The ground we walk on, the plants and creatures, the clouds above constantly dissolving into new formations – each gift of nature possessing its own radiant energy, bound together by cosmic harmony.
Ruth Bernhard
I never question what to do, it tells me what to do. The photographs make themselves with my help.
Ruth Bernhard
Mrs Woolf’s complaint should be addressed to her creator, who made her, rather than me.
Cecil Beaton
What is elegance? Soap and water!
Cecil Beaton
Americans have an abiding belief in their ability to control reality by purely material means… airline insurance replaces the fear of death with the comforting prospect of cash.
Cecil Beaton
Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
Cecil Beaton
I can’t afford a whole new set of enemies.
Cecil Beaton
All I want is the best of everything and there’s very little of that left.
Cecil Beaton
I have the worst ear for criticism; even when I have created a stage set I like, I always hear the woman in the back of the dress circle who says she doesn’t like blue.
Cecil Beaton
More varied than any landscape was the landscape in the sky, with islands of gold and silver, peninsulas of apricot and rose against a background of many shades of turquoise and azure.
Cecil Beaton
Never in the history of fashion has so little material been raised so high to reveal so much that needs to be covered so badly.
Cecil Beaton
On close inspection, this device turned out to be a funereal juke box – the result of mixing Lloyd’s of London with the principle of the chewing gum dispenser.
Cecil Beaton
Perhaps the world’s second-worst crime is boredom; the first is being a bore.
Cecil Beaton
San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities.
Cecil Beaton
Every man who is high up loves to think that he has done it all himself; and the wife smiles, and lets it go at that.
David Bailey
I never cared for fashion much, amusing little seams and witty little pleats: it was the girls I liked.
David Bailey
A positive attitude can really make dreams come true – it did for me.
David Bailey
It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.
David Bailey
People want security in this insecure world.
David Bailey
Rockers are the nicest people to photograph. They have no inhibitions.
David Bailey
When I die I want to go to Vogue.
David Bailey
All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they’re about dead people. Paintings you don’t think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I’m looking at something dead.
David Bailey
You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.
Diane Arbus
My favourite thing is to go where I’ve never been.
Diane Arbus
Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.
Diane Arbus
Regardless of how you feel inside, always try to look like a winner. Even if you are behind, a sustained look of control and confidence can give you a mental edge that results in victory.
Diane Arbus
The more specific you are, the more general it’ll be.
Diane Arbus
The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way.
Diane Arbus
I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.
Diane Arbus
Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.
Diane Arbus
Men are but children of a larger growth, Our appetites as apt to change as theirs, And full as craving too, and full as vain.
Diane Arbus
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
Diane Arbus
I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do – that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.
Diane Arbus
Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.
Diane Arbus
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
Diane Arbus
When you grow up your mother says, ‘Wear rubbers or you’ll catch cold.’ When you become an adult you discover that you have the right not to wear rubbers and to see if you catch cold or not. It’s something like that.
Diane Arbus
Words and pictures can work together to communicate more powerfully than either alone.
William Albert Allard
You’ve got to push yourself harder. You’ve got to start looking for pictures nobody else could take. You’ve got to take the tools you have and probe deeper.
William Albert Allard
What’s really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer.
William Albert Allard
In my photography, color and composition are inseparable. I see in color.
William Albert Allard
What is right? Simply put, it is any assignment in which the photographer has a significant spiritual stake… spiritually driven work constitutes the core of a photographer’s contribution to culture.
William Albert Allard
All I need is my brains, my eyes and my personality, for better or for worse.
William Albert Allard
I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don’t find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges.
William Albert Allard
I wish more people felt that photography was an adventure the same as life itself and felt that their individual feelings were worth expressing. To me, that makes photography more exciting.
Harry Callahan
Experience is the best teacher of all. And for that, there are no guarantees that one will become an artist. Only the journey matters.
Harry Callahan
There are certain things you don’t discuss with Ansel, especially if you don’t agree.
Imogen Cunningham
Well, I turn people into human beings by not making them into gods.
Imogen Cunningham
Anybody is influenced by where and how he lives.
Imogen Cunningham
I’d never kill myself for a man. I wouldn’t do it for anybody.
Imogen Cunningham
When you do portraits professionally it’s not a desire, it’s for money.
Imogen Cunningham
It’s silly to keep people alive who have a terrible disease.
Imogen Cunningham
My mind is vacant on names, but I know him as well as anything. When I need names they drop out of my head; when I don’t need them they drop back.
Imogen Cunningham
Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don’t know.
Imogen Cunningham
Some people say to me, Isn’t it too bad that people discovered you so late? I never thought that.
Imogen Cunningham
When People magazine called me, I did the job on Ansel. I’m older than Ansel and he has to mind me.
Imogen Cunningham
You see, I became kind of a drop-out in science after I came back to America.
Imogen Cunningham
A woman said to me when she first sat down, You’re photographing the wrong side of my face. I said, Oh, is there one?
Imogen Cunningham
Everybody who does anything for the public can be criticized. There’s always someone who doesn’t like it.
Imogen Cunningham
Get it out of your historic head.
Imogen Cunningham
I told the students that whatever they did in class was for the wastebasket.
Imogen Cunningham
Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.
Ansel Adams
I tried to keep both arts alive, but the camera won. I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!
Ansel Adams
Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.
Ansel Adams
The negative is comparable to the composer’s score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.
Ansel Adams
We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium.
Ansel Adams
In my mind’s eye, I visualize how a particular… sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.
Ansel Adams
These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago… I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me.
Ansel Adams
It is my intention to present – through the medium of photography – intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.
Ansel Adams
Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer – and often the supreme disappointment.
Ansel Adams
There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.
Ansel Adams
Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.
Ansel Adams
Millions of men have lived to fight, build palaces and boundaries, shape destinies and societies; but the compelling force of all times has been the force of originality and creation profoundly affecting the roots of human spirit.
Ansel Adams
Myths and creeds are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth in the world.
Ansel Adams
No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.
Ansel Adams
You don’t take a photograph, you make it.
Ansel Adams
A good photograph is knowing where to stand.
Ansel Adams
Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.
Ansel Adams
Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.
Ansel Adams
To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things.
Ansel Adams
Some photographers take reality… and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.
Ansel Adams
When I’m ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.
Ansel Adams
Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.
Ansel Adams
A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.
Ansel Adams
Television probably has become the most evocative, widely observed signpost we have.
Robert Adams
No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.
Robert Adams
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
Berenice Abbott
There are many teachers who could ruin you. Before you know it you could be a pale copy of this teacher or that teacher. You have to evolve on your own.
Berenice Abbott
I didn’t decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.
Berenice Abbott
Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.
Berenice Abbott
The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective.
Berenice Abbott
Photography helps people to see.
Berenice Abbott
The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.
Berenice Abbott
Does not the very word ‘creative’ mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act – rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life – not death.
Berenice Abbott
December 20th, 2011 
