Walker Evans Quotes

The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.

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.

Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.

I don't know. I don't go around looking at my pictures. I sometimes think I'm a mechanic. I just take pictures. When the time comes, for whatever reason, I get involved in editing and getting some prints made and stuff. There are things that interest me. But I don't really mull over them a lot.

The next time you pick up a camera think of it not as an inflexible and automated robot, but as a flexible instrument which you must understand to properly use. An electronic and optical miracle creates nothing on its own! Whatever beauty and excitement it can represent exist in your mind and spirit to begin with.

You don't take a picture, you make a picture.

A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image.

There are a thousand ways to point a camera, but really only one.

You want to make the photograph work in every way possible. Doesn't matter where it is in the world.

You always want to come back with an image that's interesting visually, and you hope to get something from the person you photograph that's different than other images you know of these people.

Life rarely presents fully finished photographs. An image evolves, often from a single strand of visual interest - a distant horizon, a moment of light, a held expression.

Most photographers would feel a certain embarrassment in admitting publicly that they carried within them a sense of wonder, yet without it they would not produce the work they do, whatever their particular field.

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

There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough - there has to be vision, and the two together can make a good photograph.

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

I've been taking photographs since I was a teenager, and fashion has taught me a lot more about photography. It's definitely inspired me.

Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.

The camera is not the instrument. People are always the instrument.

To catch a piece of life on camera and make it come alive, add layers to it and deliver a product that is wholesome is really exciting to me.

Photography belongs to a fraternity of its own. I was young and enthusiastic and wanted to take good pictures to show the other photographers. That, and the professional pride of convincing an editor that I was the man to go somewhere, were the most important things to me.

My work is about making candy for the eyes. It's about grabbing your attention. Even though my work is appearing in magazines I am trying to make a large picture. I want my photographs to read like a poster.

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.

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.

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

Light is my inspiration. My photographic images search for dimensions that words cannot touch- the result of intense responses to personal experiences. I do not wish to "record," but rather to touch upon the illusive meanings which I perceive and try to comprehend in this limitless universe.