#Childhood

“So you arrive in a place that seems good, where things are composed harmoniously in the space. Then you wait. Waiting with irrational crazy hope. Then people come into the frame and “click” you take the picture"

 

~ Robert Doisneau
(1912-1994)

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“My Credo, my way of life, my very being is based on images capable of engraving themselves indelibly in our inner soul’s eye. Also, through my personal vision, to reveal what cannot be readily seen, to capture what is most meaningful, to enrich our appreciation of life. It is to explore and celebrate the human condition and the world around us, nature and man together, to find significance in suffering and all that is profound, beautiful and nourishes the soul. Above all, I believe in creative work through struggle to increase human wisdom and happiness”~ Louis Stettner(1922 - 2016)

“My Credo, my way of life, my very being is based on images capable of engraving themselves indelibly in our inner soul’s eye. Also, through my personal vision, to reveal what cannot be readily seen, to capture what is most meaningful, to enrich our appreciation of life. It is to explore and celebrate the human condition and the world around us, nature and man together, to find significance in suffering and all that is profound, beautiful and nourishes the soul. Above all, I believe in creative work through struggle to increase human wisdom and happiness”

 

~ Louis Stettner
(1922-2016)

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“I was very sensitive to poverty, to children and people in need. I probably had a more compassionate way of looking at things”

 

~ Sabine Weiss
(1924-2021)

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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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“One must always take photos with the greatest respect for the subject and for oneself”

~ Henri Cartier Bresson

“He was the Tolstoy of Photography with profound humanity. He was the witness of the 20th Century”

~ Richard Avedon

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“I like the streets. I grew up in the streets”

~ William Klein
(1928-2022)

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“Life is once, forever"

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908 - 2004)

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“It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us”

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908 - 2004)

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“If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die, I want to go where they went.”

 

~ Will Rogers

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“A photograph fulfills my deep need to stop things from disappearing”

 

~ Dorothy Bohm
1924 - 2023

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"Key Largo, is one of the earliest images in the project. At that time, I was still photographing speculatively, without any preconceived agenda. Having moved to Miami earlier that year, it all seemed wild and exotic. The first hurricane warnings appeared in the summer. On a weekend getaway to the Keys, I took this photograph of my son climbing on a branch over the ocean. I think of this image as an allegory, both idyllic and uncertain about the future of our children in this changing climate. It appears that solving the crisis will fall largely on them."

 

~ Anastasia Samoylova

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“Seeing is not enough. You have to feel what you photograph”

~ Andre Kertész

“It is a wise father that knows his own child.”

~ William Shakespeare

We were traveling along the Redwood Highway trying to find a place to have a picnic. The road was so littered with cans and rubbish that we rode for miles and couldn’t find a place. Finally, we just went off and had our lunch amid the litter. When it was over, I wandered off the highway about 150 feet and saw this incredible scene. It was an ancient virginal forest. Barbara [my daughter] was with us. She was a young virginal child. I knew the qualities of her body would both contrast and harmonize beautifully with the qualities of the dead logs and living plants of the forest. The cyclic character of natural forces would be clearly evident.The light was just right, everything was spatially balanced; the relationships between events – the young child, the new forest covering, the prehistoric trees, the rotting logs – were strong and exciting. Everything went together perfectly. I didn’t have to analyze anything. I just recognized what was in front of me. All I had to do was set up and take the picture.

~ Wynn Bullock

"If there's one theme that connects all my work, I think it's that of landlessness; how land makes people into who they are and what happens to them when they lose it and thus lose their identities"

 

~ Larry Towell

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“Looking back upon those early years in Paris I realize that not only was the city a great inspiration but also that the Parisians gave me the reassurance that I was doing something important. There was an innate respect for artists - for what we were doing and for having the courage to take the hard road. Yet it was a joyous route, such magnificent sights and human splendor along the way that difficulties magically effaced themselves. One regretted nothing and would have it no other way”

 

~ Louis Stettner
(1922-2016)

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“Something catches your eye or your interest. You attack it in one way or observe it in some way and try and put it in some kind of form and take a picture. It’s as simple as that”

 

~ Elliott Erwitt
(1928 - 2023)

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“A good photograph becomes something more than just a good photograph. It has meaning and value that extends beyond the medium itself. Something spiritual that reveals something about life”

 

~ Louis Stettner
(1922-2016)

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Due to popular demand Jeffrey Conley's exhibition, An Ode to Nature and Steve McCurry's The Endless Traveler have been extended until Saturday May 4th, 2024. Don't miss this opportunity to experience two amazing shows at our Santa Monica gallery. We look forward to your visit.

“The League taught me that no matter how original and talented the photographers vision might berth, ultimate success of the photograph was mutually dependent on the photographer and the world of reality around him or her. Not to ignore, but on the contrary to concentrate his or her talents on everyday working people and what was immediately around them in terms of living and environment”

 

~ Louis Stettner
(1922-2016)

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"There’s a contemplative or meditative quality to photography, which I find to be a sort of peaceful state. When I’m walking around photographing, I get into a particular mindset where I become much more attuned to the world around me."

 

~ Steve McCurry

“It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us”

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908 - 2004)

“I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty. I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth. I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives. I am a woman and I wanted to know about women”

 

~ Eve Arnold
(1912-2012)

“For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to give a meaning to the world, one has to feel involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, discipline of mind, sensitivity and a sense of geometry. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression"

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908 - 2004)

"I chose the camera as a tool to document different aspects of life: who we are, what we do, how we live, what our communities look like."

 

~ Earlie Hudnall (Jr.)

