Elliott Erwitt Quotes

I have more of a relationship with the subject than I do with my camera equipment. To me, camera equipment is like a tin of shoe polish and a brush - I use that as a tool, but my basic camera is my emotion and my eyes. It's not anything to do with the wonderful cameras I use.

The camera is a remarkable instrument. Saturate yourself with your subject, and the camera will all but take you by the hand and point the way.

I'm not very eloquent about things like this, but I think that writing and photography go together. I don't mean that they are related arts, because they're not. But the person doing it, I think, learns from both things about accuracy of the eye, about observation, and about sympathy toward what is in front of you... It's about honesty, or truth telling, and a way to find it in yourself, how to need it and learn from it.

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

I sometimes think I'm a mechanic. I just take pictures.

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

There are two parts to the process: taking the picture and finding ways of using it.

To talk about photos rather than making them seems idiotic to me. It's as though I went on and on about a woman I adored instead of making love to her.

Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument.

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.

I think a lot of the time these days people are so concerned about having the right camera and the right film and the right lenses and all the special effects that go along with it, even the computer, that they're missing the key element.

I like to work my camera as if it were a musical instrument.

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important.

Fashion photographers are the new painters.

You can't expect to take a definitive image in half an hour. It takes days, often years.

Sometimes you feel uncomfortable taking a photograph, but that's all part of the job.

All I do is make photos. It's my life.

As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.

I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do - that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

First you study photography, then you practice photography, then you serve photography, and finally one becomes photography.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

When I'm not painting, I'm Oujia-boarding with my photos. I'll sort through my pictures, put them in different folders, and come back months later to one in particular and try to figure out why I took it.

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.