Ernst Haas Quotations

There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.

Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry.

I am not interested in shooting new things - I am interested to see things new.

A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?

With photography a new language has been created. Now for the first time it is possible to express reality by reality. We can look at an impression as long as we wish, we can delve into it and, so to speak, renew past experiences at will.

Bored with obvious reality, I find my fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view. Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry.

All I wanted was to connect my moods with those of Paris. Beauty paints and when it painted most, I shot.

The best pictures differentiate themselves by nuances...a tiny relationship - either a harmony or a disharmony - that creates a picture.

We can write the new chapters in a visual language whose prose and poetry will need no translation.

There is no formula. There are only confirmations to formulas which one has already discovered oneself.

A few words about the question of whether photography is art or not: I never understood the question.

The camera only facilitates the taking. The photographer must do the giving in order to transform and transcend ordinary reality. The problem is to transform without deforming. He must gain intensity in form and content by bringing a subjective order into an objective chaos.

Beware of direct inspiration. It leads too quickly to repetitions of what inspired you.

I have always felt better taking a risk than an easier route for what I believe in.

Refine your senses through the great masters of music, painting, and poetry.

I don't believe so much in the value of a single picture anymore. I don't really photograph for the wall.

The artist must express the summation of his feeling, knowing and believing through the unity of his life and work.

Is photography art?... The pure definition of the word 'art' alone is too vague today to break one's brain and soul about it. Let us take a little vacation from this word.

Only a vision - that is what one must have.

in the smallest cells are reflections of the largest. And in photography, through an interplay of scales, a whole universe within a universe can be revealed.

I prefer to be noticed some day, first for my ideas and second for my good eye...

The most important lens you have is your legs

Photography is a transformation, not a reproduction.

Every work of art has its necessity; find out your very own. Ask yourself if you would do it if nobody would ever see it, if you would never be compensated for it, if nobody ever wanted it. If you come to a clear ‘yes’ in spite of it, then go ahead and don’t doubt it anymore.

In every artist there is poetry. In every human being there is the poetic element. We know, we feel, we believe.

My theory of composition? Simple: do not release the shutter until everything in the viewfinder feels just right.

You don’t take pictures, the good ones happen to you.

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.

Style has no formula, but it has a secret key. It is the extension of your personality. The summation of this indefinable net of your feeling, knowledge and experience. Take colour as a totality of relations within a framecolour is joy. One does not think joy. One is carried by it.

Best wide-angle lens? Two steps backward. Look for the 'ah-ha'.

The best zoom lens is your legs.

There are two kinds of photographers: those who compose pictures and those who take them. The former work in studios. For the latter, the studio is the world... For them, the ordinary doesn't exist: every thing in life is a source of nourishment.

I want to be remembered much more by a total vision than a few perfect single pictures.

Style has no formula, but it has a secret key. It is the extension of your personality.

To express dynamic motion through a static moment became for me limited and unsatisfactory. The basic idea was to liberate myself from this old concept and arrive at an image in which the spectator could feel the beauty of a fourth dimension, which lies much more between moments than within a moment. In music one remembers never one tone, but a melody, a theme, a movement. In dance, never a moment, but again the beauty of a movement in time and space.

Beware of too much taste as it leads to sterility.

Living in a time of the increasing struggle of the mechanization of man, photography has become another example of this paradoxical problem of how to humanize, how to overcome a machine on which we are thoroughly dependent... the camera...

Don't park... Arrival is the death of inspiration.

Learn by doing or even better unlearn by doing. The opposite of what you learned.

Through photography, both artist and scientist can find a common denominator in their search for the synthesis of modern vision in time, space and structure.

I love to read theories without ever using them when working... The paradoxical fact in the aesthetic is that theories are also true in reverse.

You become things, you become an atmosphere, and if you become it, which means you incorporate it within you, you can also give it back. You can put this feeling into a picture. A painter can do it. And a musician can do it and I think a photographer can do that too and that I would call the dreaming with open eyes.

Color is joy. One does not think joy. One is carried by it.

Decide for yourself what kind of works you want to create... facts, essays, poems - do you want to speak or to sing?

Don't ever over-analyze your results. Don't ever try to find your own secret or the one which you admire. One does not try to catch soap bubbles. One enjoys them in flight and is grateful for their fluid existence.

Beware of color theories. Theories in color photography are dangerous. The plain fact that there are so many of them proves my point.

There are almost too many possibilities. Photography is in direct proportion with our time: multiple, faster, instant. Because it is so easy, it will be more difficult.

Leica, schmeica. The camera doesn't make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But you have to see.

Photography is a bridge between science and art. It brings to science what it needs most, the artistic sense, and to art the proof that nothing can be imagined which cannot be matched in the counterpoints of nature.

A picture can be an answer as well as a question but if you can't answer your question try to question your question... There can be questions without answers but no answers without questions.

A picture is the expression of an impression

All I wanted was to connect my moods with those of Paris. Beauty pains and when it pained most, I shot.

We all would love sometimes to be free from our own knowledge. It is even the most difficult to unlearn - as the most important problems are.