Aaron Siskind famous quotes

04-17-2025

We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect... but, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs.
-- Aaron Siskind

#Photography #Art #Believe
If you look very intensely and slowly things will happen that you never dreamed of before.
-- Aaron Siskind

#Looks
I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx.
-- Aaron Siskind

#Photography #Men #May
Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.
-- Aaron Siskind

#Inspirational #Inspiring #Photography
Almost inevitably there are tensions in the picture, tensions between the outside world and the inside world. For me, a successful picture resolves these tensions without eliminating them.
-- Aaron Siskind

#Successful #World #Resolve
Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving.
-- Aaron Siskind

#Photography #Touching #Feelings
To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesnâ€™t think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.
-- Aaron Siskind

#Photography #Art #Mean
As the language or vocabulary of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted, shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.
-- Aaron Siskind

#Photography #Mean #Vocabulary
In any art, you don't know in advance what you want to say - it's revealed to you as you say it. That's the difference between art and illustration.
-- Aaron Siskind

#Photography #Art #Creativity
Producing a photographic document involves preparation in excess. There is first the examination of the idea of the project. Then the visits to the scene, the casual conversations, and more formal interviews - talking, and listening, and looking, looking. ... And finally, the pictures themselves, each one planned, talked, taken and examined in terms of the whole.
-- Aaron Siskind

#Photography #Taken #Talking
The business of making a photograph may be said in simple terms to consist of three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet of paper on which the picture will be realized, and the experience which brings them together.
-- Aaron Siskind

#Photography #Simple #Together
What is the subject matter of this apparently very personal world? It has been suggested that these shapes and images are underworld characters, the inhabitants of the vast common realm of memories that have gone down below the level of conscious control. It may be they are. The degree of emotional involvement and the amount of free association with the material being photographed would point in that direction.
-- Aaron Siskind

#Photography #Memories #Character
I was given a small camera as a wedding gift from a very dear friend. My first pictures were taken on my honeymoon. As soon as I became familiar with the camera, I was intrigued with the possibilities of expression it offered. It was like a discovery for me.
-- Aaron Siskind

#Photography #Taken #Discovery
The only nature I'm interested in is my own nature.
-- Aaron Siskind

#Photography
However, I must stress that my own interest is immediate and in the picture. What I am conscious of and what I feel is the picture I am making, the relation of that picture to others I have made and, more generally, its relation to others I have experienced.
-- Aaron Siskind

#Photography #Stress #Conscious
When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order (unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder).
-- Aaron Siskind

#Photography #Self #Order
As photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs. Move on objects with your eye straight on, to the left, around on the right. Watch them grow large as they approach, group and regroup as you shift your position. Relationships gradually emerge and sometimes assert themselves with finality. And that's your picture.
-- Aaron Siskind

#Moving #Eye #Relax

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