Steffi Graf Quotes

By default, I am a travel photographer. I work on a combination of commissions and personal projects that take me around the world.

I grew up looking at National Geographic. I always wondered who was taking the photos and how.

I wanted life to be episodic. I wanted to be a magazine photographer and I was willing to do what it took to become that.

It's more difficult now, to be a Geographic photographer, than it was when I came along. And it wasn't easy at that time.

My least favorite photographer to have would be myself. Someone who wanted a career at National Geographic. Because it's almost mathematically impossible to achieve that.

I love to photograph the gorgeous landscapes when I travel.

I love photography, I love food, and I love traveling, and to put those three things together would just be the ultimate dream.

I would never dream, for example, of going to The States to photograph your wildlife.

I became interested in photography during my first visit to the United States. I was a student at a university in Holland. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the American West. That was when I learned about the tradition of nature in American photography.

I got a camera when I was nine years old and it wasn't until I was a model that I realized you could be a photographer for a job.

There's nothing wrong with being a fashion photographer, but it's a bit limited.

I was from a little rinky-dink town - to be a model... it looked like a lot of fun. I'd look at the girls, and they always looked happy.

I began taking pictures in the natural world to be able to show people what I was experiencing when I climbed and explored in Yosemite in the High Sierra.

If I wasn't a comic or TV star, I really wanted to be a photojournalist. That was my other dream job.

When I was young, all I wanted to be was a movie star. At a certain point, I started to grow up and really care about what I did.

Acting is something that I always wanted, but I never paid attention to the notion that it might actually work out. You have all sorts of ideas about what you want to do - at one stage, I wanted to be a jockey - but this is the one that's a big deal.

I think a lot of times, especially for certain stories, photographers travel together for safety reasons, and they also invariably cross paths. But you could have 10 photographers shooting together in the same spot but capturing different images.

Each time I arrived in a new city, I'd get lost in the streets and photograph everything that looked interesting, taking nearly a thousand photographs every day. After each day of shooting, I'd select 30 or 40 of my favorite photographs and post them on Facebook. I named the albums after my first impression of each city.

'Humans of New York' wasn't the result of a fully finished idea that I thought of and then executed; it was an evolution. There were hundreds of tiny evolutions that came from me loving photography.

I photographed rocks and trees and tide pools and nudes and all that stuff for years and years. Until 20 years ago when I found that I could do it in the studio and never have to travel.

I'm a big fan of 'National Geographic', the magazine and the channel. Anything to do with the natural world. For years, when I was younger, I was convinced I would be a nature photographer, but that didn't pan out.

I have my dream job. If I was seven years old and you asked me what I'd want to be 30 years from now, I'd say exactly who I am. So, 'rare' and 'lucky' are the exact right words. It took a lot of hard work, and I took a weird route to get here, but man, am I grateful for it.

When you get your dream job, you'd be really hard-pressed to leave it. Unless you've got another dream job out there.

As fantastic as it is to have 'Vogue' and 'Vanity Fair' as places to work, I don't often get to shoot the kind of things I like to photograph in the way I like to photograph.

I always had this vision of what I wanted to do in life.