Sam Abell Quotes

I found that photography was a great way of relaxing on the set.

When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.

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 have been photographing people dancing for 20 or 30 years now, and I think I will eventually do a book of dancing photos.

I was always painting when I was a kid. But then when I handled a camera when I was 17, that was it for me. I loved photography. I would work 4 or 5 hours a day. It was like a calling.

I can't really envision a time when I'm not shooting something.

I always considered, with every shoot, I was on trial; every time I pick up my camera and start out on the relationship, I am at degree zero. There is no coasting.

I remember the first time I went out on the street to shoot pictures. I was in downtown Philadelphia, and I just took a walk and started making contact with people and photographing them, and I thought, 'I love this. This is what I want to do forever.' There was never another question.

As much as I love music, in my mind, photography is what makes me the happiest - that's for sure.

I don't have a favorite photo. As a photographer, I have attachments to each image. Not the one photo: the experience of getting the photos is the challenge or the thing.

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

My surprises come usually once I start rolling and photographing.

Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like.

I started shooting pictures because I had all these photographers around me, and life was kind of boring creatively because you play the same songs every night. So I looked for another outlet, and I started shooting.

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.

If youre not interested in life, then photography has no meaning

Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.

In every photographer there is something of a stroller.

A photograph is just a tiny slice of a subject. A piece of them in a moment. It seems presumptuous to think you can get more than that.

I go straight in very close to people and I do that because it's the only way you can get the picture. You go right up to them. Even now, I don't find it easy. I don't announce it. I pretend to be focusing elsewhere. If you take someone's photograph it is very difficult not to look at them just after. But it's the one thing that gives the game away. I don't try and hide what I'm doing - that would be folly.

The camera gave me an incredible freedom. It gave me the ability to parade through the world and look at people and things very, very closely.

For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.

A camera gives you a purpose.

When I’m behind a camera I forget I exist.

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.