Street Photographer Quotes

I'm a street photographer, but I'm interested in any ironic, whimsical images, and there's something very romantic about a circus. ~ Mary Ellen Mark

Well, I'm not going to get into that. I think that those kind of distinctions and lists of titles like "street photographer" are so stupid. I'm a photographer, a still photographer. That's it. ~ Garry Winogrand

After all these years of wandering around as a street photographer and a journalist, I decided that this world is such a curious, screwed up place so full of contradictions ... that I couldn't look at it any more in the raw form without trying to find some way of balancing it in a more philosophical context - less in a reportorial manner and more in an artistic one. ~ Burk Uzzle

I don't like gimmicky pictures; I've always hated them. I like pictures that are very clear and clean, whether you're a great street photographer - somebody like Friedlander or Winogrand or Cartier-Bresson - or whether you're a portraitist, like Irving Penn. ~ Mary Ellen Mark

Your most important gear is your eye, heart and soul. ~ Marius Vieth

Photoshop and Lightroom help me transform my photos into what my heart felt, but my camera couldn't quite capture! ~ Marius Vieth

It is not sociologists who provide insights but photographers of our sort who are observers at the very center of their times. I have always felt strongly that this was the photographer's true vocation. ~ Brassai

The laws of the jungle remind me of the laws of the street. When I came abroad, I had to learn a different set of laws. Everywhere we go there is a different set of laws. Most of them unwritten. ~ Heidi Heilig

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. ~ Herman Melville

The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter - 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites. ~ Chuck Close

We're going to fight this battle with everything we have, and we will probably lose. But then we will fight it again, and we will lose a little less, for this battle will win us many supporters. And then we'll lose *again*. And *again*. And we will fight on. Because as hard as it is to win by fighting, it's impossible to win by doing nothing. ~ Cory Doctorow

I hadn't thought that as well as the obvious fears about money, and your future, losing your job would make you feel inadequate, and a bit useless. That it would be harder to get up in the morning than when you were rudely shocked into consciousness by the alarm. That you might miss the people you worked with, no matter how little you had in common with them. Or even that you might find yourself searching for familiar faces as you walked the high street. ~ Jojo Moyes

McCormack and Richard Tauber are singing by the bed
There's a glass of punch below your feet and an angel at your head
There's devils on each side of you with bottles in their hands
You need one more drop of poison and you'll dream of foreign lands

When you pissed yourself in Frankfurt and got syph down in Cologne
And you heard the rattling death trains as you lay there all alone
Frank Ryan brought you whiskey in a brothel in Madrid
And you decked some fucking blackshirt who was cursing all the Yids
At the sick bed of Cuchulainn we'll kneel and say a prayer
And the ghosts are rattling at the door and the Devil's in the chair

And in the Euston tavern you screamed it was your shout
But they wouldn't give you service so you kicked the windows out
They took you out into the street and kicked you in the brains
So you walked back in through a bolted door and did it all again
At the sick bed of Cuchulainn we'll kneel and say a prayer
And the ghosts are rattling at the door and the Devil's in the chair

You remember that foul evening when you heard the banshees howl
There was lousy drunken bastards singing Billy in the Bowl
They took you up to midnight mass and left you in the lurch
So you dropped a button in the plate and spewed up in the church

Now you'll sing a song of liberty for blacks and Paks and Jocks
And they'll take you from this dump you're in and ~ Shane MacGowan

I agree that there are some bad apples on Wall Street. I spent about ten years exposing corporate and financial fraud for 'Barron's' magazine and I found a lot to write about. ~ Ben Stein

My education and that of my Black associates were quite different from the education of our white schoolmates. In the classroom we all learned past participles, but in the streets and in our homes the Blacks learned to drop s's from plurals and suffixes from past-tense verbs. We were alert to the gap separating the written word from the colloquial. We learned to slide out of one language and into another without being conscious of the effort. At school, in a given situation, we might respond with "That's not unusual." But in the street, meeting the same situation, we easily said, "It be's like that sometimes. ~ Maya Angelou

At age 12 I had an obsession with Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and then proceeded to watch all the other Kubrick films I could including a doc called Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures in which it was revealed to me that he started as a photographer ... I got a camera sometime shortly after, but spent many years just photographing flowers in my neighborhood. ~ Anton Yelchin

The Occupy Wall Street movement faltered when activists realized that traders were quite busy already. ~ The Covert Comic

If you want to be a rock star or just be famous, then run down the street naked, you'll make the news or something. But if you want music to be your livelihood, then play, play, play and play! And eventually you'll get to where you want to be. ~ Eddie Van Halen

Before I came to New York, I only had a few pictures of the city in my mind. And you know 'That Girl?' Marlo Thomas jumping with her hat? I always loved that, and I wondered what that double street she crosses is. And it's Park Avenue! And that's what I can see out my window. ~ Kate Spade

Lydia is constantly reminded that her education has no purchase here, that she has no access to the kind of information that has real currency on this journey. Among migrants, everyone knows more than she does. How do you find a coyote, make sure he's reputable, pay for your crossing, all without getting ripped off? ~ Jeanine Cummins

She simply does what her daughter tells her to, and finds a surprising relief in it. Maybe, she thinks, one could begin dying into this: the ministrations of a grown daughter, the comforts of a room. Here, then, is age. Here are the little consolations, the lamp and the book. Here is the world, increasingly managed by people who are not you; who will do either well or badly; who do not look at you when they pass you in the street. ~ Michael Cunningham

