Ernst Haas Quotes

#1. Don't park ... Arrival is the death of inspiration.

Ernst Haas

#2. Bored with obvious reality, I find my fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view.

Ernst Haas

#3. The most important lens you have is your legs

Ernst Haas

#4. Photography is a transformation, not a reproduction.

Ernst Haas

#5. Decide for yourself what kind of works you want to create ... facts, essays, poems - do you want to speak or to sing?

Ernst Haas

#6. With photography a new language has been created. Now for the first time it is possible to express reality by reality. We can look at an impression as long as we wish, we can delve into it and, so to speak, renew past experiences at will.

Ernst Haas

#7. We can write the new chapters in a visual language whose prose and poetry will need no translation.

Ernst Haas

#8. Only a vision - that is what one must have.

Ernst Haas

#9. The artist must express the summation of his feeling, knowing and believing through the unity of his life and work.

Ernst Haas

#10. Don't ever over-analyze your results. Don't ever try to find your own secret or the one which you admire. One does not try to catch soap bubbles. One enjoys them in flight and is grateful for their fluid existence.

Ernst Haas

#11. The best zoom lens is your legs.

Ernst Haas

#12. The camera only facilitates the taking. The photographer must do the giving in order to transform and transcend ordinary reality. The problem is to transform without deforming. He must gain intensity in form and content by bringing a subjective order into an objective chaos.

Ernst Haas

#13. Learn by doing or even better unlearn by doing. The opposite of what you learned.

Ernst Haas

#14. Photography is a bridge between science and art. It brings to science what it needs most, the artistic sense, and to art the proof that nothing can be imagined which cannot be matched in the counterpoints of nature.

Ernst Haas

#15. A few words about the question of whether photography is art or not: I never understood the question.

Ernst Haas

#16. Living in a time of the increasing struggle of the mechanization of man, photography has become another example of this paradoxical problem of how to humanize, how to overcome a machine on which we are thoroughly dependent ... the camera ...

Ernst Haas

#17. Color is joy. One does not think joy. One is carried by it.

Ernst Haas

#18. Refine your senses through the great masters of music, painting, and poetry.

Ernst Haas

#19. In every artist there is poetry. In every human being there is the poetic element. We know, we feel, we believe.

Ernst Haas

#20. The tyranny of words is only slightly less absolute than that of men; but whereas elections, revolutions, or just the dreary passage of time can do away with human tyranny, patient analysis and redefinition are required to remedy the linguistic affliction.

Ernst B. Haas

#21. The best pictures differentiate themselves by nuances ... a tiny relationship - either a harmony or a disharmony - that creates a picture.

Ernst Haas

#22. All I wanted was to connect my moods with those of Paris. Beauty paints and when it painted most, I shot.

Ernst Haas

#23. A picture can be an answer as well as a question but if you can't answer your question try to question your question ... There can be questions without answers but no answers without questions.

Ernst Haas

#24. I don't believe so much in the value of a single picture anymore. I don't really photograph for the wall.

Ernst Haas

#25. Through photography, both artist and scientist can find a common denominator in their search for the synthesis of modern vision in time, space and structure.

Ernst Haas

#26. I have always felt better taking a risk than an easier route for what I believe in.

Ernst Haas

#27. Best wide-angle lens? Two steps backward. Look for the 'ah-ha'.

Ernst Haas

#28. There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.

Ernst Haas

#29. I prefer to be noticed some day, first for my ideas and second for my good eye ...

Ernst Haas

#30. You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

Ernst Haas

#31. We all would love sometimes to be free from our own knowledge. It is even the most difficult to unlearn - as the most important problems are.

Ernst Haas

#32. I am not interested in shooting new things - I am interested to see things new.

Ernst Haas

#33. Beware of color theories. Theories in color photography are dangerous. The plain fact that there are so many of them proves my point.

Ernst Haas

#34. Is photography art? ... The pure definition of the word 'art' alone is too vague today to break one's brain and soul about it. Let us take a little vacation from this word.

Ernst Haas

#35. There is no formula. There are only confirmations to formulas which one has already discovered oneself.

Ernst Haas

#36. My theory of composition? Simple: do not release the shutter until everything in the viewfinder feels just right.

Ernst Haas

#37. Leica, schmeica. The camera doesn't make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But you have to see.

Ernst Haas

#38. I love to read theories without ever using them when working ... The paradoxical fact in the aesthetic is that theories are also true in reverse.

Ernst Haas

#39. Style has no formula, but it has a secret key.
It is the extension of your personality.

Ernst Haas

#40. There are two kinds of photographers: those who compose pictures and those who take them. The former work in studios. For the latter, the studio is the world ... For them, the ordinary doesn't exist: every thing in life is a source of nourishment.

Ernst Haas

#41. I want to be remembered much more by a total vision than a few perfect single pictures.

Ernst Haas

#42. In the smallest cells are reflections of the largest. And in photography, through an interplay of scales, a whole universe within a universe can be revealed.

Ernst Haas

#43. There are almost too many possibilities. Photography is in direct proportion with our time: multiple, faster, instant. Because it is so easy, it will be more difficult.

Ernst Haas

#44. You don't take pictures, the good ones happen to you.

Ernst Haas

#45. Beware of too much taste as it leads to sterility.

Ernst Haas

#46. A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?

Ernst Haas

#47. Beware of direct inspiration. It leads too quickly to repetitions of what inspired you.

Ernst Haas