#Woman

“If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.”

 

~ Eve Arnold

“If you choose your subject selectively, intuitively, the camera can write poetry.”

 

~ Harry Callahan

“There is no limit to what we, as women, can accomplish.”

~ Michelle Obama

“Photography is a potential depiction expressed in seamlessly merging tonal values and brought about or conveyed by the effects of light”

~ Heinrich Kuhn

“The older I get the one thing I can trust in myself more than anything else is the way I feel about something. When I photograph, I try to be as aware of my feelings as I can be to somehow try and get them out of me and onto the film in terms of the way I am responding or seeing the world”

~ Judy Dater

“Eleanor was innocent and I was innocent.
I just try to photograph what I like. I thought she was beautiful. I intuitively photographed her. All my photography is innocent”

~ Harry Callahan

“He put a little bit of himself into every picture. He was humble, very quiet, very kind. It was as if he didn’t understand or couldn’t connect to the fact that he held a major place in fashion history and photographic history”

 

~ Carol Alt
(Model)

“For some people the word “elegance” has acquired objectionable, snobbish connotations. But I myself prefer to regard elegance as an attractive and admirable - if admittedly rare - human attribute: a form of physical and mental grace that has nothing to do with pretension or over refinement or an excess of money to spend. Unlike Huene, who had absorbed an infallible sense of elegance from his upbringing, I had to invent it on my own: more exactly, to learn gradually to recognize elegance in others and try to portray it in my photographs.”

~ Horst P Horst

"When you're observant, inspiration can show up in the most unusual places, triggering a new idea to appear.”

~ Noell Oszvald

"Everything I know, see or hear, every part of my life is transformed into dresses."

~ Christian Dior

"Real elegance is everywhere, especially in things that don't show it"

~ Christian Dior

“Pictures have to do with heart and mind and eye and they have to communicate and as long as they do that it’s valid”

 

~ Elliott Erwitt

“My interest in photography has something to do with the aesthetic and that there should be a little beauty in everything”

 

Imogen Cunningham
(1883-1976)

“The key to artistic photography is to work out your own thoughts, by yourself. Imitation leads to certain disaster. New ideas are always antagonized. Do not mind that. If a thing is good it will survive”

 

~ Gertrude Käsebier
(1853-1934)

“Just like the thunderbolt of first love or a first glance wipes away everything else and creates a kind of emptiness, I swear that at the precise moment of clicking the shutter, I have no forethought, no desire, no intention, no memory. The subject has taken hold of me: this is the impulse of acting without self interest. It happens in a moment. I am open, this opening lets in the fleeting moment when everything is bathed in the same light. This is how artists, painters, musicians, photographers - truly know themselves. Deep down they feel the same thrill as everyone else. The first glance is complete, in the light of the whole. I take portraits of light”

~ Edouard Boubat
(1923 - 1999)

“On the day of this picture, I think we’d just had lunch and strolled down to the beach to have a swim. It was September but it was still vey warm. I was just snapping away and said, “I love this beautiful house, just please sit down here.” So Marianne sat down and I did a few pictures with my Pentax 67 which is actually pretty big for carrying on the beach, but I just have to have a camera with me all the time. It was a bit like a fashion shoot because I was directing her rather than just letting her do her thing.I think I even said, “Please put your hand up to your head and close your eyes. Head up a bit and just go into a dream world”. The scene was very posh and I wanted to get that across. I always say my wife belongs to the 1950’s”.

 

~ John Swannell

"I see my pictures like pages of a coloring book in which content is stripped to the bare essence."

~ Noell Oszvald

“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 Alvarez Bravo (Mexico, b. 1902-2002)

“People don’t understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it”

~ Billie Holiday

“I was merely a living witness. What does any good journalist do? Record what’s going on, observe the artist and their expressions, then leap in. You’ve got to react to something that’s happening or anticipate that it’s about to happen.”

 

~ Don Hunstein

“My work is inspired by my life. I express myself through my photographs. Everything that surrounds me provokes my feelings"

 

~ André Kertész (1895-1985)

"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

"Everyone is free to figure out what the picture says to them. It’s very interesting to read so many different thoughts about the same piece of work.”

 

- Noell Osvald

I was visiting our great friend and artist, Pentti Sammallahti, in Helsinki and I casually said to him, “Perhaps there is another great photographer in Finland I should meet?”