#Animals

"Everything I've photographed exists regardless of me, my role is only to be receptive. The most important thing is the luck, behind every good image there is the good luck too”~ Pentti Sammallahti

“In my many years of photographing the landscape and prehistoric stones of Ireland, I had come to realize that the life of the place generated a quiet magic. During my photography, there was usually a herd of white deer. They were randomly roving on the grounds on an estate and so I asked permission of the owner and set myself to the task of how to photograph them. Catching them in small groups was unsatisfying but I remembered the talent of the Irish sheepdog and enlisted the help of the owner and his dog to corral a substantial number of these white beasts. I visualized the deer as being spread out before the trees of the estate and set about the choreography of the event. Some 25 or so of these deer were collected at one end of a long field and at my signal the dog was to chase them in my direction. My camera was set up so as to include on my ground glass the grass field as foreground and the trees and background with myself hidden in the tress so as not to be seen.Not knowing what to expect I signaled and to my delight and surprise one of the deer took the lead and the others followed one behind the other. In the subdued light of the day my calculated exposure required the widest lens, aperture and a slow shutter speed of I second. I did not know and could not know what impression would appear on my film but to my delight on processing the film I found a beautifully impressionist feel made by the running white deer. As to capturing something magical, I knew that to be the case when two white swans flew directly over my head and camera moments after releasing the shutter of the lens.”

 

~ Paul Caponigro

“I wait for photographs like a pointer dog. It is a question of luck and circumstance. I prefer winter, the worse the weather, the better the photograph will be."

 

~ Pentti Sammallahti

"I have entered into an unspoken, unwritten and generally inscrutable pact with the people I have photographed and lived among: if I promise not to tell all I know about them, they will do the same for me."

~ Kurt Markus
(1947-2022)

“I believe only in the rectangle. Filling that rectangle with a photograph remains the most challenging thing you can do. If you have to go outside of it, bringing in other non-photographic things to put inside, you run the risk of gimmickry. For me, the most powerful expression is the simplest.”

~ Kurt Markus

“A great picture, no matter the medium used, has that wonderful power to draw you back, time and again, to pause and look upon it. There must be something chemical going on in the brain when you gaze upon a great work of art. It feels good and its addicting”

 

~ Laszlo Layton

“I can do things here artistically that I couldn't do anywhere else."

~ Gregori Maiofis

“In GENESIS, my camera allowed nature to speak to me. And it was my privilege to listen.”

~ Sebastião Salgado

“I always had a strange feeling about how we order time into the past, present and future, as I never really felt that way. Sometimes, for example, one week can seem shorter than five minutes. When I started to photograph, when I was 19 years old, I felt then that I was playing with time. I was not sure what to do with this idea until much later in life, when I read the science-fiction novel, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.”

~ Miho Kajioka

“Every movement in the arm of the iguana is the same that we have in our arm – I identify with the iguana as my cousin. All of us came from the same cells. In a moment it was possible to be an iguana and the iguana to be me.”

~ Sebastião Salgado

“The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better."

~ Robert Francis Kennedy
(1925 - 1968)

"I think that light and shadow have exactly the same duality that exists between life and death."

 

~ Manuel Alvarez Bravo
(1902-2002)

"If there are no dogs in heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went."

 

~ Will Rogers

”As I continued to photograph I became quite joyous. I knew that I could express the things I wanted to say by giving them form through my eyes”

~ Inge Morath
(1923 - 2002)

"In GENESIS, my camera allowed nature to speak to me. And it was my privilege to listen."

~ Sebastião Salgado

"A picture can express a universal humanism, or simply reveal a delicate and poignant truth by exposing a slice of life that might otherwise pass unnoticed."

~ Steve McCurry

"Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
As the images unwind, like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind!"

~ from 'The Windmills of your Mind' (1968)
First recorded by Noel Harrison
Lyrics written by Alan & Marilyn Bergman
with music composed by Michel Legrand

“Dogs have more to do than children. For one thing, they are focused to lead a life that is really schizoid. Every minute, they have to be on two planes at once, juggling the dog world against the human world. And they’re always on call. Their owners want instant affection everyday, any time of day. A dog can never say that he has other things to do. He can never have a headache, like a wife.”

 

~ Elliott Erwitt

“I remember how I loved to walk through the fair as a little kid and look at all these rare birds that I knew I would never see alive. Years and years had passed since I thought about those birds, and I really wanted to photograph them.”

~ Laszlo Layton