I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing.
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.
When I make a picture, I make love.
Everything is relative except relatives, and they are absolute.
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.
Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze.
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.
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.
A work is not art until enough noise has been made about it and someone rich comes along and buys it.
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.
Several people feel I have photographed God. May be.
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.
There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.
All I want is to preserve that wonderful something which so purely exists between us.
I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.
The fight for photography became my life.
Snow. White, white, white, soft and clean, and maddening shapes, with the whole world in them.
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.
Photography is my passion.
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.