Harry Callahan Quotes

Photography gives you the opportunity to use your sensibility and everything you are to say something about and be part of the world around you. In this way, you might discover who you are, and with a little luck, you might discover something much larger than yourself.

A photographer without a magazine behind him is like a farmer without fields.

What it all boils down to for me is having the enthusiasm to do something for enjoyment and being stimulated by what's around you. That's what photography does for me.

Photography has literally changed my life.

My art form is my child, and that's what I give my focus to.

I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.

I'm going to put every aspect of myself out into the world and try to convey it through photography.

My parents offered me my first camera for my birthday and I developed an exclusive passion for it over the years. Since I was not the most social kid on the block, the camera helped me to express myself, invent my own language - something like a secret garden. I decided early on I would not write in a diary but take silent photographs instead.

I didn't do so well in the academic world, so I think the only way I could express myself was through visual art - anything I could get my hands on, whether it was glassblowing, sculpture, painting, or photography. I always wanted to be a painter. Or a farmer.

Suddenly this camera, this thing, allowed me to move around the world in a certain kind of way, with a certain kind of purpose. (On receiving a camera for her twenty-first birthday)

'Nation' was one that I'd have killed myself if I hadn't written it. It was absolutely important to me that I wrote it. It was good for my soul.

Photography was a blessing because it filled my time. If I had to start over, I'd pursue photography - probably to the exclusion of acting.

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.

Fashion photographers are the new painters.

If you practice an art, be proud of it and make it proud of you It may break your heart, but it will fill your heart before it breaks it; it will make you a person in your own right.

I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do - that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

When I was in high school, I was going to be a painter because I had a facility for painting. I could do it, but I didn't have anything to say in that medium.

I always wanted to be an artist, whatever that was, like other chicks want to be stewardesses. I read. I painted. I thought.

Painting completed my life.

Everything that is strong in me has gone into my art work.

My work is intensely personal.

Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness.

Photography, for me, is something I can control fully. It's wholly my own expressions.

Acting was a way of me finding myself, which I think is the case of a lot of actors, regardless of where they come from.