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Moving Quotes Shubhra Krishan Shubhra Krishan is a television and print journalists from India. she and her husband have been producing health series on Indian TV for a long, long time. Presently they are working on projects in the USA.

< -- Women clad in traditional Indian garb walking with colorful vases atop their heads as the country prepares for the visit of Queen Elizabeth II. Jaipur, India, 1961.

From the busy streets of Delhi to the clear, blue skies of Colorado Springs...it's been quite a journey. And it has transformed me in so many ways. I had forgotten to write poetry, but now--each time I see golden aspen leaves shimmering on a tree, or watch the criss-cross smoke of jets across the skies, I feel a poem stir inside me.

For my husband, the impact is more visual. A passionate photographer, he finds a readymade shot everywhere--just waiting to be captured on his camera. And when my best friend comes here, I know she will spend most of her day standing on the balcony, painting the mountains and the clouds.

Poets, artists and photographers...Nature speaks to all of us in its own unique way.And yet, the expressions may be different, but the theme is the same.

That is why, I am sharing with you some wonderful thoughts on photography by highly creative photographers...whether you are a poet, painter, photographer or philosopher, you'll find them deeply moving.

1. When I teach a class I often give the assignment: "Photograph someone you love." I ask people to do this so they have a subject about whom they have feelings, a subject that is more than a model, or an object, or a shape, or an idea. In this way, they can judge the result not only by its technical success, but also by how well it describes their feelings.
   - John Loengard, "Pictures Under Discussion"
2. These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me."
   - Ansel Adams, in the preface of Jacob a Riis: Photographer & Citizen

   
   Unicorn Peak and Thunderclouds, Picture by Ansel Adams, (1967) -- >
   

3. "Notebook. No photographer should be without one!"
   - Ansel Adams, The Camera
4. "Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter."
   - Ansel Adams
5. Trust that little voice in your head that says 'Wouldn't it be interesting if...." And then do it.
   -Duane Michals, "More Joy of Photography
6. You learn to see by practice. It's just like playing tennis, you get better the more you play. The more you look around at things, the more you see. The more you photograph, the more you realize what can be photographed and what can't be photographed. You just have to keep doing it.
   - Eliot Porter
7. A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts.
   - Sir Joshua Reynolds
8. Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance. Always, I am on the threshold.
   - W. Eugene Smith
9. You can't depend on your eyes if your imagination is out of focus.
   - Mark Twain
10. Ultimately, my hope is to amaze myself. The anticipation of discovering new possibilities becomes my greatest joy.
    - Jerry Uelsmann
11. A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
    - Orson Welles
12. My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea.
    - Edward Weston
13. ...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.
    - Minor White, "More Joy of Photography"
14. In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.
    - Emile Zola
15. "You don't take a photograph, you make it."
    - Ansel Adams
16. "A good photograph is knowing where to stand."
    - Ansel Adams
17. Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.
    - Anonymous
18. "When I first became interested in photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don't give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself."
    - Edward Steichen, quoted in Penelope Niven's Steichen: A Biography
19. Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term - selectivity.
20. Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.
    - Berenice Abbott
21. My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it.
    -Sam Abell; "Stay This Moment"
22. Photographs that transcend but do not deny their literal situation appeal to me.
    - Sam Abell; "Stay This Moment"
23. Above all, it's hard learning to live with vivid mental images of scenes I cared for and failed to photograph. It is the edgy existence within me of these unmade images that is the only assurance that the best photographs are yet to be made.
    - Sam Abell; "Stay This Moment"

    
    < -- Mahatma Gandhi sitting beside his spinning wheel, the symbol of India's struggle for independence. India, 1946. Photo Credit: Margaret Bourke-White, LIFE © Time Inc.
    
    

24. As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity, I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs. Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment -- this very moment -- to stay.
    - Sam Abell - "Stay This Moment"
25. A mad, keen photographer needs to get out into the world and work and make mistakes.
    - Sam Abell - "Stay This Moment"
26. No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.
    - Robert Adams, Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques, May 1995, p. 37.
27. I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don't find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges.
    - William Albert Allard, "The Photographic Essay"
28. When I walk around my little world I observe the oddities, the fun of life in the middle of harsh reality. I think one can laugh in pain. Maybe this is what we need to pull us out of the absurdity of it all. I always thought how strange it is that one can find beauty even in the most horrible images. I care for what I photograph. I make love with my eyes through the viewfinder. I caress the image on that piece of paper as it appears like magic, a ray of light emerging from total darkness.
29. What moves me about...what's called technique...is that it comes from some mysterious deep place. I mean it can have something to do with the paper and the developer and all that stuff, but it comes mostly from some very deep choices somebody has made that take a long time and keep haunting them.
30. ...invention is mostly this subtle, inevitable thing...I mean it comes from your nature, your identity. We've all got an identity. You can't avoid it. It's what's left when you take everything else away. I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don't think of.
31. I never question what to do, it tells me what to do. The photographs make themselves with my help.
    - Ruth Bernhard
32. The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.
    - Henri Cartier Bresson,"Photography Year 1980, Life Library of Photography, page 27
33. In 1927 he [ Alfred Eisenstaedt ] sold his first picture, of a tennis player. "This started me to look at the world in a different way. Ever since, sometimes I look with telephoto eyes, sometimes with wide-angle eyes."
    - Alfred Eisenstaedt, Collector's edition of Life, the Eisie Issue, spring 1998, page 16

    
    Photograph by Ernest Hass. -->
    
    

34. All I wanted was to connect my moods with those of Paris. Beauty paints and when it painted most, I shot.
    - Ernest Haas
35. It's weird that photographers spend years or even a whole lifetime, trying to capture moments that added together, don't even amount to a couple of hours. (I 1think based on 100,000 shots*(1/125s)= 800s = 13.3min?)
    -James Lalropui Keivom
36. A Ming vase can be well-designed and well-made and is beautiful for that reason alone. I don't think this can be true for photography. Unless there is something a little incomplete and a little strange, it will simply look like a copy of something pretty. We won't take an interest in it.
    - John Loengard, "Pictures Under Discussion"
37. . If you look at a photograph, and you think, 'My isn't that a beautiful photograph,' and you go on to the next one, or 'Isn't that nice light?' so what? I mean what does it do to you or what's the real value in the long run? What do you walk away from it with? I mean, I'd much rather show you a photograph that makes demands on you, that you might become involved in on your own terms or be perplexed..
    Duane Michals

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