Alfred Stieglitz Quotes

I was sad to leave Europe in 1890, after my student days in Germany ... But then, once back in New York, I experienced an intense longing for Europe, for its vital tradition of music, theatre, art, craftsmanship ... I felt bewildered and lonely. How was I to use myself?

We had many books and pictures ... my parents' way of life doubtless left a lasting impression on me. They created an atmosphere in which a certain kind of freedom could exist. This may well account for my seeking a related sense of liberty as I grew up.

The scene fascinated me: a round straw hat; the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railings made of chain; white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below; circular iron machinery; a mast that cut into the sky, completing a triangle.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs [rather than paintings, etchings, etc.] that unless one has eyes and sees, they won't be seen - and still everyone will never forget having once looked at them.

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

Snow. White, white, white, soft and clean, and maddening shapes, with the whole world in them.

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.

As a matter of fact, nearly all the greatest work is being, and has always been done, by those who are following photography for the love of it, and not merely for financial reasons. As the name implies, an amateur is one who works for love.

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

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.

Everything is relative except relatives, and they are absolute.

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.

My picture, Fifth Avenue, Winter is the result of a three hours' stand during a fierce snow-storm on February 22nd 1893, awaiting the proper moment. My patience was duly rewarded. Of course, the result contained an element of chance, as I might have stood there for hours without succeeding in getting the desired pictures.

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.

My photographs are a picture of the chaos in the world, and of my relationship to that chaos. My prints show the world's constant upsetting of man's equilibrium, and his eternal battle to reestablish it.

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

When I make a picture, I make love.

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

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

My ideal is to achieve the ability to produce numberless prints from each negative, prints all significantly alive, yet indistinguishably alike, and to be able to circulate them at a price not higher than that of a popular magazine, or even a daily paper. To gain that ability there has been no choice but to follow the road I have chosen.

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.

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

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

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.

There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art.

Photography is my passion.

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