#C20th

“I decided to photograph her as another friend had described her
“Georgia, her pure profile calm, clearer sleek black hair drawn swiftly back into a tight knot at the nape of her necktie strong white hands, touching and lifting everything, even the boiled eggs, as if they were living things-sensitive slow moving hands, coming out of the black and white, always this black and white".

 

~ Yousuf Karsh
(1908-2002)

“It’s not enough to be nice in life. You’ve got to have nerve. To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.”

 

~ Georgia O’Keefe
(1887-1986)

“The mark of a successful individual is one that has spent an entire day on the bank of a river without feeling guilty about it.”

 

~ Chinese Proverb

“A picture is like a prayer”

 

~ Harry Callahan
(1912-1999)

"One day in a second-hand shop near Covent Garden, I found a 70 year old wooden Kodak. I was delighted. Like nineteenth-century cameras it had no shutter, and the wide-angle lens, with an aperture as minute as a pin-hole, was focused on infinity. In 1926, Edward Weston wrote in his diary “The camera sees more than the eyes, so why not make use of it”. My new camera saw more and saw it differently. It created a great illusion of space, an unrealistically steep perspective and it distorted. When I began to photograph nudes, I let myself be guided by this camera and instead of photographing what I saw, I photographed what the camera was seeing. I interfered very little, and the lens produced anatomical images and shapes which my eyes had never observed."

~ Bill Brandt
(1904-1983)

“Always carry a camera, it's tough to shoot a picture without one”

~ Jay Maisel

“It’s the subject matter that counts. I’m interested in revealing the subject in a new way to intensify it. A photo is able to capture a moment that people can’t always see”

 

~ Harry Callahan

“The maestro’s villa was a photographer’s nightmare, with his boisterous children bicycling through vast rooms already crowded with canvases. I eagerly accepted Picasso’s alternate suggestion to meet later in Vallauris at his ceramics gallery. “He will never be here” the gallery owner commented, when my assistant and two hundred pounds of equipment arrived. “He says the same thing to every photographer”. To everyone’s amazement the “old lion” not only kept his appointment with me but was prompt and wore a new shirt. He could partially view himself in my large format lens and intuitively moved to complete the composition”

 

~ Yousuf Karsh
(1908-2002)

“For those who know how to read, I have painted my autobiography”

~ Pablo Picasso
(1881-1973)

“I have spent my lifetime taking photographs. The photograph fulfills my deep need to stop things from disappearing. It makes transience less painful and retains some of the special magic which I have looked for and found. I have tried to create order out of chaos, to find stability in flux and beauty in the most unlikely places”

~ Dorothy Bohm

“You can’t get away from the element of luck in sports photography, but what makes a great sports photographer is that when we get lucky we don’t miss it”

 

~Neil Leifer

“Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure. If a man or a woman wishes to express themselves photographically, they must understand surely to a certain extent, their 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 them through photography”

~ Harry Callahan

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

 

~ Harry Callahan

“The eternal is a moment that breathes and contains life, the span of one breath”

~ Edouard Boubat

“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

“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

“Both Huene and I had this extraordinary feeling about Greece. The physical beauty of the men and women, the sun and the fresh air and the sea”

~ Horst P. Horst

“Today people talk a lot about “reading” a photograph. That means getting it, understanding what it’s all about. But man, when it comes to Herman Leonard, I think a better word is “listen”. You need to “listen” to Herman's pictures. They are full of music and you can hear it”

~ Quincy Jones
(Quoted in the book “Listen: Herman Leonard and his World of Jazz”- 21st Editions)

“I am in agreement with John Szarkowski. A photograph is both a window and a mirror. We look through the window and see, connect and collaborate with the subject matter in front of us. We also use this same external reality as a mirror which reflects our individual proclivities, genetics, experiences, thoughts and desires.”

 

~ Michael Kenna

“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

“There is something instinctive about the moment you choose to “take” a photograph. It’s not the result of thought or reflection.The strength of the composition is always born of the instinct of the decision. It reminds me of archery. There is the tension of the bow and the free flight of the arrow”

~ Edouard Boubat
(1923 - 1999)

“If I knew how to take a good photograph, I’d do it every time”

~ Robert Doisneau
1912-1994

“I always felt the difference between New York and Paris is that Paris nourishes you by the fact that it is very beautiful.You see living history all around you. The whole flavor of the place is one of harmony and beauty. It raises the human spirit"

 

~ Louis Stettner

“Most of my photographs were taken in the spur of the moment, very quickly, just as they occurred. All attention focuses on the specific instant, almost too good to be true, which can only vanish in the following one”

 

~ Willy Ronis

“The camera for an artist is just another tool. It is no more mechanical than a violin if you analyze it. Beyond the rudiments, it is up to the artist to create art, not the camera.”

