The scene fascinated me: a round straw hat; the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railings made of chain; white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below; circular iron machinery; a mast that cut into the sky, completing a triangle.

Alfred Stieglitz

Categorized in : Art Men Cutting

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

Alfred Stieglitz

photography inspiring inspirational

A woman artist could be one of those intuitive geniuses [who] have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience.

Alfred Stieglitz

creativity photography art

Photography my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.

Alfred Stieglitz

passion photography photographer

Wherever there is light, one can photograph.

Alfred Stieglitz

light photography photographer

Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere.

Alfred Stieglitz

here-and-now utopia moments

My cloud photographs are equivalents of my most profound life experiences, my basic philosophy of life. All art is an equivalent of the artist’s most profound life experiences.

Alfred Stieglitz

photography philosophy art

I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.

Alfred Stieglitz

vision photograph trying

All art, like all love, is rooted in heartache.

Alfred Stieglitz

heartache love-is art

Photographers must learn not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs.

Alfred Stieglitz

photograph photographer looks

My photographs are a picture of the chaos in the world, and of my relationship to that chaos. My prints show the world’s constant upsetting of man’s equilibrium, and his eternal battle to reestablish it.

Alfred Stieglitz

upset battle men

For that is the power of the camera: seize the familiar and give it new meanings, a special significance by the mark of a personality.

Alfred Stieglitz

personality special giving

If you place the imperfect next to the perfect, people will see the difference between the one and the other. But if you offer the imperfect alone, people are only too apt to be satisfied by it.

Alfred Stieglitz

differences perfect people

As a matter of fact, nearly all the greatest work is being, and has always been done, by those who are following photography for the love of it, and not merely for financial reasons. As the name implies, an amateur is one who works for love.

Alfred Stieglitz

photography matter names

The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.

Alfred Stieglitz

photography expression art

The goal of art was the vital expression of self.

Alfred Stieglitz

expression self art

My picture, Fifth Avenue, Winter is the result of a three hours' stand during a fierce snow-storm on February 22nd 1893, awaiting the proper moment. My patience was duly rewarded. Of course, the result contained an element of chance, as I might have stood there for hours without succeeding in getting the desired pictures.

Alfred Stieglitz

storm winter snow

I do not object to retouching, dodging or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique.

Alfred Stieglitz

quality photography long

Snow. White, white, white, soft and clean, and maddening shapes, with the whole world in them.

Alfred Stieglitz

white snow world

It is not art in the professionalized sense about which I care, but that which is created sacredly, as a result of a deep inner experience, with all of oneself, and that becomes 'art' in time.

Alfred Stieglitz

care photographer art

The ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired off-hand, but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labor.

Alfred Stieglitz

photography hands years