Minor White Quotes

To engage a sequence, we keep in mind the photographs on either side of the one in our eye.

Photographers who come up with power never get accused of imitating anyone else even though they photograph the same broom, same street, same portraits.

The state of mind of the photographer creating is a blank. I might add that this condition exists only at special times, namely when looking for pictures. -Something keeps him from falling off curbs, down open manholes, into bumpers of skidding trucks while in this condition but goes off duty at other times ... This is a very special kind of blank. A very active state of mind really, it is a very receptive state ...

Let the subject generate its own photographs. Become a camera.

There's no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class. I'm always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don't give a damn how it got made.

Camera and eye are together a time machine with which the mind and human being can do the same kind of violence to time and space as dreams.

The development of a love of medium and a responsibility for one's own pictures is an overall goal.

If I have anything to give you through camera, it must be of myself. ... A gnawing burns inside ... to make something of myself worth giving.

To get from the tangible to the intangible (which mature artists in any medium claim as part of their task) a paradox of some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the visual facts upon which he is utterly dependent, a paradox is the only possible tool. And the talisman paradox for unique photography is to work "the mirror with a memory" as if it were a mirage, and the camera is a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor ... . Once freed of the tyranny of surfaces and textures, substance and form [the photographer] can use the same to pursue poetic truth" (Minor White, Newhall, 281).

The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.

Before he has seen the whole, how unusually perceptive and imaginative the person must be to evolve the entire sequence by meditating on its single, pair or triplet of essential images.

If all your life means to you is water running over rocks, then photograph it, but I want to create something that would not have existed without me.

Students were taught by doing.

No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer it has chosen.

When I looked at things for what they are I was fool enough to persist in my folly and found that each photograph was a mirror of my Self.

All photographs are self-portraits.

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.

In putting images together I become active, and excitement is of another order - synthesis overshadows analysis.

Watching the way the current moves a blade of grass - sometimes I've seen that happen and it has just turned me inside out.

A very receptive state of mind ... not unlike a sheet of film itself - seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second's exposure conceives a life in it.

I have often photographed when I am not in tune with nature but the photographs look as if I had been. So I conclude that something in nature says, 'Come and take my photograph.' So I do, regardless of how I feel.

Different levels of photography require different levels of understanding and skill. A "press the button, let George do the rest" photographer needs little or no technical knowledge of photography. A zone system photographer takes more responsibility. He visualizes before he presses the button, and afterwards calibrates for predictable print values.

When gifts are given to me through my camera, I accept them graciously.

Innocence of eye has a quality of its own. It means to see as a child sees, with freshness and acknowledgment of the wonder; it also means to see as an adult sees who has gone full circle and once again sees as a child - with freshness and an even deeper sense of wonder.

Sometimes we work so fast that we don't really understand what's going on in front of the camera. We just kind of sense that, 'Oh my God, it's significant!' and photograph impulsively while trying to get the exposure right. Exposure occupies my mind while intuition frames the images.

Photography is a language more universal than words.

We emphasized the creativeness that happens at the moment of seeing over the kind that takes place in the dark room.