Andre Kertesz Quotes

In every photographer there is something of a stroller.

With a camera, one has to love individual cases.

This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see.

Sometimes I'm amazed by how much you can do as a photographer.

It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.

Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure.

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.

The camera gave me an incredible freedom. It gave me the ability to parade through the world and look at people and things very, very closely.

I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.

I can't tell you how many pictures I've missed just 'cause I've been so hell bent on getting the shot I think I want.

Pictures you have taken have an influence on those that you are going to make. That's life!

A camera gives you a purpose.

Just as Renaissance artists provided narratives for the era they lived in, so do I. I'm always looking beyond the surface. I've done that ever since I first picked up a camera.

Things develop in front of my camera, and then I will try to do the best out of it. I am close, but in most of the scenes, I am trying not to be seen. I think that's the trick. I think it starts in your heart, goes to the head, and the head puts it into the finger.

When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

I am kept awake by the list of possibilities for shooting more photos and deciding what I must prioritise next.

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

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 was always painting when I was a kid. But then when I handled a camera when I was 17, that was it for me. I loved photography. I would work 4 or 5 hours a day. It was like a calling.

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

I fight to take a good photograph every single time.

I can't really envision a time when I'm not shooting something.

I'm not a politician or a scholar or political historian. I'm just a photographer who's trying to capture a spirit. It's not an intellectual process; it's an intuitive process.