“Photography is not a sport. It has no rules. Everything must be dared and tried.”

- Bill Brandt

“I am neither an economist nor a phototgrapher of monuments, and I am not much of a journalist either. What I am trying to do more than anything else is to observe life.”

- Henri Cartier-Bresson

“The thing itself need only exist for one two-fiftieth of a second, the time it takes to take a photograph. It is the photograph which need have the duration since it is the photograph which is printed in newspapers and magazines, sent through the post, broadcast through the air, projected onto walls––not the event itself.”

-Anonymous

Some people’s photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already.

-Helmut Newton


“If it is practiced by a man of taste, the photograph will have the appearance of art (but) the photographer must… intervene as little as possible, so as not to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses. Photography should register and give us documents.”

-Henri Matisse

“I think you reveal yourself by what you choose to photograph, but I prefer photographs that tell more about the subject. There’s nothing much interesting to tell about me; what’s interesting is the person I’m photographing, and that’s what I try to show. … I think each photographer has a point of view and a way of looking at the world… that has to do with your subject matter and how you choose to present it. What’s interesting is letting people tell you about themselves in the picture. ”

-Mary Ellen Mark

If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it’s as though I’ve neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up.

-Robert Mapplethorpe


“A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist”

- Louis Nizer

Of what use are lens and light to those who lack in mind and sight?

-Anonymous

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

-Dorothea Lange