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La photographie est un état d'esprit, il faut être éveillé et exigeant.
L'essentiel est de ne pas chercher à plaire.

bernard plossu

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The geography of the sailor is not always the one of the cartographer, for whom a cape is a cape with its longitude and latitude. For the sailor, a great cape is both very simple and extremely complex, with rocks, currents, furling seas, beautiful oceans, good winds and gusts, moments of happiness and of fright, fatigue, dreams, aching hands, an empty stomach, marvelous minutes and sometimes suffering. A great cape, for us, cannot be translated only into a latitude and a longitude. A great cape has a soul, with shadows and colors, very soft, very violent. A soul as smooth as that of a child, as hard as that of a criminal.

Bernard Moitessier

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It’s a simple assumption to believe that in photography everything has been done already. Of course, it’s not true. There are many things waiting for be discovered by a creative artist. But believing that everything has been done is easier than thinking about what hasn’t been done: It’s not like you can will your brain into coming up with a genius new idea. You can’t. What’s the point, though, of taking pictures if everything has been done already? The answer is simple and straightforward: Unless you want to view photography as part of the entertainment industry where all that matters are cheap new thrills, that which has been seen thousands of times deserves to be seen yet another time, in a different way.

J. M. Colberg

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Quality doesn't mean deep blacks and whatever tonal range. That's not quality, that's a kind of quality. The pictures of Robert Frank might strike someone as being sloppy - the tone range isn't right and things like that - but they're far superior to the pictures of Ansel Adams with regard to quality, because the quality of Ansel Adams, if I may say so, is essentially the quality of a postcard. But the quality of Robert Frank is a quality that has something to do with what he's doing, what his mind is. It's not balancing out the sky to the sand and so forth. It's got to do with intention.

Elliot Erwit

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When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.


© robert frank

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A portrait can be more than simply a photograph of a person.
Under the right conditions it becomes a visual representation of a dialogue
between a subject and a photographer that is communicated to the viewer.

Dan Larkin

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Things happen in front of you.
That's perhaps the most wonderful and mysterious aspect of photography.
It seemed like you just had to decide when and where to aim the camera.
The process was linear and it never stopped.
That's still true,
although i've traded in my need for always taking pictures.
I can let them go by sometimes now
and just be there?

Annie Leibovitz

(read in 'At work' Annie Leibovitz)

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"The photograph isn't what was photographed. It's something else. It's a new fact."

Gary Winogrand