#Street

"I think that what you've got to do is discover the essential truth of the situation, and have a point of view about it."

~ Burt Glinn

“It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us”

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908 - 2004)

“There is an orchestra outside my window”

 

~ Cig Harvey

"...Jacques Lowe was monumentally self-effacing. This, I believe, is why his camera caught so much human truth. There are no orchestrated 'photo-opportunities here..."

 

~ Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
American Historian and Social Critic
(1917 - 2007)

“Everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations, so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings....to capture some of this - I suppose that’s lyricism.”

~ Josef Sudek

"I don’t always know why I’m photographing something. It’s my learning machine."

~ Bruce Davidson

"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving."

 

~ Albert Einstein
(1879-1955)

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

 

~ Manuel Alvarez Bravo
(1902-2002)

"I take the rather unpopular view - among photographers - that words and pictures need one another."

~ Thurston Hopkins

“In winter, the elegant ladies wore fur coats that were fitted and cut in such a unique manner, that one could immediately recognize each designer's signature. In the summer, printed dresses made of Lyon silk, combined in rare color harmonies, impeccably made-up faces, protected by flowery capelines illuminated the grey-blue city after sunset. Fragrance trails accompanied these beautiful passers-by. Chanel's N°5 or Guerlain's Chant d'Arômes. To decipher and to recognize them was a magical feeling. The proportions, the balance, the refinement, the purity of the lines of the French creations embodied a rare harmony.”

~ Janine Niépce
(1921 – 2007)

“I am a photographer. I’m not an artist. I’m just a witness of what I see.”

~ Gianni Berengo Gardin

“I did know that fundamental changes were taking place… and nobody seemed to be interested in recording the faces of the people or anything in their lives"

 

~ Shirley Baker

“I’m quite happy with my pictures. I’ve been co-habitant 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"

~ Robert Doisneau
(1912-1994)

“The moment always dictates in my work. Everybody can look, but they don’t necessarily see. I see a situation and I know that it’s right”

~ André Kertész
(1894-1985)

"It’s up to us, as mothers and mother-figures, to give the girls in our lives the kind of support that keeps their flame lit and lifts up their voices — not necessarily with our own words, but by letting them find the words themselves.”

~ Michelle Obama
(Former First Lady of the United States)

“I photographed real life - not the way it was, but the way I felt it. That is the most important thing, not analyzing but feeling”

 

~ André Kertész
(1894-1985)

“Be sure to take the lens cap off before photographing”

~ Elliott Erwitt

"I’m interested primarily in people, and human behavior – how people relate to each other and their environment."

 

~ Steve McCurry

“A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos”

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

“The ideal picture tells something of the essence of life. It sums up emotion, it holds the feeling of movement thereby implying the continuity of life. It shows some aspect of humanity, the way that the person who looks at the picture will at once recognize as startlingly true”

 

~ Bert Hardy

“There’s nowhere else like London. Nothing at all, anywhere.”

~ Dame Vivienne Westwood
(1941–2022)

“But oh, San Francisco! It is and has everything. The wonderful sunlight there, the hills, the great bridges, the Pacific at your shoes. Beautiful Chinatown .. Every race in the world. The sardine fleets sailing out. The little cable cars whizzing down the city hills”

~ Dylan Thomas
(Poet, Writer)
1914 - 1953

“The world makes up my pictures not me"

~ Lee Friedlander

“In the past decade a new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach towards more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life, but to know it. Their work betrays a sympathy - a trust, an affection - for the imperfections and frailties of society. They like the real world in spite of it’s terrors as the source of all wonder and fascination and value-no less precious for being irrational ."

