Harry Callahan Quotes

The difference between the casual impression and the intensified image is about as great as that separating the average business letter from a poem. If you choose your subject selectively—intuitively—the camera can write poetry.

The easy bit is picking up a camera and pointing and shooting. But then you have to decide what it is you’re trying to say and express.

Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.

The camera's a ballpoint pen, an imbecile; it's not worth anything if you don't have anything to say.

The desire to discover, the desire to move, to capture the flavor, three concepts that describe the art of photography.

I love photography and I love the art of photography. So when I'm working with high-level art photographers, I give them artistic freedom because I want that for myself when it's my turn to do my work and I never try and control it or say I'll only do this or I want it like that.

It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.

The camera can be a machine gun, a warm kiss, a sketchbook. Shooting a camera is like saying, Yes, yes, yes. There is no maybe. All the maybes should go in the trash.

I'd always loved movies, but it wasn't some sort of desperate love of celluloid. It was literally like, "I want to write things, and I want people to see them more."

I've always known that I've wanted to write, but I always saw myself doing that in the context of something other than film, so it was a really beautiful and kind of perfect moment in my life when I realized that I could combine this idea of wanting to write and tell my own stories with the environment I had grown up in and knew well - that I could make film as opposed to writing being a departure from what I knew.

A camera gives you a purpose.

But let's speak of art for a moment. Yes, art. I know a gentleman who makes excellent portraits. This gentleman is a camera.

You don't make a photograph just with a camera

The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.

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)

You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.

The word "photography" can be interpreted as "writing with light" or "drawing with light." Some photographers are producing beautiful photographs by drawing with light.. Some other photographers are trying to tell something with their photographs. They are writing with light.

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.

Creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817)

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

Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe