American Photographer Quotations

My favourite thing is to go where I've never been.

The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.

I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable.

Saturate yourself with your subject and the camera will all but take you by the hand.

If slaughterhouses had glass walls the whole world would be vegetarian.

It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.

What I mean by photographing as a participant rather than observer is that I'm not only involved directly with some of the activities that I photograph, such as mountain climbing, but even when I'm not I have the philosophy that my mind and body are part of the natural world.

Some people have compared the Klan images to ecclesiastical figures.

An artist is nothing without his or her obsessions, and I have mine.

My mountaineering skills are not important to my best photographs, but they do add a component to my work that is definitely a bit different than that of most photographers.

The subject must be thought of in terms of the 20th century, of houses he lives in and places he works, in terms of the kind of light the windows in these places let through and by which we see him every day.

Wanting to take a light camera with me when I climb or do mountain runs has kept me using exclusively 35 mm.

The fact that the movement was carried on by women who, for the most part, had no money of their own and were totally inexperienced in organization, and that they won their fight in about two generations, makes a story often dramatic and always worth preserving.

Paul persuaded me to join the band. I would never have had the courage otherwise. It was fun at the beginning. We were playing just for fun, with Paul's group.

I remember when an editor at the National Geographic promised to run about a dozen of my landscape pictures from a story on the John Muir trail as an essay, but when the group of editors got together, someone said that my pictures looked like postcards.

Owing to the fact that leaders in the women's groups made a point of serving on the jury here whenever they were called, we have always had an unusually high type of women represented on the jury.

I would like them all to enjoy life and try different things until there is something they really like.

I began to realise that film sees the world differently than the human eye, and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.

I wasn't looking for another marriage. I had been married before. He is a nice man - a geologist, an Ernest Hemingway type. But Paul and I married because of convention.

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

There's another horizon out there, one more horizon that you have to make for yourself and let other people discover it, and someone else will take it further on, you know.

Don't put my name on it. These are simply documents I make.

The reason that I keep writing is that all my most powerful messages about the fates of wild places that I care about need to have words as well as images.

Luckily, many other people tell me how they have had a particular landscape photograph of mine in their office or bedroom for 15 years and it always speaks to them strongly whenever they see it.

The man at Kodak told me the shots were very good and if I kept it up, they would give me an exhibition. Later, Kodak gave me my first exhibition.

I am a gambler. I decided to go in with Company E in the first wave.

When we tune in to an especially human way of viewing the landscape powerfully, it resonates with an audience.

We are really on top of one another at the moment and I think it is amazing how we stay so close. Maybe that's the test. Why not totally put yourself together, rather than always wonder whether you actually like each other?

My work has social implications, it functions in a social arena.

We have lasted this long close together, so we must have something going for each other.

Once you develop your own style, you know when you're able to give your best. Feeling at home is part of it, and I don't think that's an L.A. thing. It's a matter of the environment and of what affects you.

We spend so much time together, because that's how we like it. I never used to go on girl's nights out, even at school. And Paul has never liked going out for a night with the boys, either.

That's why I felt so at home when I went to Africa. It didn't matter that I was halfway around the world in a foreign country, because all those elements are universal. And I think that's one thing about my work: It's universal.

When you grow up your mother says, 'Wear rubbers or you'll catch cold.' When you become an adult you discover that you have the right not to wear rubbers and to see if you catch cold or not. It's something like that.

When I married Paul, we lived in St John's Wood in London. We had nice next-door neighbours, but you don't know anyone else. Everyone lives in isolation.

I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn't have a personal vision or doesn't communicate emotion fails.

I began taking pictures in the natural world to be able to show people what I was experiencing when I climbed and explored in Yosemite in the High Sierra.

Unfortunately, the Church's position on most contemporary issues makes it hard to take them seriously.

When you start out, you're not really aware. I didn't have a sense of photographic history.

I think that cognitive scientists would support the view that our visual system does not directly represent what is out there in the world and that our brain constructs a lot of the imagery that we believe we are seeing.

We both came from families in which parents got married, had children and the whole thing. So we were not the kind of people to live together permanently.

If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only too make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better.

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

When Paul was arrested in Japan for having hash in his luggage, I thought he'd be out that night. But it became really serious stuff when he was kept in a cell. I became more fearful as the days went by.

I'm exchanging molecules every 30 days with the natural world and in a spiritual sense I know I am a part of it and take my photographs from that emotional feeling within me, rather than from an emotional distance as a spectator.

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

The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance.

There's no question that photographs communicate more instantly and powerfully than words do, but if you want to communicate a complex concept clearly, you need words, too.

People have to find ways of explaining the work.

These days, most nature photographers are deeply committed to the environmental message.

But the constant filtering into the home of information about government, through mothers now as well as fathers, is making itself felt.

Out of the six of us, I am the quietest.

That was my first day in Washington, D.C., in 1942. I had experienced a kind of bigotry and discrimination here that I never expected to experience.

Who has time to manually spam web sites? That can't be very cost effective.

Well, I was born in Kansas, raised in Minnesota and spent a good part of my early life, up until I was about fifteen or sixteen, in Kansas.

Times change. The farmer's daughter now tells jokes about the traveling salesman.

Washington, D.C. in 1942 was not the easiest place in the world for a Negro to get along.

As I hold the future well-being of photography very dear I must see to it that these forces which militate against it be opposed and destroyed.

They all have some talent. Mary plays the recorder beautifully. I am not pushing them on, though. They are pretty good at the moment just being kids.

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is... the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.

Now, I recognize that there are certain postures and angles that make people see red, which are evidence of original sin or something, and I avoid that. I don't shoot that any more.

There is nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept.

It is the consensus of opinion among the bench and the bar here that the women's service as jurors has been quite as satisfactory as that of the men.

It's like people expect me to criticize my mother who died when I was fifteen because all I knew from her was perfection, you know?

Youth is that period when a young boy knows everything but how to make a living.

In our position, we could have a big house with maids and chauffeurs - but what's the point of having kids if you have all that?

If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough.

In order to be a diplomat, one must speak a number of languages, including doubletalk.

The combination of pictures and words together can be really effective, and I began to realise in my career that unless I wrote my own words, then my message was diluted.