Natasha Trethewey Quotes

All the things worth writing about are outside me. I'm a lens, not a source. And even if it's not always a comfortable journey, it's always a stimulating one.

The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed.

When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it.

Photography is an accident.

Observation is an old man's memory.

Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.

Recording a scene with paint rather than film sinks you more deeply into your surroundings. You have to look a little harder and a little longer. And you end up with a memento.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter.

I know everything should be photographed. It helps me make sense of my existence.

Man is a recording animal.

The words come from here. From memories, from dreams, from people I've known. I'm always writing and reflecting on life. I want to suck it all in.

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.

I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.

The camera is the eye of history.

From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour, and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.

The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience

When I’m photographing I see life.

Photography's a case of keeping all the pores of the skin open, as well as the eyes. A lot of photographers today think that by putting on the uniform, the fishing vest, and all the Nikons, that that makes them a photographer. But it doesn't. It's not just seeing. It's feeling.

What I'm documenting can be hard to distill, because it's all around us like the air we breathe. I often need to go to a place where I can capture extreme moments.

I go out to take a walk, I see something, I take a picture. I take photographs. I have avoided profound explanations of what I do.

A photograph is just a little, teeny-weeny, small piece of life. I feel like I see so much more than what I can actually get.

I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.

Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all meaning of the thing seen. Then only could the real meaning of it be understood and felt.

Nobody has ever been able to experience what they have thoroughly understood - or understand what they have experienced until they have achieved a detachment that renders them incapable of repeating the experience.