I keep my chin tucked in, eyes on the ground, the same stance I have when I pass by the guys from my neighborhood who laugh and call me Urkel because I wear a big backpack and don't hang out on the street all night smoking Kool XLs--and by the way, we need a new black nerd archetype; also, when are these wannabe gangstas watching reruns of Family Matters? ~ Una LaMarche

Occupation prevents you from managing your affairs in your own way. It interferes in every aspect of life and death; it interferes with longing and anger and desire and walking in the street. It interferes with going anywhere and coming back, with going to market, the emergency hospital, the beach, the bedroom, or a distant capital. ~ Mourid Barghouti

Our Lord did not say it was wrong to pray in the corners of the street, but He did say it was wrong to have the motive to "be seen of men". ~ Oswald Chambers

Inexpensive Progress

Encase your legs in nylons,
Bestride your hills with pylons
O age without a soul;
Away with gentle willows
And all the elmy billows
That through your valleys roll.

Let's say goodbye to hedges
And roads with grassy edges
And winding country lanes;
Let all things travel faster
Where motor car is master
Till only Speed remains.

Destroy the ancient inn-signs
But strew the roads with tin signs
'Keep Left,' 'M4,' 'Keep Out!'
Command, instruction, warning,
Repetitive adorning
The rockeried roundabout;

For every raw obscenity
Must have its small 'amenity,'
Its patch of shaven green,
And hoardings look a wonder
In banks of floribunda
With floodlights in between.

Leave no old village standing
Which could provide a landing
For aeroplanes to roar,
But spare such cheap defacements
As huts with shattered casements
Unlived-in since the war.

Let no provincial High Street
Which might be your or my street
Look as it used to do,
But let the chain stores place here
Their miles of black glass facia
And traffic thunder through.

And if there is some scenery,
Some unpretentious greenery,
Surviving anywhere,
It does not need protecting
For soon we'll be erecting
A Power Station there.

When all our roads are lighted
B ~ John Betjeman

Johnson seemed to have a playbook memorized. He mumbled things like, "Pleasure, apply pressure, female gratification." And bent her legs to accomplish some pretty spectacular sexual Twister poses. One in particular had Dove ratcheted up like a street dancer with twenty years' experience. ~ Debra Anastasia

The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random. ~ Andre Breton

It's been said that love is all there is; that a lack of love causes people to do evil things. I can buy that. Take it a step further: capitalism, by itself, is not a bad thing; but when taken to an extreme, as it has been in America - when Christmas is but a measuring stick for how well the economy is doing, when Wall Street and the banking industry turn nescient heads to morality in pursuit of the Almighty Dollar, when love of money overshadows love of self and others - what then?
In the grand scheme of the universe - whatever that scheme may be - when one considers its immensity, that it has existed for billions of years, some of us realize how insignificant our seventy or eighty years is; while others, for whatever reason (selfishness?) pursue materialism to a vulgar degree. In the end, what does all that matter, really?
It's nice to spoil oneself from time to time; but really, life's true gift to oneself is doing and giving to others. That's love. ~ J. Conrad Guest, Novelist

I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography - that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms. ~ Joel Meyerowitz

Each culture has its own form of staged combat, evolved from its particular method of street fighting and cleaned up for presentation as a spectacle, e.g. savate, Cornish wrestling, karate, kung-fu. ~ David Mamet

He did not believe, and yet he admitted the supernatural. Right here on earth how could any of us deny that we are hemmed in by mystery, in our homes, in the street, - everywhere when we came to think of it? ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

I thought I had a huge crush on a young Canadian photographer who was commissioned to go down to Australia to do a series, so I tried to figure out a way to follow him without getting in trouble with my parents, and that was by auditioning for their National Institute. ~ Deborah Kara Unger

After a sleepless night, the people in the street seem automatons. No one seems to breathe, to walk, Each looks as if he is worked by clockwork: nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles, spectral gesticulations. Yourself a specter, how would you see others as alive? ~ Emil M. Cioran

Working myself into a position of total versatility, so that I can do anything I want to do at the time I want to do it. Whether I do it or not is another question. ~ Elliott Erwitt

Who knows the meaning of life, death, or anything else quasi-important. Maybe the starving poets on street corners and oceanside piers. I'd give 'em my last dollar to inspire me. That's all I really want. ~ Anne Clendening

We're not going to beat Barack Obama with some guy who has Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island accounts, owns shares of Goldman Sachs while it forecloses on Florida and is himself a stockholder in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while he tries to think the rest of us are too stupid to put the dots together to understand what this is all about ... People matter more than Wall Street. ~ Newt Gingrich

I consider it essential that the photographer should do his own printing and enlarging. The final effect of the finished print depends so much on these operations. ~ Bill Brandt

From: [email protected]
Sent: Saturday, June 8, 2013 1:18 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: what happy looks like
Sunrises over the harbor. Ice cream on a hot day. The sound of the waves down the street. The way my dog curls up next to me on the couch. Evening strolls. Great movies. Thunderstorms. A good cheeseburger. Fridays. Saturdays. Wednesdays, even. Sticking your toes in the water. Pajama pants. Flip-flops. Swimming. Poetry. The absence of smiley faces in an e-mail.

What does it look like to you? ~ Jennifer E. Smith