Saul Leiter Quotes

Photography allows you to learn to look and see. You begin to see things you'd never paid attention to.

The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.

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

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

To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.

A camera teaches you how to see without a camera.

Photography helps people to see.

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.

To be able to take my pictures, I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about.

You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

I think my thing is that I try and pick up on things that other people have maybe not picked up on.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

Leica, schmeica. The camera doesn't make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But you have to see.

I've no doubt that those photographs i took will make people look at everything in a more interesting way - the little tear on one piece of paper, the shadow on another. But good painting has always done that - made you see things. And the most ordinary can be the most extraordinary.

The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.

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

Have you ever watched the jet cars race on the boulevard?...I sometimes think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly...If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! He'd say, that’s grass! A pink blur! That’s a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows.

If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing.

Seeing is a gift that comes with practice.

I once taught art to adults in a night course. I had a woman who painted her back yard, and she said it was the first time she had ever really looked at it. I think everyone sees beauty. Art is a way to respond

Observe Everything. Communicate Well. Draw, Draw, Draw.

Photography hankers after the condition of the neutral observer. But there can be no such things as a neutral observer. For something to be seen, it must be looked at by somebody, and any true and real depiction must be an account of the experience of that looking.

I think we seem to remember things in still pictures. I never gave up on painting. When they said painting was dead, I just thought, Well, that's all about photography, and photography's not that interesting, and it's changing anyway.

All the technique in the world doesn't compensate for the inability to notice.

I think there's some stuff that's at least photographically interesting. There are things I back off from trying to talk about.