 

~ Brett Weston
(1911-1993)

“Today music is visual”

~ Archie Shepp

“Give me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling”

~ Walt Whitman
(1819-1892)

“New York is a city I love, a city that forgives nothing but accepts everyone - a place of a thousand varied moods and visions, of countless faces in a moving crowd, each one silently talking to you”

 

~ Louis Stettner

“Brassai showed me that it was possible to find something significant in photographing subjects in everyday life doing ordinary things by interpreting them in your own way and with your own personal vision"

 

~ Louis Stettner

“In life’s saddest winter moments, when you’ve been under a cloud for weeks, suddenly a glimpse of something wonderful can change the whole complexion of things, your entire feeling.The kind of photography I like to do, capturing the moment, it is very much like that break in the clouds. In a flash, a wonderful picture seems to come out of nowhere”

 

~ Elliott Erwitt

“A photograph should always have the last word. Surrounded by silence, it should by its presence dominate all those who look at it. Even the photographer should keep quiet. The picture is taken, their work is done.”

~ Louis Stettner
1922-2016

"I like taking photographs because I like life. And I like photographing people best of all because most of all I love humanity."

~ Horst P. Horst

“I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you,
My heart moves from cold to fire.
I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you, bend to you,
and the measure of my changing love for you,
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume my heart with its cruel ray,
stealing my key to true calm.
In this part of the story I am the one who dies,
The only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.”

~ Pablo Neruda
(Sonnet LXVI: I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You)

“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)

“The real night people live at night not out of necessity, but because they they want to. They belong to the world of pleasure and love, a secret suspicious world closed to the uninitiated"

 

Brassaï
(1899-1984)

“I soon understood that I could get closer to the feel of things by taking pictures.”

 

~ Charles Harbutt
1935-2015

“Dogs have more to do than children. For one thing, they are focused to lead a life that is really schizoid. Every minute, they have to be on two planes at once, juggling the dog world against the human world. And they’re always on call. Their owners want instant affection everyday, any time of day. A dog can never say that he has other things to do. He can never have a headache, like a wife.”

 

~ Elliott Erwitt

“We are all living letters. All our troubles, our problems and our joys are written inside us. We are living photographs. Photography reveals the images hidden within us”

~ Edouard Boubat
(1923 - 1999)

"I believe that each of us has a unique structure of visual organization. I also believe that whatever structure we have is the result of the visual character of the place in which we spent our earliest years. Each of us sees with our own pattern, but artists and gardeners are the ones to find that pattern and build something that we can see around it."

 

~ Gregory Conniff

"I love her and it is the beginning of everything."

 

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

“There is a kind of pathos about the bride drinking at the bar. Humor is a feeling of shame for overt emotion. When the scene is too tender - or too cruel- you take refuge in humor to avoid that sense of embarrassment"

 

~ Robert Doisneau
1912-1994

“Photography is not documentation but intuition, a poetic experience. It’s drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, then sniff, sniff, sniff- being sensitive to coincidence. You can’t go looking for it: you can’t want it or you won’t get it. First you must lose yourself. Then it happens"

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
1908-2004

“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)

“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

"The world is as good as you are. You've got to learn to like yourself first."

~ Steve McQueen
(1930-1980)

“Although she seems uncertain, her understanding of what would make her a movies star was so great. The need also was so great. The intelligence was there too. She created Marilyn. She created that character, it wasn’t the movies that did it. She did it. She had much more control with a still camera than in the movies. We would discuss what we were going to do and then we would play. We used to laugh a lot. It was great.
Neither one of us knew what we were doing and that was a bond between us. Secondly, I was not a threat to her. I had six sessions with her. The shortest was two hours which was a press event, and the longest was two months on the set of “The Misfits”. Her enemy was that she couldn’t sleep, so she would take sleeping tablets. I saw an enormous change in her over the ten years that I photographed her. In that time she had gone from a beginner to a world figure and it had taken its toll. She created “Marilyn Monroe” but it was very hard on her. To my knowledge as long as she could fantasize about being a movie star she was fine. It was when the fantasy became the reality that it was hard”

 

~ Eve Arnold
(1912 - 2012)

“A nice girl knows her limits, a smart girl knows that she has none”

~ Marilyn Monroe
(1926 - 1962)

"I was doing a magazine story about the hydroelectric dam in Bratsk, which at that time was the largest in the world, but when you’re in a place you want to look around as well so I walked into this wedding palace. You can read anything you want into it. I think that if you explain pictures it’s like explaining jokes, or as a friend of mine used to say “It’s like dissecting a frog: once it’s dissected it’s dead". If it hits you, fine. If it doesn’t, that’s fine too. A picture has more than content, it has also a position, a style and so forth, so if you get something out of it, it’s good enough: if you get something beyond that, it’s even better"

 

~ Elliott Erwitt

“I’ve always known that I didn’t know what I was looking for, that the quest was more important than the prize, that was enough to keep me going”

 

~ Sarah Moon

“Life is short. Break the rules. Forgive quickly, kiss slowly. Love truly. Laugh uncontrollably and never regret anything that made you smile. The world I was trying to present was one where I would feel good, where people would be friendly, where I could find the tenderness I longed for. My photos were like a proof that such a world could exist.”

