Imogen Cunningham Quotations

I don't think there's any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.

I don't love the world. I think Jupiter should have hit us.

Everybody who does anything for the public can be criticized. There's always someone who doesn't like it.

A woman said to me when she first sat down, You're photographing the wrong side of my face. I said, Oh, is there one?

I never stopped photographing. There were a couple of years when I didn't have a darkroom, but that didn't stop me from photographing.

I was poor. When you're poor you work, and when you're rich you expect somebody to hand it to you. So I think being reasonably poor is very good for people.

When I need names they drop out of my head; when I don't need them they drop back.

Anybody is influenced by where and how he lives.

My mind is vacant on names, but I know him as well as anything. When I need names they drop out of my head; when I don't need them they drop back.

When you do portraits professionally it's not a desire, it's for money.

I don't talk about success. I don't know what it is. Wait until I'm dead.

There are certain things you don't discuss with Ansel, especially if you don't agree.

I told the students that whatever they did in class was for the wastebasket.

I turn people into human beings by not making them into gods.

I was invited to photograph Hollywood. They asked me what I would like to photograph. I said, Ugly men.

I'd never kill myself for a man. I wouldn't do it for anybody.

It's silly to keep people alive who have a terrible disease.

Some people say to me, Isn't it too bad that people discovered you so late? I never thought that.

When People magazine called me, I did the job on Ansel. I'm older than Ansel and he has to mind me.

You see, I became kind of a drop-out in science after I came back to America.

Well, I turn people into human beings by not making them into gods.

Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don't know.

When people ask me silly questions about my private life, I just say, I don't discuss that.

I became kind of a drop-out in science after I came back to America. I wanted to photograph.

I think San Francisco is the best place in the whole world for an easy life.

I was brought up on art. My father thought I had a great hand at art and sent me to art school. But he did not want me to become a photographer.

I don't know what love means.

Suppose Cartier-Bresson asked the man who jumped the puddle to do it again --- it never would have been the same. Start stealing!

Get it out of your historic head.

Which is my best picture? The one I will do tomorrow.

I never divide photographers into creative and uncreative, I just call them photographers. Who is creative? How do you know who is creative or not?

I don't resent anything.

...There are too many people studying it [photography] now who are never going to make it. You can't give them a formula for making it. You have to have it in you first, you don't learn it. The seeing eye is the important thing.

I just believe in working. I'm not one of those romantic explainers of my own individual point of view.

None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.

You know, a documentary is only interesting once in a while. If you look at a whole book of Dorothea [Lange]'s where she has row after row of people bending over and digging out carrots - that can be very tedious. And so it's only once in a while that something happens that is worth doing.

So many people dislike themselves so thoroughly that they never see any reproduction of themselves that suits. None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.

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

The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.

I wasn't very ambitious. I think that's the solution. I just took things as they came. I wouldn't say I didn't have any problem, but I didn't care. I didn't think I was going to save the world by doing photography as some of these people do. I was just having a good time doing it, and so I still had a good time no matter what I had to photograph.

Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I'm going to take tomorrow.