Alfred Stieglitz Quotes

Wherever there is light, one can photograph.

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

A woman artist could be one of those intuitive geniuses [who] have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience.

Photography my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.

Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere.

All art, like all love, is rooted in heartache.

Photographers must learn not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs.

My cloud photographs are equivalents of my most profound life experiences, my basic philosophy of life. All art is an equivalent of the artist’s most profound life experiences.

If you place the imperfect next to the perfect, people will see the difference between the one and the other. But if you offer the imperfect alone, people are only too apt to be satisfied by it.

The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.

I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.

I do not object to retouching, dodging or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique.

The ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired off-hand, but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labor.

The goal of art was the vital expression of self.

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.

To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.

Everything is relative except relatives, and they are absolute.

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.

Beautiful dreams - if the world were more beautiful they would come true - But the world is relentless & cruel - people are - they must be, I suppose, or they could not live.

When I make a picture, I make love.

There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.

Technically perfect, pictorially rotten. (Stieglitz's standard comment on photographs he rejected for publication in The American Amateur Photographer.)

Photography is my passion.

The fight for photography became my life.

I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing.

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.

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.

Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze.

A work is not art until enough noise has been made about it and someone rich comes along and buys it.

All I want is to preserve that wonderful something which so purely exists between us.

Several people feel I have photographed God. May be.

Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.