Edward Steichen Quotes

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

When I first became interested in photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don't give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself.

Once you really commence to see things, then you really commence to feel things.

Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyonwith a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed.

Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product.

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.

The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each to himself. And that is the most complicated thing on earth.

The boy and girl going hand in hand through a meadow; the mother washing her baby; the sweet simple things in life. We have almost lost track of them. On the one side, we over-intellectualize everything; on the other hand, we are over-mechanized. We can understand the danger of the atomic bomb, but the danger of our misunderstanding the meaning of life is much more serious.

When that shutter clicks, anything else that can be done afterward is not worth consideration.

I knew, of course, that trees and plants had roots, stems, bark, branches and foliage that reached up toward the light. But I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself.

No photographer is as good as the simplest camera.

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.

Every ten years a man should give himself a good kick in the pants.

A photograph is worth a thousand words, provided it is accompanied by only ten words.

I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself.

Women-the greatest natural resource in the world today.

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face.

Every photograph is a fake from start to finish.

It is an error common to many artists, who strive merely to avoid mistakes, when all our efforts should be to create positive and important work. Better positive and important with mistakes and failures than perfect mediocrity.

Art for art's sake is dead, if it ever lived.

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

To make good photographs, to express something, to contribute something to the world he lives in, and to contribute something to the art of photography besides imitations of the best photographers on the market today, that is basic training, the understanding of self.

You know... that a blank wall is an apalling thing to look at... The wall of a museum - a canvas - a piece of film - or a guy sitting in front of a typewriter. Then, you start out to do something - that vague thing called creation. The beginning strikes awe within you.

There is only one optimist. He has been here since man has been on this earth, and that is man himself. If we hadn't had such a magnificent optimism to carry us through all these things, we wouldn't be here. We have survived it on our optimism.

A good daguerreotype was as perfect a kind of photograph as was ever made.