Bill Brandt Quotes

#1. 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

#2. The good photographer will produce a competent picture every time whatever his subject. But only when his subject makes and immediate and direct appeal to his own interests will he produce a work of distinction.

Bill Brandt

#3. In my portraits I try to avoid the fleeting expression and vivacity of a snapshot.

Bill Brandt

#4. Photography has no rules, it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.

Bill Brandt

#5. If there is any method in the way I take pictures, I believe it lies in this: See the subject first. Do not try to force it to be a picture of this, that or the other thing. Stand apart from it. Then something will happen. The subject will reveal itself.

Bill Brandt

#6. And only the photographer himself knows the effect he wants. He should know by instinct, grounded in experience, what subjects are enhanced by hard or soft, light or dark treatment.

Bill Brandt

#7. Photography is not a sport. It has no rules. Everything must be dared and tried!

Bill Brandt

#8. Photography is still a very new medium and everything must be tried and dare.

Bill Brandt

#9. No amount of toying with shades of print or with printing papers will transform a commonplace photograph into anything other than a commonplace photograph.

Bill Brandt

#10. A photographer must be prepared to catch and hold on to those elements which give distinction to the subject or lend it atmosphere.

Bill Brandt

#11. But I did not always know just what it was I wanted to photograph. I believe it is important for a photographer to discover this, for unless he finds what it is that excites him, what it is that calls forth at once an emotional response, he is unlikely to achieve his best work.

Bill Brandt

#12. It is the gift of seeing the life around them clearly and vividly, as something that is exciting in its own right. It is an innate gift, varying in intensity with the individual's temperament and environment.

Bill Brandt

#13. When I began to photograph nudes, I let myself be guided by this camera, and instead of photographing what I saw, I photographed what the camera was seeing. I interfered very little, and the lens produced anatomical images and shapes which my eyes had never observed.

Bill Brandt

#14. I am not interested in rules or conventions. Photography is not a sport.

Bill Brandt

#15. Most photographers would feel a certain embarrassment in admitting publicly that they carried within them a sense of wonder, yet without it they would not produce the work they do, whatever their particular field.

Bill Brandt

#16. The photographer must possess and preserve the receptive faculties of a child who looks at the world for the first time.

Bill Brandt

#17. It is part of the photographer's job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveler who enters a strange country.

Bill Brandt

#18. Andre Breton once said that a portrait should not only be an image but an oracle one questions, and that the photographer's aim should be a profound likeness, which physically and morally predicts the subject's entire future.

Bill Brandt

#19. Sometimes they are a matter of luck; the photographer could not expect or hope for them. Sometimes they are a matter of patience, waiting for an effect to be repeated that he has seen and lost or for one that he anticipates.

Bill Brandt

#20. A good nude photograph can be erotic, but certainly not sentimental or pornographic.

Bill Brandt