DAILY BLOG

“A fine image is geometry, modulated by the heart.” 
~ Willy Ronis
(1910-2009)

“My mother told me to be a lady. 
And for her that meant be your own person, be independent.

I do think I was born under a very bright star. Because if you think about my life, I get out of law school. I have top grades. No law firm in the city of New York will hire me. I end up teaching. It gave me time to devote to the movement for balancing out the rights of women and men."

~ Ruth Bader Ginsberg 
(1933-2020)

“In photography, we don’t capture time, we evoke it. It flows like fine sand, endless. We don’t take a photograph, we “see” it, then we share it with others. I practice photography to be on one level with the world and what is happening”

~ Bernard Plossu

“In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotive.”

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908-2004)

“I give the moment permanence."

~ Manuel Alvarez Bravo
(1902-2002)

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

~ André Kertész  
(1894-1985)

“Music chose me but photography needed me. The Gods of music on the mountain on the Right were called upon by the mountain of photography as art on the Left.They said “We are so young and know so little can you please give us something from your realm, somebody to come to invest our photography with the power of music?” So I became a photographer. The Gods of music sent me over. In both cases I was chosen by music in order to put it into photography.”

~ Paul Caponigro 
(1932-2024)

“My father was Venetian from St Mark’s Square, my wife is Venetian, my children are Venetian. Although I was not born there, I have always considered myself an adopted Venetian.”

~ Gianni Berengo Gardin
(1930-2025)

“Making people laugh is one of the highest achievements you can have and when you can make someone laugh and cry, alternatively as Charlie Chapin does, now that’s the highest of all possible achievements.”

~ Elliott Erwitt 
(1928-2023)

“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. Sometimes when you are in the right place in the right moment, you’ll feel that the image is a gift and even that doesn’t matter who is behind the camera."

~ Pentti Sammallahti

“We’ve got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can’t just accept it and leave it in a cupboard or just think it is going to get on by itself. You’ve got to keep watering it. You’ve got to really look after it and nurture it.”

~ John Lennon 
(1940-1980)

“I’m a devoted and fiercely loyal New Yorker."

~ Brian Hamill

“A good photojournalist goes into any situation prepared to find out something, at least one key thing, about the topic you’re going to cover and just as importantly you make friends. You make friends with everybody wherever you go because you never know who you’ll need to go back there for one more picture or to follow up on a story.”

~ Ralph Morse
(1917-2013)  

‘“If LIFE could afford only one photographer, it would have to be Ralph Morse.” 
~ George Hunt, Former managing editor LIFE

“Only time will reveal the value of creative photography.If they have significance they will grow more alive and important with the years.The passing of time will reveal new hidden aspects in the photographs”

~ Louis Stettner
(1922-2016)

“The passage of half a century of photographing. people both for myself and for clients, has given me the inevitable opportunity of being an observer and recorder of a cross section of the history of our times, politics. , music, architecture, psychology and the arts “

~ Arnold Newman
(1918-2006)

“I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we too will be remembered not for the victories or defeats in battle or in politics but for our contribution to the human spirit.”

~ John Fitzgerald Kennedy
(1917-1963)

“I like high shots. If you are on the same level you lose many things.”

~ Andre Kertész
(1894-1985)

“To photograph is to express gratitude."

~ Edoaurd Boubat 
(1923-1999)

“I feel I am getting more myself in the sense of I have all my forces. I hope so anyhow. I have this sort of feeling that I am all there now and you know it’s not even thinking in terms of one’s limitations because they have to come naturally. I think whatever you have, you can do wonders with it if you accept them."

~ Willem de Kooning
(1904-1997)

“I wanted to transform the images from something that came from inside me.”

~ Lillian Bassman
(1917-2012)

“That day to avoid the crowds, Godard shot from up high on the fifth floor of a building. You could just make out this minuscule couple parting with a chaste kiss in front of a newspaper stand. I went down afterwards and said I wanted to do a close up of a kiss because it summed up their characters so well. They obliged, the kiss lasted five seconds.”

