Paul Strand Quotes

Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.

It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.

The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.

It is easy to make a picture of someone and call it a portrait. The difficulty lies in making a picture that makes the viewer care about a stranger.

If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

No matter what lens you use, no matter what speed the film, no matter how you develop it, no matter how you print it, you cannot say more than you can see.

The important thing is, you have to have something important to say about the world.

All good art is abstract in its structure.

I've always wanted to be aware of what's going on around me, and I've wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time.

Objectivity is of the very essence of photography, its contribution and at the same time its limitation

I like to photograph people who have strength and dignity in their faces. Whatever life has done to them, it hasn’t destroyed them.

Photography is only a new road from a different direction, but moving toward the common goal, which is life.

Photography... is either an expression of a cosmic vision, an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing - to me. (1919)

I think of myself as an explorer who has spent his life on a long voyage of discovery.

All light is available light.

If the photographer is not a discoverer, then he is not an artist.

To be a photographer you must have something to say about the world.

If Ansel Adams gets a thousand dollars a print, I want ten thousand.

Did I express my personality? I think that's quite unimportant because it's not people's selves but what they have to say about life that's important.

I don't care how you photograph - use the kitchen mop if you must, but if the product is not true to the laws of photography... you have produced something that is dead. (1923)