If it’s a likeness, alone, it’s not a success. If, through my portraits, you can come to know the subjects more meaningfully, if it synthesizes your feelings toward someone whose work has imprinted itself on your mind–if you see a photograph and say, ‘Yes, this is the person,’ with a little new insight–that is a beautiful experience.-Yousuf Karsh

It fascinates me that there is a variety of feeling about what I do. I’m not a premeditative photographer. I see a picture and I make it. If I had a chance, I’d be out shooting all the time. You don’t have to go looking for pictures. The material is generous. You go out and the pictures are staring at you.

-Lee Friedlander, “Documentary Photography – LIFE Library of Photography”

Making pictures is a very simple act. There is no great secret in photography…schools are a bunch of crap. You just need practice and application of what you’ve learned. My absolute conviction is that if you are working reasonably well the only important thing is to keep shooting…it doesn’t matter whether you are making money or not. Keep working, because as you go through the process of working things begin to happen.

-Elliott Erwitt

To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.

-Henri Cartier-Bresson

I’m not a collector at heart. I’m never tormented by the longing to possess things. I’m quite happy with my pictures. I’ve been cohabiting 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. I haven’t gone that far – not yet anyway. Lots of them behave like good little girls and give me a nice smile whenever I walk past, but others are real bitches and never miss any opportunity to ruin my life. I handle them with kid gloves.

-Robert Doisneau, “Three Seconds of Eternity” by Robert Doisneau

The element of discovery is very important. I don’t repeat myself well. I want and need that stimulus of walking forward from one new world to another. There is something demoralizing about going back to a place to retake pictures. You can no longer see your subjects in a fresh eye; you keep comparing them with the pictures you hold in your memory. [The] world was full of discoveries waiting to be made…(as a photographer) I could share the things I saw and learned…you would react to something all others might walk by.

Margaret Bourke-White, “Portrait of Myself” by Margaret Bourke-White

Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term – selectivity.

Berenice Abbott, in “Infinity” magazine, 1951.

“The name of Leonardo da Vinci will be invoked by artists to prove that only a great artist can be a great technician. The name of Leonardo da Vinci will be invoked by technicians to prove that only a great technician can be a great artist.”

Alex Gross, East Village Other (1968)

Grace Glueck, The New York Times (29 June 1984)

“The studio, a room to which the artist consigns himself for life, is naturally important, not only as workplace, but as a source of inspiration. And it usually manages, one way or another, to turn up in his product.”

Grace Glueck is an art critic for The New York Times.

Leonard Bernstein, Vogue (December 1958)

“Any great work of art … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world—the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.”

Leonard Bernstein (August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, and pianist. He was the first conductor born in the United States of America to receive world-wide acclaim, and is known for both his conducting of the New York Philharmonic, including the acclaimed Young People’s Concerts series, and his multiple compositions, including West Side Story, Candide and On The Town.

Everytime I turn the camera on these guys I’m amazed at what comes out. Makes me wonder why I ever decided to grow up. Being an adult is over rated. Here’s to hoping that some of their childish ways will rub off…

Luis Barragán, Time (12 May 1980)

“Art is made by the alone for the alone.”

Luis Barragán (Guadalajara, March 9, 1902 – Mexico City, November 22, 1988) is considered the most important Mexican architect of the 20th century.