~ Raymond Cauchetier 
(1920-2021)

“Traditions are not killed by facts.”
~ George Orwell. 
(1903-1950)

“The Road to Wigan Pier”

“I take photographs to hold on to the ephemeral, capture chance, keep an image of something that will disappear, gestures, attitudes, objects that are reminders of our brief lives. The camera picks them up and freezes them at the very moment that they disappear." ~ Sabine Weiss (1924-2021)

“This is at the Grand Hotel in St Moritz in Switzerland- those are the Engadine Mountains in the background -and this is the headwaiter Rene Breguet. He is showing how to bring a bottle of whiskey at great speed. He could even jump over a chair and keep his tray steady. He was a great skater, that man.
All the waiters wore black tie and tails. I went back in 1947 but the Grand Hotel had burned down and was never re built. The old glitter was gone.”

~ Alfred Eisenstaedt
(1898-1995)

“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

“Yosemite Park… None can escape its charms. Its natural beauty cleans and warms like a fire, and you will be willing to stay forever in one place like a tree.”

~ John Muir
(1838-1914)

“I had to be brave. There was no other way.”

~ Dorothy Bohm
(1924-2023)

“In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines
Sprung from cages on Highway 9
Chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected
And steppin’ out over the line
Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we’re young
‘Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run"

~ Bruce Springsteen

“Amazonia is paradise. The light is amazing, the clouds amazing, the people amazing. These Indians in the forest, they are integrated with the water, with the soil, with the forest, with the animals. It’s marvelous to be there with them.”

~ Sebastião Salgado
(1944-2025)

“I have tried to attain the spirit and feeling of the individual artist, without resorting to copying his or her work or their surface style.” 

~ Arnold Newman
(1918-2006)

“The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.”

~ Frank Lloyd Wright 
(1867-1959)

“Everything that surrounds you can give you something. Last summer I stayed in my room most of the time and I began playing around with things. Years ago I was given a primitive Polaroid camera and I didn’t like it -it was for snapshots. But one day I took it out. I had discovered, in the window of a shop, a little glass bust and I was very moved because it resembled my wife-the shoulder, and the neck were Elizabeth. For months and months, I looked at the bust in the window and finally I bought it. The lady in the shop said “It’s a beautiful bust sir” “I know” I said and I took it home, put it in my window, and began shooting and shooting with the Polaroid camera-in the morning, in the afternoon, in different lights something came out of this little incident, this little object. They made a book of all the pictures I took. It is dedicated to my wife. Look how the face of the bust is always changing: a shadow, which is the shadow of the curtain, then a passing cloud.The sky and its reflection give it the expression.I didn’t arrange this thing-it was there.Photography cannot make nature more beautiful. Nature is the most beautiful thing in the world. You can show the beauty, illustrate it, but it is never the real beauty-very far from it. We don’t know how beautiful nature really is.We can only guess.I am always saying that the best photographs are those I never took”

~ Andre Kertész
(1894-1985)

“What ever we have done, Kertész did it first.”

~Henri Cartier Bresson 
(1908-2004)

“Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life offers you and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.”

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908-2004)

“In Gianni Berengo Gardin we have lost an undisputed master of photography. He was a true explorer who knew how to portray humanity and nature in every corner of the earth. His gaze illuminated the history of the 20th Century.” 

~ Alessandro Guiti
Italian Minister of Culture

“Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous when you think about it.”

~ Lenny Bruce
(1925-1966)

“Photography is jazz for the eyes. All I ask you to do is listen with your eyes.”

~ William Claxton 
(1927-2008)

“I think you are born with a conscience and so it should be your guidance system for life.”

~ Dan Budnik
(1933-2020)

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

“You have no right to arrive in a community just to take a few pictures and go. To do photography you must be integrated with the community and to live with them. A fantastic picture you do in a fraction of a second. But to arrive to do this picture you must put your life in theirs. To give your time and to receive it from the community that you come to see”

~ Sebastião Salgado
(1944-2025)

"The smoke and the fire and the speed, the action and the sound, and everything that goes together, [the steam engine] is the most beautiful machine that we ever made, there's just nothing like it."

~ O. Winston Link
(1914-2001)

“I am not an artist, nor do I wish to be. I am only a witness of my era.”

~ Gianni Berengo Gardin
(1930-2025)

Sarah Moon:
"Which part of you appears “out of control”? Which part of you is outside the control of your will? I know there is an unconscious part that motivates me. I always think of it as an echo between the outside world and me, whether I’m working outside or whether I’m working with models. Finally, it’s a portrait of the instant. I was thinking about that when I was doing yours just now.

