” assigning through the beauty in them the meaning of their shape”

 

~ Luis González Palma

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“Solitary wanderings, eyes always peeled. As evening approaches, I wonder what meaning could be given to those encounters. Doubt often hovers nearby, but I photograph the way a musician hums. Looking is like breathing. So when luck offers me a good picture, joy is surely not far away”

 

~ Marc Riboud
(1923-2016)

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"I think that what you've got to do is discover the essential truth of the situation, and have a point of view about it."

~ Burt Glinn

“I soon saw how the music came naturally. It wasn’t like they’d built in time to compose - they had to do it on the fly. There was a piano in Paul’s room. At one point John pulled up a chair and started tinkering. Paul joined in. John started humming what I would later recognize as the tune to,“Baby’s good to me you know / She’s happy as can be you know / She said so…..” But they got stuck. Where should it go after the melody?

 

George wandered over with his guitar and played a catchy rhythm - and -blues riff, plucking away. He seemed to be improvising, although John was later credited with writing the riff-influenced by Bobby Parker’s song “Watch Your Step” - the way I heard it that day it was George coming up with it. They appeared to be writing a song right in front of me. And as John and Paul kept at it on the piano, Ringo, in a black turtle-neck came over and stood next to George, and I had my shot: The Beatles composing “I Feel Fine”.

 

~ Harry Benson

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“The models are friends of mine. These photographs involve moments of complicity that only a friend could accept. If there is no fondness between the model and the photographer, this kind of work cannot be done”

 

~ Flor Garduno

“Street photography is a joy. But the most difficult thing for me is a portrait. It’s not at all like someone you catch on the street. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt, which is not an easy thing”

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908 - 2004)

“I want to express our dignity, beauty, suffering and resistance. This is the force of our gender."

 

Flor Garduño

“What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera notes with relentless fidelity."

~ Berenice Abbott

 

"If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint. Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist and this inner life would result in his or her personal vision of the world. No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination”

 

~ Edward Hopper

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"We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

 

~ Martin Luther King Jr.
Washington National Cathedral, March 31, 1968

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“When you take a photograph, you are selecting an instant of life. It is like a personal discovery that I want to show everybody else, not as an achievement of mine but as something I want to share because I feel it is important”

 

~ Mariana Yampolsky

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“The Culture in which one lives, especially during childhood affects the entire way one perceives what we call reality. Our perception and our being in the world are bound up with the way we lived when we were children. No one leaves childhood unharmed. It is something we must deal with for the rest of our lives. And I think art is indeed a way of doing so. It allows us to revisit and re-interpret the pain and trauma of the past. In my case having lived in a country ravaged by more than 30 years of armed conflict this approach is particularly meaningful. The subjects of fear, loneliness, emptiness and absence are deeply embedded in my work”

 

~ Luis Gonzalez Palma

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“Photography is much more than just taking pictures – it is a way of life. What you feel, what you want to express, is your ideology and your ethics. It’s a language that allows you to travel over the wave of history.”

 

~ Sebastião Salgado

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“We are only beginning to learn what to say in a photograph. The world we live in is a succession of fleeting moments, anyone of which might say something significant”

 

~ Alfred Eisenstaedt

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"All I ask you to do is to listen with your eyes. The international language of jazz and photography need no special education or sophistication to be enjoyed."

 

~ William Claxton

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"A photograph is a collision between a person with a camera and reality. The photograph is typically as interesting as the collision is."

 

~ Charles Harbutt

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“I arrived at this location from London and had only a couple of days due to the low budget. One thing I tried to do when I arrived somewhere was to get a local map and drive to a hill or vantage point to get a sense of the place. When I got to the top I saw the view over the old pottery kilns and the man with a dog. As a newspaper photographer that I then was I always had my long lens on a camera, loaded and ready, so I was able to grab it and get this shot before he walked off"

 

~ John Bulmer

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“I was driving around Yorkshire and stopped by the bridge. I pretended to be photographing the buildings and switched at the last minute to catch the girls. I met one of the ladies in the picture fifty years later when the BBC did a little film about an exhibition I had in Wakefield. She rang The BBC and said “I’m the girl in the picture”. We were both invited to the studio to meet on air”

 

~ John Bulmer

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“To be born in a country which is not free means that you appreciate freedom. You don’t think of it as something automatic, and you don’t want anyone to take it from you”

 

~ Josef Koudelka

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“A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they’ll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won’t do a thing for you if you don’t have anything in your head or in your heart.”

 

~ Arnold Newman

 

"Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?"

 

~ Pablo Picasso

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“Every professional should remain always in his or her heart an amateur”

 

~ Alfred Eisenstaedt
(1898-1995)

 

“I can’t live one day without hearing music, playing it, studying it or thinking about it”

 

~ Leonard Bernstein
(1918-1990)

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“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

 

~ James Baldwin

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“What I want is the world to remember the problems and the people I photograph. What I want is to create a discussion about what is happening around the world and to provoke some debate with these pictures. Nothing more than this. I don’t want people to look at them and appreciate the light and the palate of tones. I want them to look inside and see what the pictures represent, and the kind of people I photograph.”

 

~ Sebastião Salgado

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“I see that I could stop touring at anytime, but then I don’t feel like it right now. I’ve got no retirement plans”

 

~ Bob Dylan

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“If you wait, people will forget your camera and the soul will drift up into view.”

 

~ Steve McCurry

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“I couldn’t believe I was going to photograph Bob Dylan. I chose the Ambassador Hotel because of the variety it gave me as a location. It also had a great history. It was where the Rat Pack used to hang out and play at its Coconut Grove Room. Also Robert Kennedy was assassinated there. Dylan was also interested in the history of the location. I think he stayed a few hours more for that reason. We also decided to create images with atmosphere and capturing special moments. We decided to find some props and someone came back with some foreign language newspapers and we thought it would be fun to go with that. I was simply amazed he even showed up !”

 

~ Danny Clinch

 

“What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do”

 

~ Bob Dylan

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"It’s not about a moment, it’s about a moment made."

 

~ Kurt Markus
(1947 - 2022)

 

“For me photography is a passion, closer to an obsession. It is not an intellectual process. It is a visual one. While shooting, if we think too much we miss the birdie. A good photograph is a surprise. How could we plan a surprise? We just have to be ready.”

~ Marc Riboud
(1923-2016)

"The models are friends of mine: these photographs involve moments of complicity that only a friend could accept. If there is no fondness between the model and the photographer, this kind of work cannot be done."

 

~ Flor Garduño

Bruce is one of the great Magnum photographers best known for his gritty urban work. This is a rare gem in his archive. Full of wonderment, humanity and hope.