Edwin Land Quotes

The camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time.

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.

Photography helps people to see.

A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it.

About shadows: do we see shadows? Loads of people don't. A camera will notice a shadow, but how many people have got a shadow in front of them when they take a picture and don't notice it, and then they see it in the photograph because the photograph will catch the shadow.

I don't take the camera out with me. My eyes are the camera for me every day.

You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

We don't all see the same way at all. Even if I'm sitting looking at you, there is always the memory of you as well. And a memory is now. So someone who's never met you before is seeing a different person. That's bound to be the case. We all see something different. I assume most people don't look very hard at anything.

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

Let's face it, the human eye is clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible when compared to the camera's eye.

Famous in our circles is the story of the visiting English banker who in 1948 upon seeing our model 95 camera commented, 'Very interesting, but why would one want a picture in a minute?'

When I look at pictures I have made, I have forgotten what I saw in front of the camera and respond only to what I am seeing in the photographs.

I like being behind the camera because I can control perception and what people see.

Memory demands an image.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.

Leica, schmeica. The camera doesn't make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But you have to see.

To see life. To see the world. To watch the faces of the poor, and the gestures of the proud. To see strange things. Machines, armies, multitudes, and shadows in the jungle. To see, and to take pleasure in seeing. To see and be instructed. To see and be amazed. (Describing the powers of photography; written for the launch of LIFE Magazine, 1936.)

I never take pictures. Skies are much larger in reminiscences and my friends are much better-looking. Photos crop reality into little squares; instead, I have very good binoculars.

The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?

Telescopes and binoculars endanger the ever-distant sublime.

[A Polaroid camera] places before you a thing that is more of the thing than the thing was.

The camera is a mirror with a memory, but it cannot think.

I thought using three cameras was a lot better than one, because you could see where you were going, where you'd been, and all kinds of things - more like life. I think photography has colored our vision. We're now in an area where it might break something. I think this is a time. I feel it. I don't know whether I'll be here long enough to experience it. I've no plans to leave yet.

As small, quick, foolproof cameras became generally available, moreover, the camera has been used so much and so flabbily by so many people that it has acted as a sort of contraceptive on the ability to see.

But it is a pipe." "No, it's not," I said. It's a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It's very clever.