Yohji Yamamoto: 
Every time I work very seriously on one outfit with a model, I ask myself: Am I guilty? Am I lucky? I am always asking myself: Do you love the world? Do you love human beings? I say no! I hate the world-but I love the moments when I’m working. Isolation is the best gift.

Sarah Moon:
What keeps you going? 

Yohji Yamamoto:
It is an important question. Maybe my anger, about my society, my world, because it is not exactly what I want. If I hadn’t become a dressmaker, maybe I would have become a killer.


Sarah Moon:
It’s because you are a perfectionist. The Japanese say perfection doesn’t exist, it is like a dream you cannot fulfill. But then you work with a team- and that is important.

Yohji Yamaoto:
Very important. Fashion is teamwork. Some pattern makers keep me surprised. In that case, I feel so lucky.

"I had the Guggenheim, I had photos in the Museum of Modern Art and I was starving"

~ Max Yavno
(1911-1985)

"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth"

~ Mike Tyson

“Photography gave me happiness. It’s a chance to talk to anybody, to travel, to meet different people. Photography opens so many doors.”

~ Sabine Weiss
(1924-2021)

“I just walk around observing the subject from various angles until the picture elements arrange themselves into a composition that pleases my eye.”

~ Andre Kertész
(1894-1985)

“It took a longtime to get the angle I liked but the best picture is the one I took at the climax of the action. It carries all the excitement of the children screaming “The Dragon is slain!’"

~ Alfred Eisenstaedt
(1898-1995)

“I hope I go to Heaven and when I do, I’m going to do what every San Franciscan does when they get there. They look around and say “it ain’t too bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.”

~ Herb Caen
(1916-1997)

“I look for a different story every time because I selfishly want to live every single story that I photograph.”

~ Gianni Berengo Gardin
(1930-2025)

"I nervously walked across the historic Charles Bridge for the first time in 1982, to be “greeted" by two military guards, with what looked like machine guns, asking for my ID. After checking my British passport, they continued to pace, expressionless, back and forth over the cobble stones. Prague was occupied, tense, paranoid, and hostile in those days. The Velvet revolution, which transitioned Czechoslovakia to democratic rule, would not occur for another seven years, and coincided with my next visit to Prague in 1989. I was searching for locations where one of my idols, the great Josef Sudek, had photographed. In those days, the thirty sandstone statues along the Charles Bridge were weathered a ghostly black, the result of dense smog and coal dust which all too often enveloped the city. An unhealthy atmosphere for sure, but greatly intriguing for a photographer, especially at night. Nowadays, Prague, in Czechia, as it is now called, is a prime tourist destination. Bright and lively cafes, shops and hotels are open to the public. The statues along the bridge, along with many city buildings, have been cleaned, and a walk along the Charles Bridge usually entails weaving through dense crowds and vendors. This photograph is a souvenir from a dark, bygone era, which will, hopefully, never, ever, return."

~ Michael Kenna

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

~ Pentti Sammallahti

"Photography is a unique visual language that cannot be expressed in words. As a matter of fact, if it can be expressed in words, then it probably isn’t worth photographing."

~ Charles Harbutt
(1935-2015)

Yohji Yamamoto:
You have to keep in mind that you can catch the gift, you have the capacity. But if you’re feeling lazy, if you’re not very serious, then you’ll miss it.

Sarah Moon:
It’s exactly like a photographer, except a photographer has very little time to succeed or to fail. It’s all or nothing.

Yohji Yamaoto:
We are the same. To make a new collection, I do fittings at least six times out of those six times, two or three times I feel “Oh, this is it” and the other three times I feel “Oh, what is this? Should I change? Should I do it again? Should I stop?” It’s like a punishment.  

Sarah Moon:
Guy Bourdin used to tell me "you can’t be a photographer every day.” It’s true, sometimes you don’t believe in it. Plus, there is a limit, a deadline, what about you? Is time a friend or an enemy? For me, it’s an enemy because it goes too quickly.

Yohji Yamamoto: 
When I don’t work, I have to kill time: it’s time when I’m staying at home or walking my dog. But then when I work on a collection, I feel very strong. I don’t know why, it is like I said, something like a gift.

