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.

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.

I just don't know what makes a picture, really - the thing that makes it is something unique, as far as I can understand. Just like one guy can write a sentence and it's beautiful and another one can write it and it's dead. What the difference is, I don't know.

Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure.

I can tell you for me it goes on forever. There are some things you can't ever find out. You can't find out in one life either.

I guess I've shot about 40,000 negatives and of these I have about 800 pictures I like.

I like the simple things. I don't know why. I'm that way. I came from a simple place.

The difference between the casual impression and the intensified image is about as great as that separating the average business letter from a poem. If you choose your subject selectively—intuitively—the camera can write poetry.

My project could be only to photograph as I felt and desired, to regulate a pleasant form of living, to get up in the morning-free, to feel the trees, the grass, the water, sky or buildings, people-everything that affects us; and to photograph that which I saw and have always felt.

A picture is like a prayer.

The photographs that excite me are photographs that say something in a new manner; not for the sake of being different but ones that are different because the individual is different and the individual expresses himself.

Every time I talked about making a picture I didn't do it. I had already done it - talking about it! I quit talking.

Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure. If man wishes to express himself photographically, he must understand, surely to a certain extent, his relationship to life.

If you choose your subject selectively - intuitively - the camera can write poetry.

In terms of art, the only real answer that I know of is to do it. If you don't do it, you don't know what might happen.

The mystery isn't in the technique, it's in each of us.

I can't say what makes a picture. I can't say. It's mysterious.

I do believe strongly in photography and hope by following it intuitively that when the photographs are looked at they will touch the spirit in people.

I think nearly every artist continually wants to reach the edge of nothingness - the point where you can’t go any further.

It's the subject matter that counts. I'm interested in revealing the subject in a new way to intensify it. A photo is able to capture a moment that people can't always see.

It's a question of methods. Everybody wants results, but nobody wants to do what they have to do to get them done.

It takes me a long time to change. I don't think you can just go out and figure out a bunch of visual ideas and photograph. The change happens in living and not through thinking.

I think I came alive when I started photography.

A picture is like a prayer; you're offering a prayer to get something, and in a sense it's like a gift of God because you have practically no control-at least I don't.

I realize that we all do express ourselves, but those who express that which is always being done are those whose thinking is almost in every way in accord with everyone else. Expression on this basis has become dull to those who wish to think for themselves.