 

~ Robert Doisneau
(1912-1994)

“Every photo is my first photo. I have avoided nothing, roads, trains, plains, tiredness, departures, passions, morning light, desire for others, life. People often ask me “How did you begin?” I like to answer: “With light". I look out every morning, like a farmer, at the grey and white sky of Paris. I wake with the promise of sunshine”

~ Edouard Boubat(1923 - 1999)

“To me exotic is a subway ticket away from my home. There is no need for me to buy a round trip ticket to Japan. I photographed people not always without cruelty, certainly, but with an impassioned interest with a lucid tenderness”

~ Jean-Philippe Charbonnier
(1921-2004)

“To be a champ you have to believe in yourself when no one else will”

~ Sugar Ray Robinson
(1921-1989)

“Everywhere I look and most of the time I look, I see photographs”

~ Bert Hardy
(1913-1990)

“Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself.”

~ Martin Luther King
(1929 -1968)

"The child marchers and protesters were some of the most inspiring participants of the Civil Rights movement to me. The authorities arrested thousands of people who were demonstrating for voting rights primarily in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama. The jails were overflowing. They used a sports stadium in Selma to detain people. I realized the kids had formed a certain resolve. They’d seen their parents forced to live a certain way, and they weren’t going to do that. When I saw that, I knew change was imminent. These young students, considering the threat of violence they faced, acted very heroically. One young lady in particular stands out in my mind to this day — Quintella Harrel, a demonstrator for voter registration who was only ten. Her face had that resolve, and to me, she personified inevitable change."

~ Dan Budnick
(1933 - 2020)

“My pictures do not only belong to me”

~ Edouard Boubat
(1923-1999)

"Jacques is the most meticulous person I know. He spent 2 hours taking the old bicycle to pieces. He has the same patience with every kind of mechanism. A gag is just another piece of clockwork”

 

~ Robert Doisneau
(1912-1994)

“The images are designed so that after you see the picture 2 or 3 times, it’s no longer my film. It starts to be your film. You recognize the people, you know them and you don’t even know who directed the picture. “Play Time” is nobody.

 

~ Jacques Tati
(1907-1982)

“In this world of illusion, moments are rare. For a moment to become reality it needs to have a “before” and an “after”, it needs to be related but forgotten in order to be found again”

 

~ Sarah Moon

“Simplicity is the soul of modern elegance”

~ Bill Blass

“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)

"I was able to look through that camera and to see things that I loved. I loved my community. I love my people as I do now"
~ John Simmons

“In 1963, Mrs Kennedy came to London for a visit with her sister, Princess Lee Radziwill, who lived there. I read the daily press bulletin from Buckingham Palace and saw they were expected for lunch with the Queen. I ran from outside Princess Radziwill’s home to Buckingham Palace and took this photograph as their limousine was about to turn into the gate. Recently when I showed the photograph to a close friend of Mrs Kennedy’s he immediately said, "That was taken before 1963", And when I asked how he knew, he replied simply, “Because Jackie never smiled that way again after 1963.”

~ Harry Benson

“The children have been a wonderful gift to me and I’m thankful to have once again seen our world through their eyes. They restore my faith in the family’s future”

~ Jacqueline Kennedy

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone work so hard in my life, be so dedicated to putting on a show that the crowd would remember for the rest of their lives. It’s hard to forget an event like that, whether you were on the stage or off. It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing”

~Terry O’Neill
(1938-2019)

“John’s Saturday and Sunday appearances were indeed akin to a World Series for rock music fans. Not only is singer-composer-pianist, John, the biggest star in pop music, but his weekend concerts marked the first time a rock act had played Dodger Stadium - the city’s most prestigious and best designed outdoor athletic facility - since the Beatles in 1966. The audience response predictably was tumultuous at times”

~ Robert Hilburn, Times Pop Music Critic, Los Angeles Times, Monday October 27, 1975

“I hate ugliness, it makes me physically ill. But melancholy and compassion, these may be minor values but they’re the ones that move me most of all.”

 

~Robert Doisneau

 

(1912-1994)

“It could happen any day, anytime, any season. I am outside walking, wherever cars and people are whirling around. Fleeting thoughts vanishing through my mind, probably dealing with what I am out for, or supposed to be out for. But there is nothing I can grab, I am just there “in the turning world"

~Sarah Moon

I've never "arranged" my photographs, I've always been an observer."

