Alfred Stieglitz famous quotes

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Inspirational #Inspiring #Photography

Wherever there is light, one can photograph.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Photography #Light #Photographer

The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Photography #Art #Expression

Photography my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Photography #Passion #Obsession

I do not object to retouching, dodging or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Photography #Long #Quality

The great geniuses are those who have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Vision #Genius #Spirit

The ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired off-hand, but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labor.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Photography #Hands #Years

When I make a picture, I make love.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Making Love #Photographer

My picture, Fifth Avenue, Winter is the result of a three hours' stand during a fierce snow-storm on February 22nd 1893, awaiting the proper moment. My patience was duly rewarded. Of course, the result contained an element of chance, as I might have stood there for hours without succeeding in getting the desired pictures.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Winter #Snow #Storm

I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Vision #Trying #Photograph

The fight for photography became my life.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Photography #Fighting

Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Moments #Utopia #Here And Now

All art, like all love, is rooted in heartache.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Art #Love Is #Heartache

If you place the imperfect next to the perfect, people will see the difference between the one and the other. But if you offer the imperfect alone, people are only too apt to be satisfied by it.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Differences #People #Perfect

Everything is relative except relatives, and they are absolute.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Relative

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?
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Lonely #Art #New York

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

#White #Snow #World

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.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Beautiful #Dream #People

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.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Teacher #Believe #School

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.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Photography #Art #Real

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.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Book #Parent #Atmosphere

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.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Photography #Mistake #Ideas

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.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Piano #Waiting #Miracle

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.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Photography #Gentleman #Imagine

My cloud photographs are equivalents of my most profound life experiences, my basic philosophy of life. All art is an equivalent of the artist’s most profound life experiences.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Art #Philosophy #Clouds

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

#Want #Wonderful

Several people feel I have photographed God. May be.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#People #May #Photographer

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.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Photography #Running #Struggle

The goal of art was the vital expression of self.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Art #Self #Expression

The scene fascinated me: a round straw hat; the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railings made of chain; white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below; circular iron machinery; a mast that cut into the sky, completing a triangle.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Art #Cutting #Men

Photography is my passion.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Photography #Passion #My Passion

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

#Photography #Artist #May

As a matter of fact, nearly all the greatest work is being, and has always been done, by those who are following photography for the love of it, and not merely for financial reasons. As the name implies, an amateur is one who works for love.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Photography #Names #Done

It is not art in the professionalized sense about which I care, but that which is created sacredly, as a result of a deep inner experience, with all of oneself, and that becomes 'art' in time.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Art #Care #Results

My photographs are a picture of the chaos in the world, and of my relationship to that chaos. My prints show the world’s constant upsetting of man’s equilibrium, and his eternal battle to reestablish it.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Men #Upset #Battle

For that is the power of the camera: seize the familiar and give it new meanings, a special significance by the mark of a personality.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Giving #Personality #Special

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.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Choices #Negative #Magazines

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.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Eye #Etching #Looks

There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Men #Done #Accepting

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.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Art #School #Matter

Photographers must learn not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs.
-- Alfred Stieglitz

#Looks #Photographer #Photograph