Edward Steichen Quotes

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

I've never liked the moment of seeing something beautiful - a sunset, a moose, an elephant - and then raising a camera and trying to capture it for some future moment. That's always struck me as strange.

The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.

The camera photographs what's there.

Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.

I have been photographing people dancing for 20 or 30 years now, and I think I will eventually do a book of dancing photos.

We are only beginning to learn what to say in a photograph. The world we live in is a succession of fleeting moments, any one of which might say something significant.

As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

I have always found photography magical, and became more taken with it whilst modeling.

I'm a photographer, period. I love photography, the immediacy of it. I like the craft, the idea of saying 'I'm a photographer.'

I think that's the strength of photography - to decide the decisive moment, to click in the moment to come up with a picture that never comes back again.

Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.

It's something that I've always been attracted to, that idea of letting everything happen in a single frame.

It's actually one of the only things that I do that I don't get frustrated over. Everything else I do - racing, golf, video games - those things I want to win at. With photography, I think the camera wins every time.

I really loved taking photos when I was younger. I think my love for photography sparked my love for creating the visuals to support my music.

The camera and I have always had good chemistry.

It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.

I'm not very eloquent about things like this, but I think that writing and photography go together. I don't mean that they are related arts, because they're not. But the person doing it, I think, learns from both things about accuracy of the eye, about observation, and about sympathy toward what is in front of you... It's about honesty, or truth telling, and a way to find it in yourself, how to need it and learn from it.

The photographer's art is a continuous discovery which requires patience and time.

[The] arresting of time is photography's unique capacity, and the decision of when to click the shutter is the photographer's chief responsibility.

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.

I go out to take a walk, I see something, I take a picture. I take photographs. I have avoided profound explanations of what I do.

Photography is better than art. It is a solar phenomenon in which the artist collaborates with the sun.

Cartier-Bresson has said that photography seizes a 'decisive moment', that's true except that it shouldn't be taken too narrowly...does my picture of a cobweb in the rain represent a decisive moment? The exposure time was probably three or four minutes. That's a pretty long moment. I would say the decisive moment in that case was the moment in which I saw this thing and decided I wanted to photograph it.