Photographic Mastery Quotes

The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.

I enjoy very much seeing a good photographer working. There’s an elegance, just like in a bullfight.

It was amazing to watch him in the darkroom at an advanced age, still get excited when the results were pleasing. He still struggled like we all do in the darkroom and he struggled behind the camera, and when he had a success he was beaming.

Photography is the easiest thing to make, and one of the hardest things to make well.

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.

During my lifetime I have met dozens of writers and photographers in dozens of different countries. But I have encountered no one who could both write and photograph with the artistry of Robert Vavra.

I have a reverence for great photography, but I don't consider myself in that league.

Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment.

Photography is the easiest medium with which to be merely competent. Almost anybody can be competent. It's the hardest medium in which to have some sort of personal vision and to have a signature style.

Truly great images make all the other millions of images you look at unimportant. You gotta look at an image and understand it in a nanosecond.

Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography.