John Szarkowski famous quotes

04-17-2025

To quote out of context is the essence of the photographer's craft.
-- John Szarkowski

#Photography #Essence #Crafts
A skillful photographer can photograph anything well.
-- John Szarkowski

#Photographer #Photograph #Wells
Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere ...
-- John Szarkowski

#Photography #Photographer #Contests
The goal is not to make something factually impeccable, but seamlessly persuasive.
-- John Szarkowski

#Goal #Persuasive
Photography is the easiest thing in the world if one is willing to accept pictures that are flaccid, limp, bland, banal, indiscriminately informative, and pointless. But if one insists in a photograph that is both complex and vigorous it is almost impossible
-- John Szarkowski

#Photography #World #Impossible
Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.
-- John Szarkowski

#Photography #Writing #Numbers
It isn't what a picture is of, it is what it is about.
-- John Szarkowski
In practice a photographer does not concern himself with philosophical issues while working; he makes photographs, working with subject matter that he thinks will make the pictures.
-- John Szarkowski

#Photography #Philosophical #Thinking
A camera has interesting ideas of its own.
-- John Szarkowski

#Photography #Ideas #Interesting
The very best pictures adapt themselves to many changes in meaning.
-- John Szarkowski

#Photography #Best Picture
The photographerâ€™s vision convinces us to the degree that the photographer hides his hand.
-- John Szarkowski

#Hands #Vision #Degrees
One of the leading uses of photography by the mass media came to be called photojournalism. From the late 'twenties' to the early 'fifties' what might have been the golden age of this speciality - photographers worked largely as the possessors of special and arcane skills, like the ancient priests who practiced and monopolized the skills of pictography or carving or manuscript illumination. In those halcyon days the photographer enjoyed a privileged status.
-- John Szarkowski

#Photography #Illumination #Media
The world now contains more photographs than bricks, and they are, astonishingly, all different.
-- John Szarkowski

#Different #World #Bricks
The basic material of photographs is not intrinsically beautiful. It's not like ivory or tapestry or bronze or oil on canvas. You're not supposed to look at the thing, you're supposed to look through it. It's a window.
-- John Szarkowski

#Beautiful #Photography #Ivory
Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.
-- John Szarkowski

#Photography #Lying #Discovery
The simplicity of photography lies in the fact that it is very easy to make a picture. The staggering complexity of it lies in the fact that a thousand other pictures of the same subject would have been equally easy.
-- John Szarkowski

#Photography #Lying #Simplicity
A photographer's best work is, alas, generally done for himself.
-- John Szarkowski

#Done #Photographer #Best Work
Luck is the attentive photographer's best teacher.
-- John Szarkowski

#Photography #Teacher #Luck
The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it.
-- John Szarkowski

#Photography #Shapes #Lines
They were ... pure and unadulterated photographs, and sometimes they hinted at the existence of visual truths that had escaped all other systems of detection.
-- John Szarkowski

#Photography #Sometimes #Existence
Trained as a musician, [photographer Ansel] Adams understood the richness of variation that could be unfolded from a simple theme.
-- John Szarkowski

#Music #Simple #Variation

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