Minor White famous quotes

When gifts are given to me through my camera, I accept them graciously.
-- Minor White

#Photography #Cameras #Accepting

The reason why we want to remember an image varies: because we simply 'love it,' or dislike it so intensely that it becomes compulsive, or because it has made us realize something about ourselves, or has brought about some slight change in us. Perhaps the reader can recall some image, after the seeing of which he has never been quite the same.
-- Minor White

#Want #Remember #Realizing

I'm always mentally photographing everything as practice.
-- Minor White

#Photography #Practice

There's no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class. I'm always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don't give a damn how it got made.
-- Minor White

#Photography #Thinking #Class

When I look at pictures I have made, I have forgotten what I saw in front of the camera and respond only to what I am seeing in the photographs.
-- Minor White

#Cameras #Looks #Saws

...innocence of eye has a quality of its own. It means to see as a child sees, with freshness and acknowledgment of the wonder; it also means to see as an adult sees who has gone full circle and once again sees as a child - with freshness and an even deeper sense of wonder.
-- Minor White

#Children #Mean #Eye

Photography is a language more universal than words.
-- Minor White

#Photography #Language

When you approach something to photograph it, first be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence. Then don't leave until you have captured its essence.
-- Minor White

#Essence #Attention #Firsts

At first glance a photograph can inform us. At second glance it can reach us.
-- Minor White

#Photography #Firsts #Photograph

All photographs are self-portraits.
-- Minor White

#Self #Portraits #Photograph

Let the subject generate its own photographs. Become a camera.
-- Minor White

#Photography #Cameras #Photograph

No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen.
-- Minor White

#Photography #Long #Matter

Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence.
-- Minor White

#Photography #Attention #Stills

It is curious that I always want to group things, a series of sonnets, a series of photographs; whatever rationalizations appear, they originate in urges that are rarely satisfied with single images.
-- Minor White

#Want #Groups #Curious

We could teach photography as a way to make a living, and best of all, somehow to get students to experience for themselves photography as a way of life.
-- Minor White

#Photography #Way #Students

The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.
-- Minor White

#Photography #Order #Photographer

I have often photographed when I am not in tune with nature but the photographs look as if I had been. So I conclude that something in nature says, 'Come and take my photograph.' So I do, regardless of how I feel.
-- Minor White

#Looks #Tunes #Photographer

The development of a love of medium and a responsibility for one's own pictures is an overall goal.
-- Minor White

#Photography #Responsibility #Goal

If all your life means to you is water running over rocks, then photograph it, but I want to create something that would not have existed without me.
-- Minor White

#Running #Photography #Mean

Students were taught by doing.
-- Minor White

#Photography #Taught #Students

When I looked at things for what they are I was fool enough to persist in my folly and found that each photograph was a mirror of my Self.
-- Minor White

#Self #Mirrors #Fool

Photographers who come up with power never get accused of imitating anyone else even though they photograph the same broom, same street, same portraits.
-- Minor White

#Portraits #Photographer #Brooms

Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts.
-- Minor White

#Photography #Heart #Horizon

A very receptive state of mind... not unlike a sheet of film itself - seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second's exposure conceives a life in it.
-- Minor White

#Mind #Film #Sensitive

In putting images together I become active, and excitement is of another order - synthesis overshadows analysis.
-- Minor White

#Order #Together #Synthesis

One does not photograph something simply for 'what it is', but 'for what else it is.
-- Minor White

#Doe #Photograph

Some of the young photographers today enter photography where I leave off. My "grandchildren" astound me. What I worked for they seem to be born with. So I wonder where Their affirmations of Spirit will lead. My wish for them is that their unfolding proceeds to fullness of Spirit, however astonishing or anguished their lives.
-- Minor White

#Photography #Grandchildren #Wish

Different levels of photography require different levels of understanding and skill. A "press the button, let George do the rest" photographer needs little or no technical knowledge of photography. A zone system photographer takes more responsibility. He visualizes before he presses the button, and afterwards calibrates for predictable print values.
-- Minor White

#Photography #Responsibility #Skills

We emphasized the creativeness that happens at the moment of seeing over the kind that takes place in the dark room.
-- Minor White

#Photography #Dark #Rooms

Reaching a 'creative' state of mind thru positive action is considered preferable to waiting for 'inspiration'.
-- Minor White

#Photography #Inspiration #Creative

Camera and eye are together a time machine with which the mind and human being can do the same kind of violence to time and space as dreams.
-- Minor White

#Dream #Eye #Space

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.
-- Minor White

#Photograph #Should

While we cannot describe its appearance (the equivalent), we can define its function. When a photograph functions as an Equivalent we can say that at that moment, and for that person the photograph acts as a symbol or plays the role of a metaphor for something that is beyond the subject photographed.
-- Minor White

#Play #Roles #Moments

Before he has seen the whole, how unusually perceptive and imaginative the person must be to evolve the entire sequence by meditating on its single, pair or triplet of essential images.
-- Minor White

#Pairs #Essentials #Evolve

To engage a sequence, we keep in mind the photographs on either side of the one in our eye.
-- Minor White

#Eye #Mind #Sides

If I have anything to give you through camera, it must be of myself. … A gnawing burns inside … to make something of myself worth giving.
-- Minor White

#Self Worth #Giving #Cameras