Sam Abell Quotes

You know when I shoot with digital capture, I look for the mistake. When I shoot with film I embrace it.

Fine artists reflect, and then they act. Fashion photographers - we act, and then we reflect.

It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.

John Loengard, the picture editor at Life, always used to tell me, ”If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.

There are two parts to the process: taking the picture and finding ways of using it.

There is a difference between film and digital. Because digital, you know, it's perfect and whatever. But with film, you get depth. You get subject.

When I began to photograph nudes, I let myself be guided by this camera, and instead of photographing what I saw, I photographed what the camera was seeing. I interfered very little, and the lens produced anatomical images and shapes which my eyes had never observed.

What does a painter do? You get a painting, you put some intent and passion and emotion into these things, and hope the people will receive it. Same as a playwright. It's art.

Everyone has a different approach, but I like to shoot a lot of film anyway.

I was just trying to make a nice little movie... It wasn't until I saw it all put together that I realized this was something remarkable.

My recent drawings that personal ones aren't fashion-related. I sometimes sit and draw people on the bus, or some fantasy hybrid animal. You know, wherever the hand will lead.

What is to be done about these literary people, who will never understand that painting is a craft and that the material side comes first? The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

I've never made a movie I wasn't surprised to see.

I use photos a lot for drawing people and personalities, but they're almost never photos that I've taken.

In putting images together I become active, and excitement is of another order - synthesis overshadows analysis.

Making art is a rite of initiation. People change their souls.

I sort of have various sort of theories when people ask me about songwriting because it is a mystery. You don't really know. Sometimes you can do it and sometimes you can't. It's really peculiar.

Once I started working with the Polaroid, I would take a shot and if that shot was good, then I'd move the model and change the lighting or whatever... slowly sneaking up on what I wanted rather than having to predetermine what it was.

The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.

To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.

People go, 'What do you want to do?' What do you want to do? What are you feeling? Going into a shoot not fully knowing what I want to do—that excitement, that thing that happens, is just so powerful and makes such great pictures.

I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content - kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on.

I see no difference between my pictures that people consider amusing and the rest. To me, it's all serious work - they're just a reaction to what I see. I don't leave this apartment in the morning and say to myself 'Today I'm going to be funny and tomorrow I'm going to be sad.'

When painting portraits a lot of people say, 'Why not get a photograph of the person?' Photography is wonderful and it is an art form in itself, but... my portrait is a culmination of elements... a truer image of a person than just the 'click' of a snapshot.

I personally think if you're given four months instead of four weeks on a play, with the people who want to work that way, the play will invariably be different and stronger, and much more fulfilling and richer on all counts. There's no doubt in my mind about it.