Lee Friedlander Quotes

The world makes up my pictures, not me.

With a camera like that you don't believe you're in the masterpiece business. It's enough to be able to peck at the world.

At first, my presence in my photos was fascinating and disturbing. But as time passed and I was more a part of other ideas in my photos, I was able to add a giggle to those feelings.

I only wanted Uncle Vernon standing by his own car (a Hudson) on a clear day, I got him and the car. Ialso got a bit of Aunt Mary's laundry and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on the fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and 78 trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It's a generous medium, photography.

When you take a picture you haven't a clue that it is going to be what it is. Maybe you have a clue but you don't really know. There are too many possibilities. Part of the game is how many balls you can juggle. It is to me. When you are 12 you can juggle two. Maybe when you are 50 you can juggle five. That is an interesting concept to me: how much I can put in and still make it pull together?

A mysterious intersection of chance and attention that goes well beyond the existential surrealism of the 'decisive moment'.

I retired from everything except work.

Photography is a generous medium ...

[Garry Winogrand] was a bull of a man and the world his china shop.

I take more to the subject than to my ideas about it. I am not interested in any idea I have had, the subject is so demanding and so important.

The idea that the snapshot would be thought of as a cult or movement is very tiresome to me and, I'm sure, confusing to others. It's a swell word I've always liked. It probably came about because it describes a basic fact of photography. In a snap, or small portion of time, all that the camera can consume in breadth and bite and light is rendered in astonishing detail: all the leaves on a tree, as well as the tree itself and all its surroundings.

Sometimes just the facts of the matter make it interesting.

Photographs are so loaded with information. They're remarkable. As I said, you get both the tree and the forest.