Paul Strand Quotations

This is a nice format because we get 10 guys competing on one of the area's most challenging courses. The boys struggled a bit today, but it was good to get on this course before we come back for the third leg of the conference.

Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningness. If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

The photographer's problem is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium, for it is precisely here that honesty no less than intensity of vision is the pre-requisite of a living expression. The fullest realization of this is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation, through the use of straight photographic methods.

To be a photographer you must have something to say about the world.

Did I express my personality? I think that's quite unimportant because it's not people's selves but what they have to say about life that's important.

All light is available light.

Photography is only a new road from a different direction, but moving toward the common goal, which is life.

The camera machine cannot evade the objects which are in front of it. When the photographer selects this movement, the light, the objects, he must be true to them. If he includes in his space a strip of grass, it must be felt as the living differentiated thing it is and so recorded. It must take its proper but no less important place as a shape and a texture in relationship to the mountain tree or what not, which are included.

The documentary photographer aims his camera at the real world to record truthfulness. At the same time, he must strive for form, to devise effective ways of organizing and using the material. For content and form are interrelated. The problems presented by content and form must be so developed that the result is fundimentally [sic] true to the realities of life as we know it. The chief problem is to find a form that adequately represents the reality.

Photography... is either an expression of a cosmic vision, an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing - to me. (1919)