Ruth Bernhard Quotes

The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.

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.

I like to choose the people I take photographs of, but when you make your living off it, you've got to take everybody.

The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don't have to explain things with words.

Photographers feel guilty that all they do for a living is press a button.

I had to get my camera to register things that were more important than how poor they were--their pride, their strength, their spirit.

The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer's understanding of his subject and mastery of his process.

All photographs are far more important than any painting.

A photo says, you were happy, and I wanted to catch that. A photo says, you were so important to me that I put down everything else to come watch.

You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.

Photography is solitary and there are lags between seeing with your eyes and seeing through the lens, and then seeing the image on your computer... I often see things after the fact. So there’s a revelatory quality. And this definitely includes a sense of playfulness, because you’re not sure what the consequences are going to be.

With a camera, one has to love individual cases.

At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands before our camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect--a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.

Photography is something you learn to love very quickly. I know that many, many things are going to ask me to have their pictures taken and I will take them all.

Behind the camera, I was invisible. When I lifted it up to my eye it was like I crawled into the lens, losing myself there. and everything else fell away.

Often people ask what I'm photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best what I've come up with is I just say: Life today.

When you draw a crowd of people in a street or room or landscape, decide whether you want to say that the people dominate the place or that the place is more important than the people.

To me, photography is 90% a retrospective experience. There's the part of pursuing the image, and exposing the film, but once you make the exposure, you're always looking backwards in time. I like that aspect of photography.

I was given a small camera as a wedding gift from a very dear friend. My first pictures were taken on my honeymoon. As soon as I became familiar with the camera, I was intrigued with the possibilities of expression it offered. It was like a discovery for me.

I try to capture reality, nothing else.

The herculean task of a photographer is to capture a momentary frame as beautiful in reality, as it would be in a dream.

It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.

Things happen in front of you. That's perhaps the most wonderful and mysterious aspect of photography.

One of the many ways of contesting level-zero, and one of the best, is to take photographs, an activity in which one should start becoming adept very early in life, teach it to children since it requires discipline, aesthetic education, a good eye and steady fingers.

For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.