Alfred Stieglitz Quotes

42 quotes in 634 categories

• The goal of art was the vital expression of self.
• 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…
• I do not object to retouching, dodging or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique.
• Photography is my passion.
• I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing.
• 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…
• 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.
• 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…
• Photography my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.
• 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…
• 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,…
• There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.
• 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…
• The great geniuses are those who have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience.
• All I want is to preserve that wonderful something which so purely exists between us.
• 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…
• When I make a picture, I make love.

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