“Photography is still a very new medium and everything is allowed and everything should be tried.”

~ Bill Brandt
(1904-1983)

“Woman is the being who projects the greatest shadow or the greatest light on our dreams.”

~ Charles Baudelaire 
(1821-1867)

“I went to his studio and instinctively tried to capture in my photographs the spirt of his paintings. He simplified, simplified, simplified. The studio with its symmetry dictated the composition."

~ Andre Kertész
(1894-1985)

“The fashion photographer always has so much of his/her inner self contributing. Their taste, their inner being. Fashion photographers have to take a product and beautify and enhance every aspect of it” 

~ William Helburn 
(1924-2020)

"It felt as if the end were nigh. With the sun obliterated by dark smoke, a Dantean landscape stretched as far as the eye could see. The horizon itself was marked by torches of fire where burning oil leapt from the lifeless desert."

~ Sebastião Salgado 
(1944-2025)

“I have to make myself happy first and then I hope that some of that will make others happy.”

~ Judy Dater

"When you're observant, inspiration can show up in the most unusual places, triggering a new idea to appear.”

~ Noell Oszvald

"Before I start the fittings, I start imagining some type of beauty., sexuality or emotion.Sometimes I can’t find one:sometimes it happens or it collapses and I have to catch it."

~ Yohji Yamamoto

"It’s exactly the same for me. It’s a very short moment, and if I don’t catch it, it’s lost. That’s why I try to repeat: it’s “la course à la chimèra" (chasing a chimera) because sometimes I don’t see it straight away. I have a feeling……. finally I’m looking for an accident. That’s what I call chance or serendipity….working with hope for something you can’t know. A gift as you say and if it does accidentally happen then you want to make the most of it."

~ Sarah Moon

“I started with the Subway series in 1946 and would occasionally shoot in Penn Station until 1958 when I did it full time. I loved the place and what was happening there. It was a spacious and dramatic arena where people in the art of traveling went through a mixture of excitement, a silent patience for waiting and an honest fatigue. My fellow human beings are my main subject matter. When they travel, people are “on the big stage” so to speak. At heart my life’s work with the camera is to interpret the world around me through my own personal vision."

~ Louis Stettner 
(1922-2016)

“The camera is my tool. Through it I give reason to everything around me”

~ Andre Kertész
(1894-1985)

"No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film."
~
Robert Adams

"What always fascinates me about your work is that you always wrap a woman, mostly in black, yet every time you find a new idea"

~ Sarah Moon


"When I start working on a collection, I’m always looking for myself, for a surprise. Sometimes when I feel very excited by wrapping a body, I feel it might be a gift"

~ Yohji Yamamoto

“The only competition is you and your work.”
~
Brett Weston
(1911-1993)

“They are deliberate or involuntary wanderings because my mind is always in photo mode from morning to evening, and sometimes at night too! If I’m on my way to an appointment, for example, and en route something moves me, I try to take a photo the moment it touches me. If what touches me is a person’s attitude, or a situation, I get closer. The blurriness records my movement in the direction of the person. That’s why there are often photos that aren’t very sharp. I never take deliberately blurred shots.”
~ 
Dolores Marat
(b.1944)

“The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score and the print is the performance.”

~ Ansel Adams 
(1902-1984)

“Adams feels deeply about what he sees. He has a reverence for the earth in all its variety, delicacy and strength but he is the absolute reverse of effusive. He sees with such austerity, even severity, that some have mistakenly called him cold. He has an incomparable technical expertness in communicating what he sees and feels and for half a century and more he has gone on making photographs so plainly stamped with his personal artistry that they hardly need his steeple A signature on them. They have taught thousands how to see, they have become household images, they have steadily affirmed life.”

~ Wallace Stegner
(1909-1993)

“My fellow humans are my main subject matter. At the end of the day, my life’s work with the camera is to interpret the world around me through my own personal perception."~Louis Stettner

"Even though fixed in time, a photograph evokes as much feeling as that which comes from music or dance. Whatever the mode, from the snapshot to the decisive moment to multi media montage - the intent and purpose of photography is to render in visual terms feelings and experiences that often elude the ability of words to describe. In any case the eyes have it and the imagination will always soar further than was expected.”
~ 
Ralph Gibson

“I will never say I won’t do a job because I don’t like it. There are somethings I can’t do because I don’t know how to, but otherwise I will do anything and this is a good lesson in humility. Even though I am doing exactly what my client wants, I put my personality into the pictures”

~ Jean-Philippe Charbonnier 
(1921-2004)

“Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there."

