Edward Hopper - Painter

 

Why I select certain subjects and not others I do not exactly know, unless it is that I believe them to be the best mediums for a synthesis of my inner experience.

 

                              

                           Dorothea Lange - Documentary Photographer

 

 

To know ahead of time what you're looking for means you're only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting.

 

 

                                             

                           Walker Evans - Documentary Photographer                     

                       

I have a theory that seems to work with me that some of the best things you ever do sort of come through you. You don't know where you get the impetus and response to what is before your eyes.

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                       Henri Cartier - Bresson -  Documentary Photographer

 

That book of Herrigel's (Zen in the Art of Archery), which I discovered many years ago, seems to me to be the basis of our craft of photography. Matisse wrote similarly about drawing ---- that it was the practicing of a discipline, imposing a rigorousness on oneself and thereby forgetting oneself completely. In photography, the attitude should be the same. My sense of freedom is like this: a regimen that allows for infinite variations. This is the basis of Zen Buddhism.                        

 

 

                           Charles Pierre Baudelaire - Philosopher 

                                                 

What is the human brain if not an immense and natural palimpsest? My brain is a palimpsest*, as is yours, reader. Innumeral layers of ideas, images and feelings have successively built up in your brain, as softly as light. It may seem that each new layer buries the one beneath it. But in reality none of them are lost. However incoherent existence may be, human unity is not disrupted. All the echoes of your memory, if awakened at the same time, make a concert, pleasant or painful, but logical and without dissonances.

 

*Palimpsest: something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.

 

 

                                    Bruce Lee - Martial Artist                                            

 

Don’t get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water... be formless, shapeless , like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot... be water, my friend.

 

                                       Socrates - Philosopher 

 

"A thing is not seen because it is visible, but conversely, visible because it is seen."   

                            

                            Ruth Bernhard - Fine Art Photographer

 

I never look for a photograph. The photograph finds me and says, "I'm here!" and I say, "Yes, I see you. I hear you."

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                      Manuel Alvarez Bravo - Fine Art Photographer

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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 led my life and not just in photography.

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                                        Walt Whitman - Poet

 

I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the world ...

I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities, insects, vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds, rejected refuse than I have supposed ...

 

 

                                Saul Leiter - Street Photographer

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It's quite possible that my work represents a search for beauty in the most prosaic and ordinary places. One doesn't have to be in some far away dreamland in order to find beauty. ​

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                                Paul Graham - Photographer

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If you are a photographer who works with life, then you have to put yourself into the territory where the imagery and your thoughts might coalesce, because you need the vital lesson that the first key image provides. Not the first image, but the first key image, the one that unlocks the door. The one you stumble over. It might surprise you by coming in from left field, taking things in a completely different direction, but that's the beauty of working with the world, with the moments that time hurls your way. It's a collaborative dance between the artist and life itself, so embrace the partnership. Often the world's complexity is far more interesting than your concepts. If you can have the humility to admit that, you'll do well.