“The basic material of photographs is not intrinsically beautiful. It’s not like ivory or tapestry or bronze or oil on canvas. You’re not supposed to look at the thing, you‚Äôre supposed to look through it. It’s a window.”

“A camera has interesting ideas of its own.”

“Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere…”

“In the past decade a new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life, but to know it.”

“One might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. It must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others. … The talented practitioner of the new discipline would perform with a special grace, sense of timing, narrative sweep, and wit, thus endowing the act not merely with intelligence, but with that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art, so that we would be uncertain, when remembering the adventure of the tour, how much our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from a pattern created by the pointer.”

“Luck is the attentive photographer’s best teacher.”

“In practice a photographer does not concern himself with philosophical issues while working; he makes photographs, working with subject matter that he thinks will make the pictures.”

“Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one’s cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.”

“They were … pure and unadulterated photographs, and sometimes they hinted at the existence of visual truths that had escaped all other systems of detection.”

John Szarkowski
(1925-2007)

Special thanks to FocalPower for making these quotes available.