~ Miles Davis
(1926-1991)

“The world is filled with incredible things. So I’m happy to just let my eye be caught by something. If something catches my eye that’s enough reason to take the picture.”
~
Henry Wessel
(1942 - 2018)

“The camera is an unsophisticated mechanical instrument which, like a mirror, reflects passively without a conscience. The artist must supply the conscience.” 

~ Ralph Eugene Meatyard 
(1925-1972)

“I look at this image and applaud the artists and artisans who made these standing sculptures and placed them in the stately gardens of Versailles. My mind inevitably wanders to Andre Le Nôtre, (1613-1700), the landscape architect who created many such wonderful perspectives of garden topiary in and around Paris. I then telescope back to take a more distant view of planet earth, a speck in our immense universe, with all the magnificence, beauty and mystery of it all. In 1996, I stopped, looked, saw and appreciated what was in front of me, on one of the many thousands of frosty mornings Versailles has experienced. I clicked the shutter on my camera, (which was made by somebody else, in another country). The image exposed on film, (manufactured thousands of miles away). It was processed in a laboratory, (in another distant city). I made the eventual print, in my own darkroom, and even had the audacity to sign it. But, let’s face it, I was and remain a bit part actor in an enormous cast of giant characters, and I’m absolutely fine with that.”
~
Michael Kenna

"Photography has always been my life. I've always taken photos. I always have my Leica on me and, as soon as I feel an emotion in relation to something I see, I photograph it, no matter where I am."

~ Dolorès Marat

“I devised a little technique to get around the restrictions and successfully take photos in a museum. All you need is a small camera that is inconspicuous and doesn’t make too much noise. When the attendant is not looking, you adjust it to your eye level and cough slightly while pressing the button to disguise the noise of the shutter release. You can also bribe the attendant, a more efficient and direct practice in some countries.”
~
Elliott Erwitt
(1928 - 2023)

“The city was my home. As I look back at the work I did during that period, I realize that I was a witness to a time that no longer exists, a more innocent time. While I know that the city has changed, that the streets are dirtier and meaner, the energy that I love is still there. No matter where I go, I keep coming back to photography New York. Of course the “good old days” were not all sweetness and light. There was poverty, racism, corruption and violence in those days too, but somehow we believed in the possible. We believed in hope.”
~
Arthur Leipzig 
(1918 - 2014)

“Having seen so much it seems that Arthur Leipzig wanted to go on seeing much more land what he has shown us remains hauntingly clear. His images say, look at us and be born again. Taken out of time they refuse to grow faded, and with the clock moving on, Arthur Leipzig’s camera should be moving with it. He should never yield to inactivity. Life as he shows it is what life is all about.” 
~
Gordon Parks 
(1912 - 2006)

“Photographers stay young because until the end they would like to pull off one more good shot.”

~ Gianni Berengo Gardin

“My photography is rooted in a curiosity and reverence for the human experience. I’ve always been fascinated by people. ”
~ Ron Cooper

“I love to watch very common species- sparrows, crows, pigeons, ducks, gulls, domestic birds- from home doorsteps to the ends of the earth. They are lovely and easy and sometimes funny to observe.”
~ Pentti Sammallahti

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”
~ Susan Sontag
(1933 - 2004)

“We don’t take pictures with our cameras. We take them with our hearts and we take them with our minds. The camera is nothing more than a tool.”

~ Arnold Newman
(1918-2006) 

“Photography has given me a life. The very least I could do was to try and articulate these stories with as much compassion and clarity as they deserve, with as loud a voice as I could muster. Anything less would be mercenary.”

~ Don McCullin

“I don’t speak emotionally about my pictures.That’s for other people to do. I will say that I love my photos. That’s what keeps me going. Photography teaches us to see and we can see whatever we wish. When I take a photograph, I make a wish, I was always looking for beauty”

~ George Tice
(1938-2025)

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby