Childe Hassam Quotes

One of the things I've always loved about New York is there is so much precedent for ornament on industrial buildings.

Proportion is that agreeable harmony between the several parts of a building, which is the result of a just and regular agreement of them with each other; the height to the width, this to the length, and each of these to the whole.

What's fun about shooting exteriors on the street in Toronto is that there are cable cars.

The skylines of Buffalo, New York, and Toronto, Ontario, some 40 miles away, can be seen from the eight observation areas of the Seagram Tower.

Now I'm writing about contemporary Los Angeles from memory. My process was to hang out, observe, research what I was writing about, and almost immediately go back to my office and write those sections. So it was a very close transfer between observation and writing.

I like shooting in New York because I have such a connection to the city. I have so many memories there.

I like shaped things. I like shape in things, and I do overshape things, it's true.

I know that if I were to take ugly photographs, no one would be interested in looking at them.

I'm just interested in what makes a photograph.

Generally, when it comes to covers, I try and add elements that may not take your immediate attention but really become important the more you look at them.

So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design.

I think one of my favorite things about Paris is the ever-present, nonstop beauty of the city. So I would just walk as much as possible.

The greatest work of art about New York? The question seems nebulous. The city's magic and majesty are distilled in the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand.

All I wanted was to connect my moods with those of Paris. Beauty paints and when it painted most, I shot.

I don't like gimmicky pictures; I've always hated them. I like pictures that are very clear and clean, whether you're a great street photographer - somebody like Friedlander or Winogrand or Cartier-Bresson - or whether you're a portraitist, like Irving Penn.

I was drawn to street photography because there are pictures everywhere there: a woman holding a dog, a baby screaming to be put in a pram, kids playing punch ball, stores with huge barrels of kosher pickles outside. I wanted to photograph life, and here it was.

When taking a photo, I tend to look for one of the following: depth, symmetry, color or contrast. All of those things catch my eye to the point where I stop dead in my tracks to capture whatever it is that I've seen.

I love going to the Via Giulia, a beautiful old cobbled street, which has a bridge at one end behind the Palazzo Farnese. It has long creepers hanging from it, and is the most evocative, beautiful place to stand and enjoy the city.

Every picture that is successful has one little miracle in it.

Providing, meaning to a mass of unrelated needs, ideas, words and pictures - it is the designer's job to select and fit this material together and make it interesting.

And then as I frequently do, some times I'll peek out from underneath the focusing cloth and just look around the edges of the frame that I'm not seeing, see if there's something that should be adjusted in terms of changing the camera position.

Old San Francisco - the one so many nostalgics yearn for - had buildings that related well to each other.

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

It's far better to shoot a good picture than a good-looking picture.

I struck upon this kind of crazy idea that I was going to go to New York and stop 10,000 people on the streets and take their portrait and create kind of a photographic census of the city.