Rick Smolan Quotes

Everybody's got their own particular vision which is a personal thing.

Do you ever wonder if what you look at is the same thing everyone else is seeing?' He went even stiller at her side. 'Sometimes I'm sure it isn't the same...but that's not so bad is it? Seeing the world in a different way?' Creative vision creates art' he motioned around the gallery 'that shows the rest of the world a new angle. That's a beautiful thing.

Whenever I arrive on a real location, I have to move around and work out what the best angles are going to be. When I was moving around with the lens, I discovered things that the naked eye would not have.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.

In my writing, I focus lenses. I'm almost always seeing when I am writing.

I paint what I see, not what a camera would see.

You can turn something into art just because of the way you tell people to look at it.

A camera teaches you how to see without a camera.

Everybody has their thing they like or don't like to see. It's all in your head. That's why people take their own pictures, because it's difficult for someone else to capture what you seek.

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.

Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place - and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all - so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.

We all have our own takes on things. To being yourself. The abstract, the whole thing that I play with, seems to result in seeing through your lenses, and once you express how you see things to others, you start to see there are similarities between all people. It's kind of like, no matter how far you go, you're still where you started, in a way.

There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only/ eyes in all heads,/ to be looked out of.

We don't all see the same way at all. Even if I'm sitting looking at you, there is always the memory of you as well. And a memory is now. So someone who's never met you before is seeing a different person. That's bound to be the case. We all see something different. I assume most people don't look very hard at anything.

Photography doesn't teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.

Max Kozloff said to me one day, ‘You’re not really a photographer. You do photography, but you do it for your own purposes – your purposes are not the same as others’. I’m not quite sure what he meant, but I like that. I like the way he put it.

Photography hankers after the condition of the neutral observer. But there can be no such things as a neutral observer. For something to be seen, it must be looked at by somebody, and any true and real depiction must be an account of the experience of that looking.

From what I could see, the hardwood was just fine. Then again, I'd just see a windmill and an open sky, too, never feeling the need to conquer either. You think it's all obvious and straightforward, this world. But really, it's all in who is doing the looking.

One person's crazy is another person's refreshing.

There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice-box seasons his own food.

I always wonder why some people see things as weird and some people don't.

I don't believe a person has a style. What people have is a way of photographing what is inside them. What is there comes out.

None of us see the world as it is but as we are, as our frames of reference, or maps, define the territory.

Life's gift to you is your unique vantage point. Your gift to life is expressing from it.