Alfred Stieglitz Quotes - Page 2

Photography is my passion.

All I want is to preserve that wonderful something which so purely exists between us.

Standing up here on the hill away from all humans - seeing these Wonders taking place before one's eyes - so silently... watching the silence of Nature. No school - no church - is as good a teacher as the eye understandingly seeing what's before it. I believe this more firmly than ever.

Beautiful dreams - if the world were more beautiful they would come true - But the world is relentless & cruel - people are - they must be, I suppose, or they could not live.

Let me here call attention to one of the most universally popular mistakes that have to do with photography - that of classing supposedly excellent work as professional, and using the term amateur to convey the idea of immature productions and to excuse atrociously poor photographs.

My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs [rather than paintings, etchings, etc.] that unless one has eyes and sees, they won't be seen - and still everyone will never forget having once looked at them.

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

Snow. White, white, white, soft and clean, and maddening shapes, with the whole world in them.

There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art.

Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze.

Several people feel I have photographed God. May be.

A work is not art until enough noise has been made about it and someone rich comes along and buys it.

My ideal is to achieve the ability to produce numberless prints from each negative, prints all significantly alive, yet indistinguishably alike, and to be able to circulate them at a price not higher than that of a popular magazine, or even a daily paper. To gain that ability there has been no choice but to follow the road I have chosen.

The fight for photography became my life.

We had many books and pictures... my parents' way of life doubtless left a lasting impression on me. They created an atmosphere in which a certain kind of freedom could exist. This may well account for my seeking a related sense of liberty as I grew up.

If you can imagine photography in the guise of a woman and you’d ask her what she thought of Stieglitz, she’d say: He always treated me like a gentleman.

I have all but killed myself for Photography. My passion for it is greater than ever. It's forty years that I have fought its fight... I am not fighting to make a 'name' for myself. Maybe you have some feeling for what the fight is for. It's a world's fight... All that's born of spirit seems mad in these days of materialism run riot.

The camera was waiting for me by predestination and I took to it as a musician takes to the piano or a painter to canvas. I found that I was master of the elements, that I could work miracles.

I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing.

I was sad to leave Europe in 1890, after my student days in Germany... But then, once back in New York, I experienced an intense longing for Europe, for its vital tradition of music, theatre, art, craftsmanship... I felt bewildered and lonely. How was I to use myself?

Before the people at large, and for that matter, the artists themselves, understand what photography really means, as I understand that term, it is essential for them to be taught the real meaning of art.