Walker Evans Quotes

It is a great honor for me to be compared to Henri Cartier-BressonBut I believe there is a very big difference in the way we put ourselves inside the stories we photograph. He always strove for the decisive moment as being the most important. I always work for a group of pictures, to tell a story. If you ask which picture in a story I like most, it is impossible for me to tell you this. I don't work for an individual picture. If I must select one individual picture for a client, it is very difficult for me.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

You adapt to who you're photographing.

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

I have a master's degree in photography as a fine art, and I would call my work primarily conceptual. I don't carry cameras with me wherever I go. I get an idea of a subject matter I want to deal with and I pull out my cameras.

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.

My dad had been an ardent amateur photographer, and he taught me to compose a photograph from the back to the front, and then populate the picture.

I almost never set out to photograph a landscape, nor do I think of my camera as a means of recording a mountain or an animal unless I absolutely need a 'record shot'. My first thought is always of light.

'Humans of New York' wasn't the result of a fully finished idea that I thought of and then executed; it was an evolution. There were hundreds of tiny evolutions that came from me loving photography.

I'm always taking behind-the-scenes photos and stuff.

There's a lot of research and time that goes into my shoots. I spend weeks on them, even for one picture.

You see someone like maybe William Eggleston. William doesn't even really talk about what he does; he just wants to make these images. He kind of hovers around a location and extracts these images.

I believe that the medium of photography prevails entirely as an act of faith in the souls of those who love and practice it. And so every photograph becomes another subtle variation on the theme of the medium itself.

I have tried to bring about better communication between people. I believe that humanitarian photography is like economics. Economy is a kind of sociology, as is documentary photography.

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.

A good print is really essential. I want to take strong documentary photographs that are as good technically as any of the best technical photographs, and as creative as any of the best fine-art photographs. [...] I don't want to just be a photo essayist; I'm more interested in single images...ones that I feel are good enough to stand on their own.

When you work fast, what you put in your pictures is what your brought with yoiu - your own ideas and concepts. When you spend more time on a project, you learn to understand your subjects. There comes a time when it is not you who is taking the pictures. Something special happens between the photographer and the people he is photographing. He realizes that they are giving the pictures to him.

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.

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

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.

Producing a photographic document involves preparation in excess. There is first the examination of the idea of the project. Then the visits to the scene, the casual conversations, and more formal interviews - talking, and listening, and looking, looking. ... And finally, the pictures themselves, each one planned, talked, taken and examined in terms of the whole.

When people talk to me about picture hunters, I very quietly laugh. I'm not a hunter of pictures, I'm a fisher of pictures.

I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.

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.

I photograph continuously, often without a good idea or strong feelings. During this time the photos are nearly all poor, but I believe they develop my seeing and help later on in other photos. I do believe strongly in photography and hope by following it intuitively that when the photographs are looked at they will touch the spirit in people.