Photographic Quality Quotes

Quality doesn't mean deep blacks and whatever tonal range. That's not quality, that's a kind of quality. The pictures of Robert Frank might strike someone as being sloppy-the tone range isn't right and things like that-but they're far superior to the pictures of Ansel Adams with regard to quality, because the quality of Ansel Adams, if I may say so, is essentially the quality of a postcard. But the quality of Robert Frank is a quality that has something to do with what he's doing, what his mind is. It's not balancing out the sky to the sand and so forth. It's got to do with intention.

I do not like bad photographs. I don't like to be badly lit. There is a fashion, particularly on stage, for very 'toppy' lighting, which makes a child look 50. Ten o'clock is very good. If someone is taking a picture, you say, 'Lamps at 10 o'clock,' then everybody looks lovely.

Technically perfect, pictorially rotten. (Stieglitz's standard comment on photographs he rejected for publication in The American Amateur Photographer.)

The ‘machine-gun’ approach to photography – by which many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good – is fatal to serious results.

The good photographer will produce a competent picture every time whatever his subject. But only when his subject makes and immediate and direct appeal to his own interests will he produce a work of distinction.

I come from the school of thought that feels that if you can shoot film, you should shoot film.

Editorial photography has to be energetic and visually competitive.

No amount of toying with shades of print or with printing papers will transform a commonplace photograph into anything other than a commonplace photograph.