Alfred Stieglitz Quotes

The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.

...There are too many people studying it [photography] now who are never going to make it. You can't give them a formula for making it. You have to have it in you first, you don't learn it. The seeing eye is the important thing.

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

You don't make a photograph just with a camera

It occurs to me that at the beginning one works passionately to learn photography. This takes years, and the craft is usually formed during this period. Then as time passes one finds oneself more in the role of serving the medium... Then, as in the example of several masters that I have been privileged to know personally, it appears that by having devoted oneself totally to the medium, one becomes photography.

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

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

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

'The Gardener' is more than a marvellous collection of images by a master photographer.

The darkroom is just the means to an end.

When you're so used to operating the camera, it's an extension of your eye and your heart and your head.

I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.

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.

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

A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they'll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won't do a thing for you if you don't have anything in your head or in your heart.

A person cannot learn to be a photographer. He can only cultivate what he already has. I try to make people aware that they have something very precious to cultivate.

I love photography and art-directing is something that I really would enjoy to do.

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

On digital photography: It's fantastic, but it's not a freebie for anything. You still have to have this (he points to his eyes), and this (points to his heart), and feet.

My talent lies in the fact that I cannot touch a camera without expressing myself.

The art is the challenge which you must meet every day: the technique you should learn to control with time. The science and the art of photography are really one, and not opposed to each other.

I never considered myself a good photographer. I still don't. I thought of myself as a hard worker. My camera was a sponge and I had an instinct that athletes have - anticipation. Photography really represents an enormous amount of anticipation - understanding what might be there the next moment and being prepared for it.

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 a transformation, not a reproduction.

The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don't know what to do with it.