Black And White Photography Quotes

Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn’t look like somebody else’s work.

The eye should learn to listen before it looks.

Life wanted faces that would express what we wanted to tell. Not just the unusual or striking face, but the face that would speak out the message from the printed page. I am always looking for some typical person or face that will tie the picture essay together in a human way.

You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.

In fact, I probably learned more about photography from studying black-and-white photography in those magazines [Look Magazine and LIFE Magazine] than I did from watching movies here. That’s the truth.

Black and white photography is truly quite a ‘departure from reality’, and the transition from one aspect of visual magic to another was not as complete as many imagine.

In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.

Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.

My philosophy, like color television, is all there in black and white.

In the beginning it was all black and white.

I just get the will to do it.В  I don’t plan a photograph in advance…  I work by impulse.В  No philosophy.В  No ideas.В  Not by the head but by the eyes.В  Eventually inspiration comes-instinct is the same as inspiration, and eventually it comes.

…one sees differently with color photography than black-and-white… in short, visualization must be modified by the specific nature of the equipment and materials being used.

Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness.

It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera… they are made with the eye, heart and head.

Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn’t interest me.

Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.