W. Eugene Smith Quotes

28 quotes in 491 categories

• Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness.
• I've never made any picture, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.
• Available light is any damn light that is available!
• Negatives are the notebooks, the jottings, the false starts, the whims, the poor drafts, and the good draft but never the completed version of the…
• Hardening of the categories causes art disease.
• Most photographers seem to operate with a pane of glass between themselves and their subjects. They just can't get inside and know the subject.
• What use having a great depth of field, if there is not an adequate depth of feeling?
• The purpose of all art is to cause a deep and emotion, also one that is entertaining or pleasing. Out of the depth and entertainment…
• In music I still prefer the minor key, and in printing I like the light coming from the dark. I like pictures that surmount the…
• My pictures are complex and so am I.
• Up to and including the moment of exposure, the photographer is working in an undeniably subjective way. By his choice of technical approach, by the…
• The journalistic photographer can have no other than a personal approach; and it is impossible for him to be completely objective. Honest—yes. Objective—no.
• I didn’t write the rules. Why would I follow them?
• My photographs at best hold only a small length, but through them I would suggest and criticize and illuminate and try to give compassionate understanding.
• The photographer must bear the responsibility for his work and its effect …[for] photographic journalism, because of its tremendous audience reached by publications using it,…
• I try to take what voice I have and I give it to those who don’t have one at all.
• I am an idealist. I often feel I would like to be an artist in an ivory tower. Yet it is imperative that I speak…
• Many claim I am a photographer of tragedy. In the greater sense I am not, for though I often photograph where the tragic emotion is…
• I can’t stand these damn shows on museum walls with neat little frames, where you look at the images as if they were pieces of…
• Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance. Always, I am on…

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