Black And White Photography Quotes by Erica Tazel, Henri Cartier-Bresson, August Sander, Elliott Erwitt, Arnold Newman, W. Eugene Smith and many others.
I am inspired by great food, theater, books, the beach, black-and-white photography, and great vocalists, like Dianne Reeves, Alice Smith, and Shirley Horn. I am inspired by my mentor Diana Castle, who is guiding me towards a truth and honesty in my life and work that I have always longed for.
It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera… they are made with the eye, heart and head.
In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.
The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.
A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they’ll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won’t do a thing for you if you don’t have anything in your head or in your heart.
Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness.
Life wanted faces that would express what we wanted to tell. Not just the unusual or striking face, but the face that would speak out the message from the printed page. I am always looking for some typical person or face that will tie the picture essay together in a human way.
Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.
My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.
Which is probably the reason why I work exclusively in black and white… to highlight that contrast.
I just get the will to do it. I don’t plan a photograph in advance… I work by impulse. No philosophy. No ideas. Not by the head but by the eyes. Eventually inspiration comes-instinct is the same as inspiration, and eventually it comes.
Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.
Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.
In fact, I probably learned more about photography from studying black-and-white photography in those magazines [Look Magazine and LIFE Magazine] than I did from watching movies here. That’s the truth.
You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.
The eye should learn to listen before it looks.
To some extent, the cult surrounding black-and-white photography is based on nostalgia.
