Paul Strand Quotes

#1. Did I express my personality? I think that's quite unimportant because it's not people's selves but what they have to say about life that's important.

Paul Strand

#2. The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.

Paul Strand

#3. Whether a watercolor is inferior to an oil [painting], or whether a drawing, an etching, or a photograph is not as important as either, is inconsequent. To have to despise something in order to respect something else is a sign of impotence.

Paul Strand

#4. If Ansel Adams gets a thousand dollars a print, I want ten thousand.

Paul Strand

#5. If the photographer is not a discoverer, then he is not an artist.

Paul Strand

#6. The decision as to when to photograph, the actual click of the shutter, is partly controlled from the outside, by the flow of life, but it also comes from the mind and the heart of the artist. The photograph is his vision of the world and expresses, however subtly, his values and convictions.

Paul Strand

#7. It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.

Paul Strand

#8. All good art is abstract in its structure.

Paul Strand

#9. To be a photographer you must have something to say about the world.

Paul Strand

#10. Photography is only a new road from a different direction, but moving toward the common goal, which is life.

Paul Strand

#11. The artist is one who makes a concentrated statement about the world in which he lives and that statement tends to become impersonal-it tends to become universal and enduring because it comes out of something very particular.

Paul Strand

#12. No matter what lens you use, no matter what speed the film, no matter how you develop it, no matter how you print it, you cannot say more than you can see.

Paul Strand

#13. The important thing is, you have to have something important to say about the world.

Paul Strand

#14. I don't care how you photograph - use the kitchen mop if you must, but if the product is not true to the laws of photography ... you have produced something that is dead. (1923)

Paul Strand

#15. All light is available light.

Paul Strand

#16. Every artist I suppose has a sense of what they think has been the importance of their work. But to ask them to define it is not really a fair question. My real answer would be, the answer is on the wall.

Paul Strand

#17. I've always wanted to be aware of what's going on around me, and I've wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time.

Paul Strand

#18. It is easy to make a picture of someone and call it a portrait. The difficulty lies in making a picture that makes the viewer care about a stranger.

Paul Strand

#19. I like to photograph people who have strength and dignity in their faces. Whatever life has done to them, it hasn't destroyed them.

Paul Strand

#20. Photography ... is either an expression of a cosmic vision, an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing - to me. (1919)

Paul Strand

#21. Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.

Paul Strand

#22. I think of myself as an explorer who has spent his life on a long voyage of discovery.

Paul Strand

#23. If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

Paul Strand

#24. Objectivity is of the very essence of photography, its contribution and at the same time its limitation

Paul Strand