Joel Sternfeld Quotes

#1. All of my work has been about ideas of utopia and dystopia. I think that's what gives America interest. It's many things all at once. It's such a complicated society.

Joel Sternfeld

#2. The digital print is becoming the look of our time, and it makes the C-print start to look like a tintype.

Joel Sternfeld

#3. A photographer must choose a palette as painters choose theirs.

Joel Sternfeld

#4. Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.

Gertrude Stein

#5. She knew in her heart that to be without optimism, that core of reasonless hope in the spirit rather than the brain, was a fatal flaw, the seed of death.

Anne Perry

#6. I could get my camera and point it at two people and not point it at the homeless third person to the right of the frame, or not include the murder that's going on to the left of the frame.

Joel Sternfeld

#7. Some people consider utopia to be derived from nature. For some people, utopia is the city.

Joel Sternfeld

#8. People tend to personalize technology so they can't get to the systemic analysis. They say, "Oh, I can't give up my personal computer." Or, "I just love radio too much."

Chellis Glendinning

#9. Photography has always been capable of manipulation.

Joel Sternfeld

#10. Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.

Joel Sternfeld

#11. I grew up in Belle Harbor, which is in New York City, but it has the most powerful sense of nature and seasons. It wasn't even the beach and the water. I just dreamt about everything that had to do with nature. I read about Thoreau.

Joel Sternfeld

#12. But anyone who sees your scars before they see you doesn't deserve you.

Colleen Hoover

#13. If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.

Pearl S. Buck

#14. What they failed to teach you at school was that the whole business of being human just got messier and more complicated as you got older. You could tell the truth, be polite, take everyone's feelings into consideration and still have to deal with other people's shit. At nine or ninety.

Mark Haddon

#15. When you come to the end of yourself, you are at that exact moment in the kind of place where you can fully experience the God who is for you.

Rob Bell

#16. You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo. No individual photo explains anything. That's what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium.

Joel Sternfeld

#17. For me it was sort of career suicide to work in color, but I did it because I perceived myself from an early stage to be interested in seasonality - the changing of the seasons - that's what I deeply loved.

Joel Sternfeld

#18. When we surrender moral government to the courts, we have surrendered the very essence of freedom, we have surrendered its only real meaning
and we will not be free again until we get it back.

Alan Keyes

#19. Black and white is abstract; color is not. Looking at a black and white photograph, you are already looking at a strange world.

Joel Sternfeld

#20. When you have unity, I think it squares the reach or power of the work.

Joel Sternfeld

#21. The job of the color photographer is to provide some level of abstraction that can take the image out of the daily.

Joel Sternfeld

#22. No one can say how long the process of human extinction might take, but as it proceeds, the same global order will prevail that always prevails: rich nations will find ways to protect themselves and make themselves comfortable, while the poor nations and the poor people of the planet will suffer.

Joel Sternfeld

#23. With a photograph, you are left with the same modes of interpretation as you are with a book. You ask: 'What do we know about the author and their background? What do I know about the subject?'

Joel Sternfeld

#24. I loved the High Line when it was just mine, when I was the only person up there, and I had a private park in New York City. I had to make an appointment to see it ... I'd walk around. I was all alone.

Joel Sternfeld

#25. Terence: As my old da used to tell me, 'never trust a rich man'.
David: Good thing I'm only moderately rich.
Terence: Which is why I only moderately distrust you.

Sabrina Jeffries

#26. While you're sleeping, traveling, attending meetings, or messing around online, the same thing is happening to you. You're going soft. You're not aggressive enough. You're not pressing ahead.

Ryan Holiday

#27. I'm trying to take pictures of less and less.

Joel Sternfeld

#28. A real leader spends his time fixing the problem instead of finding who to blame.

David Cottrell

#29. The love and attention you always thought you wanted from someone else, is the love and attention you first need to give to yourself.

Bryant McGillns