Bill Brandt Quotes

I was a very, very careful printer when I used 8-by-10 film. I probably spent more time on printing than anything else. The more the prints were appreciated, the more time I spent on them.

I remember being shocked when I came out from under the focusing cloth after a minute or two being submerged within that, at the startling green color of those ferns.

I just had the joy of taking pictures, and I never cared about my negatives. I just gave them away whenever anybody asked for them.

Photography is about light and what it does and how it is captured on a piece of negative.

I never stopped photographing. There were a couple of years when I didn't have a darkroom, but that didn't stop me from photographing.

Light is everything in photographs and has to be considered in all situations.

I like to know where the camera is.

I became hooked on the idea of being able to shoot an image and process it myself, and end up with a product.

For me the printing process is part of the magic of photography. It's that magic that can be exciting, disappointing, rewarding and frustrating all in the same few moments in the darkroom.

A photographer needs to be a good editor of negatives and prints! In fact, most of the prints I make are for my eyes only, and they are no good. I find the single most valuable tool in the darkroom is my trash can - that's where most of my prints end up.

My father taught me photography. It was his hobby, and we had a small darkroom in the fruit cellar of our basement. It was the kind of makeshift darkroom that was only dark at night.

In the early days of picture-taking, the exposure shutter had to stay open for a long time, so you had to stay really still.

It ain't the picture and it ain't the camera - it's the operator.

Wherever there is light, one can photograph.

My dad was a photographer, so we had all these studio portraits of us.

A mad, keen photographer needs to get out into the world and work and make mistakes.

Your camera is the best critic there is. Critics never see as much as the camera does. It is more perceptive than the human eye.

Color can do anything that black-and-white can.

There's something magical still about it when I get in a darkroom, and you've shot a roll of film and you develop it and you look at your negatives, and there's, like, imagery there. That always stuns me.

'Humans of New York' wasn't the result of a fully finished idea that I thought of and then executed; it was an evolution. There were hundreds of tiny evolutions that came from me loving photography.

The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter - 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites.

I was extravagant in the matter of cameras - anything photographic - I had to have the best. But that was to further my work. In most things I have gone along with the plainest - or without.

I remember the first roll of film I took. It was wintertime, and I wanted to shoot a roll of film to practice processing it, so I took an entire 36-exposure roll of my dog, Tippy.

I would like to become a better photographer. I'm working on that.

I picked up photography in high school.