~ John Szarkowski

“I saw the small old woman coming towards us down the sidewalk. I was intrigued and wanted to catch her passing Neil. The mistake to me was that I had in my haste focused the lens just past the two figures closer to the fence than to Neil’s face.That was the original reason why I made a small sized print and solarized it to help with the apparent sharpness.. But the solarization in this case added a somewhat spooky dimension to the image, which Neil took to immediately”

~ Joel Bernstein

“When you’re young, you don’t have any experience-you are charged up but you’re out of control. And if you’re old and you’re not charged up, then all you have are memories. But if you’re charged and stimulated by what’s going on around you and you also have experience, you know what to appreciate and what to pass by”

~ Neil Young

“You don’t take a photo, the photo gives itself to you”

 

~ Pentti Sammallahti

“Always carry a camera, it's tough to shoot a picture without one”

~ Jay Maisel

“Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure. If a man or a woman wishes to express themselves photographically, they must understand surely to a certain extent, their relationship to life. I am interested in relating the problems that affect me to some set of values that I am trying to discover and establish as being my life. I want to discover them through photography”

~ Harry Callahan

“If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.”

 

~ Eve Arnold

“The eternal is a moment that breathes and contains life, the span of one breath”

~ Edouard Boubat

“I always felt the difference between New York and Paris is that Paris nourishes you by the fact that it is very beautiful.You see living history all around you. The whole flavor of the place is one of harmony and beauty. It raises the human spirit"

 

~ Louis Stettner

“There are days when the technique of an aimless stroll or destination works like a charm, flushing out pictures from the non stop urban spectacle"

 

~ Robert Doisneau

“New York is a city I love, a city that forgives nothing but accepts everyone - a place of a thousand varied moods and visions, of countless faces in a moving crowd, each one silently talking to you”

 

~ Louis Stettner

“Brassai showed me that it was possible to find something significant in photographing subjects in everyday life doing ordinary things by interpreting them in your own way and with your own personal vision"

 

~ Louis Stettner

“In life’s saddest winter moments, when you’ve been under a cloud for weeks, suddenly a glimpse of something wonderful can change the whole complexion of things, your entire feeling.The kind of photography I like to do, capturing the moment, it is very much like that break in the clouds. In a flash, a wonderful picture seems to come out of nowhere”

 

~ Elliott Erwitt

“There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.”

~ Simone de Beauvoir

“We are all living letters. All our troubles, our problems and our joys are written inside us. We are living photographs. Photography reveals the images hidden within us”

~ Edouard Boubat
(1923 - 1999)

“Photography is not documentation but intuition, a poetic experience. It’s drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, then sniff, sniff, sniff- being sensitive to coincidence. You can’t go looking for it: you can’t want it or you won’t get it. First you must lose yourself. Then it happens"

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
1908-2004

I've never "arranged" my photographs, I've always been an observer."

~ Wolfgang Suschitzky
(1912-2016)

"People like my photos because they see in them what they would see if they stopped rushing about and took the time to enjoy the city."

~ Robert Doisneau

“Across the narrow Rue Lepic from the Moulin de La Galette, up eight flights of stairs under the thin roof of a Montmartre studio garret lived an old widow. She was the wife of Leon Fauche, an impressionist painter who was a close friend of Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir. Her husband died leaving her with a small military pension and 60 paintings. Montmartre changed but the widow stayed on. Each day she would go down to the streets crowded with tourists seeking the past and buy flowers to place under her husband’s self portrait. Then at twilight, as the weakening evening rays made a shadowy symbol of a long dead Paris through her studio window of the Moulin de la Galette, she was absorbed into darkness with her memories”

 

~ Esquire Magazine, October 1958

“All my photographs are portraits, self portraits because you can’t photograph someone without reflecting/echoing, like a bat sending out a signal that comes back to you. You get not only a picture of who you are photographing but you get a picture of yourself at the same time”

 

~ Bruce Davidson

“Everybody can look but they don’t necessarily see”

 

~ André Kertész (1894-1985)

“My way of life, my very being is based on images capable of engraving themselves indelibly in our inner soul’s eye.”

~ Louis Stettner (1922 -2016)

"For me photographs are taken in the eye before you've even thought what they mean. That's the reality I'm interested in capturing"

~ Daido Moriyama

"He is a magician with the camera, the camera being his magic eye."

~David Blochwitz