~ Wolfgang Suschitzky
(1912-2016)

“The sun, which was already a little low created sharp silhouettes against the back light. I switched out the 28mm for the exact opposite, the 135 mm which would best form the image that I was hoping for and which I could already see in my head. Just as I hoped a little girl stepped on to the bridge. A single click”

~ Willy Ronis(1910-2009)

“It seemed John and Paul could compose anywhere.They would wander over to the piano, sit down and start playing, taking no notice of what was going on around them. Here in their George V Hotel suite they were composing “I Feel Fine”. George and Ringo wandered over and started to join in. It was fascinating to watch how intense they were while creating a song"

~ Harry Benson

"People like my photos because they see in them what they would see if they stopped rushing about and took the time to enjoy the city."

~ Robert Doisneau

"The wandering photographer sees the same show that everyone else sees. He, however, stops to watch it."

~ Edouard Boubat
(1923 - 1999)

“On April 4, 1968 amidst rising racial tension, Martin Luther King Jr, was shot while the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis,Tennessee. America was shocked, stunned and again pitched into the nightmare of violent death and public agony, not five years after President John F Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas. I was nearby and flew to Memphis and then on to Atlanta to cover the funeral. Arriving in advance of the plane that was carrying the body of the slain civil rights leader, I moved out of the photographers’ allotted area on the tarmac for a moment and caught one frame of his widow, Coretta Scott King and their children as they prepared to step down from the plane. Crowds lined up outside the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to quietly view the casket and pay tribute to the slain leader.”

~ Harry Benson

“Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation”

~ Coretta Scott King
(1927 - 2006)

"Laura Ashley asked me to photograph some of her summer collection in the studio. I told her they need to be photographed in the countryside because her dresses were considered “romantic”. She said “Why don’t you come and stay at my house in Wales as I’m going on holiday” So Marianne Lah who was my girlfriend and I drove to Wales. We took no hair, make up or stylist. Just the two of us. The countryside around her house was spectacular. I just had to point the camera”

~ John Swannell

“I don’t like ephemeral things. I just like things that last forever”

~ Laura Ashley

“Darling, you are in love with my camera!”

~ Georges Dambier
(1925-2011)

“I was aware that Pete Townshend might be difficult as he had a history of being impossible with the press. On the contrary, I found him to be very cooperative to the point of giving orders to everyone around him that I was to have complete access and could even go on stage during a performance”

~ Harry Benson

“I am a lucky man. I can do something with almost anything I see. Everything is still interesting to me"

~ André Kertész

“Crowds of skiers were waiting to catch a glimpse of the elegant former First Lady who was on holiday with her children. You could tell it was her from a mile away, even in a ski mask with the signature sunglasses propped on her head. You could still see her eyes - those eyes like no others”

~ Harry Benson
(b. 1929)

“It was 3.00am after a concert at the Olympia in Paris in January 1964. They had so much pent-up energy after a performance, and they really couldn’t go out because they would be mobbed. So we were sitting around talking and drinking. Their manager, Brian Epstein burst into their suite at the George V Hotel to tell them, “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was number one on the American charts, which meant they were going to America to be on The Ed Sullivan Show. That also meant I was going to America with them and I was pleased. America had always fascinated me. Ever since I was a boy in Glasgow watching James Cagney gang movies, I knew that was where I wanted to be.

They were excited about having a number -one hit in America. I had heard the Beatles talking about a pillow fight they had had a few nights before, so I suggested it. I thought it would make a good photo to celebrate. At first they said okay, but then John said, no, it would make them look silly, so that was that. Then John slipped up behind Paul and hit him over the head with a pillow, spilling his drink, and that started it."

~ Harry Benson

“A plane aims for the heavens but goes no higher while heaven continues upward, boundless like dreams, infinite like the horizon across the windows. A man with his head in the clouds dreams, free”

 

~ John Simmons

“It is absolutely clear we need to recognize the universality of human rights, the indivisibility of human rights and we need to find a new energy that motivates young people around the world.”

~ Volker Tucker (UN High Commissioner for Human Rights)

“It is in your hands to make a better world for all who live in it”

~ Nelson Mandela

“Only the photographer, himself or herself, knows the effects he or she wants. They should know by instinct, grounded in experience what subjects are enhanced by hard or soft light or by dark treatment”

~ Bill Brandt (1904 - 1983)

“I believe in deeply ordered chaos”

~ Francis Bacon, Painter (1909-1992)

“I realized that pictures are far more important than the photographers themselves. For myself I could only say the whole of the game was to remain invisible and to have the least possible impact on what was going on around me”

~ Dominique Tarlé

“To me “Exile on Main Street" was probably the best Rolling Stones album as far as the connection between the band members. We were coming up with song ideas like crazy and the ideas were catching on. Everyone was going flat out”

~Keith Richards