Ruth Bernhard Quotes

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities.

for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only too make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better.

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.

Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.

Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.

You can't buy vision, and you can't buy aesthetic.

An artist sees that which does not yet exist. He or she imagines a future others cannot perceive. The artist - and the writer - reshapes reality so that it becomes even more vivid and lasting.

Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.

Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss. Just sharing that truth can be a very powerful thing.

Photography doesn't teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.

I don't photograph life as it is, but life as I would like it to be.

Photography's a case of keeping all the pores of the skin open, as well as the eyes. A lot of photographers today think that by putting on the uniform, the fishing vest, and all the Nikons, that that makes them a photographer. But it doesn't. It's not just seeing. It's feeling.

Art is not in the ...eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist.

To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.

Image quality is not the product of a machine, but of the person who directs the machine, and there are no limits to imagination and expression.

The thing is that when you don't carry a camera, that's when you see pictures in particular, or at least that's when you think you see pictures in particular. When you do carry it, if you do see one on the occasion that you do, you can take it.

This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see.

Every single thing you see on-screen came out of somebody's creativity. It doesn't exist. Nature didn't deliver it to us. Everything had to be dreamed.

A painter may be looking at the world in a way which is very different from everyone else. If he's a craftsman, he can get other people to see the world through his eyes, and so he enlarges our vision, perception, and there's great value in that.

One longs for a director with a sense of imagination.