"For me the camera is a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to give a meaning to the world, one has to feel involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, discipline of mind, sensitivity and a sense of geometry. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression"

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908-2004)

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“I never had a “project”. I would go out and shoot, follow my eyes-- what they noticed. I tried to capture with my camera for others to see”

 

~ Helen Levitt (1913-2009)

“Most important was the outdoor studio that was Paris. I would take long daily walks with my camera, leaving myself open to what ever happened around me. Sometimes I am asked why I did it. There was no economic basis and the possibility of recognition was slight. I suppose I was drawn by a great need and love to get close to the world around me. Each photograph was a way of reaching out and an act of discovery”

 

~ Louis Stettner (1922-2006)

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“I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us”

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908-2004)

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“Photography is nothing. It’s life that interests me"

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

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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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"A good picture knows how to communicate the emotion that created it."

 

~ Willy Ronis
( 1910 - 2009 )

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"They were getting ready for their annual Village Fete and the lady was calling a friend to get the recipe for some tarts to bake. Her little girl had been in a phone box and found out that if you pressed Button B then sometimes money came out (Do you remember the old UK phone boxes?). The Mother therefore told the child that she had to face outwards and keep her hands off the buttons. I heard this story more than 50 years later when I showed the pictures in Pembridge Village Hall and I met the former child. This picture was on the cover of the Sunday Times issue”

 

~ John Bulmer

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“There’s a time for photographs that say “hello”. And there’s a time to listen”

 

~ Elliott Erwitt
(1928-2023)

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“If I take a picture I have to account for it. I have opened something to someone’s reality”

 

~ Bruce Davidson 

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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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"Get a book of great photographs and spend a week studying each shot. Every day, think about a different aspect: subject, composition, tonal range, the moment when the image was taken and how the photograph was made."

 

~ Pentti Sammallahti

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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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"...Jacques Lowe was monumentally self-effacing. This, I believe, is why his camera caught so much human truth. There are no orchestrated 'photo-opportunities here..."

 

~ Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
American Historian and Social Critic
(1917 - 2007)

"I don’t always know why I’m photographing something. It’s my learning machine."

~ Bruce Davidson

"I often think of my work as visual haiku. It is an attempt to evoke and suggest through as few elements as possible rather than to describe with tremendous detail."

~ Michael Kenna

"I spent the day at a wedding with this family in Sana'a, Yemen. As the father and uncle left late in the afternoon, the boy seemed tired and bored. It reminded me what it was like to go to adult events when I was young, and longing to be out playing. It's a tradition in Yemen for men to wear a Jambiya, a curved dagger, around their waist. It is typically given to sons by their fathers."

~ Steve McCurry

“The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better."

~ Robert Francis Kennedy
(1925 - 1968)

“I had no brief, no agenda at all. They just let me loose. I was free to encounter life. There was a certain sense of grayness everywhere. That’s why these pictures are delicate and I was delicate too”

~ Bruce Davidson

“When I press the shutter, everything I've ever done, ever smiled about, cried about, or loved shapes how I see. Nothing is more important than that moment; it's what makes me see a picture."

~ John Simmons

"If there are no dogs in heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went."

 

~ Will Rogers

“Someday you will know that a father is much happier in his children’s happiness than in his own. I cannot explain it to you: it is a feeling in your body that spreads gladness through you.”

~ Honore de Balzac
(Le Père Goriot, 1835)

“I did know that fundamental changes were taking place… and nobody seemed to be interested in recording the faces of the people or anything in their lives"

 

~ Shirley Baker

"I am not ashamed to say that no man I ever met was my father's equal, and I never loved any other man as much."

 

~ Hedy Lamarr

“I’m quite happy with my pictures. I’ve been co-habitant with them for years now and we know each other inside out. So I feel I’m entitled to say that pictures have a life and a character of their own. Maybe they’re like plants, they won’t really flourish unless you talk to them"

~ Robert Doisneau
(1912-1994)

"Mother's love, that divine gift which comforts, purifies, and strengthens all who seek it."

~ Louisa May Alcott

“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

“My work begins with recording an image, but it is not finished until I have made a fine print. That is my photograph. A lot goes into a finished documentary photograph, a very personal view of life, a knowledge of technique and of course, information. It is the information that gets the viewer, but it is the photographer’s art that holds them."

~ George Zimbel

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

~ Edouard Boubat

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

~ Robert Doisneau
1912-1994

“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

“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)

“You cannot live when you are untouchable. Life is vulnerability”

~ Edouard Boubat
(1923 - 1999)

“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)

“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)

“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)

"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)

“I had set up near a bakery at peak hour and after a few attempts, I was not sure I had the right image. Then I noticed a boy seriously counting his pennies while waiting for his turn and I explained to him what I needed from him. Exit the bakery in a hurry with the loaf held tilted under his left arm. The first attempt was too tense, the second was perfect. We went back into the bakery to eat a chocolate treat together"

~ Willy Ronis

“250 grams of magic and perfection in our daily lives. A French way of life. We had been fighting for years with bakers and the world of gastronomy for its recognition. The baguette is now a Unesco intangible heritage.”

~ Emmanuel Macron (President of France)

“The world has been always made of many different layers – even before the disaster. And there have been always problems, and beautiful things have always remained beautiful…”

~ Miho Kajioka

“The camera is an unsophisticated mechanical instrument which, like a mirror, reflects passively without a conscience. The artist must supply the conscience.”

~ Ralph Eugene Meatyard
(1925-1972)

“I think that a photograph to be strong has to recount some aspect of the human condition, enable us to feel the emotion that the photographer felt before her subject”

 

~ Sabine Weiss