Bill Brandt: When I began to photograph nudes, I let myself be guided...

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

Bill Brandt

photography sports

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

Bill Brandt

conventions photography sports

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

atmosphere photography giving

It is essential for the photographer to know the effect of his lenses. The lens is his eye, and it makes or ruins his pictures. A feeling for composition is a great asset. I think it is very much a matter of instinct. It can perhaps be developed, but I doubt if it can be learned. To achieve his best work, the young photographer must discover what really excites him visually. He must discover his own world.

Bill Brandt

eye photography thinking

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

Bill Brandt

children looks world

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

Bill Brandt

photography matter sports

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 a child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveler who enters a strange country We are most of us too busy, too worried, too intent on proving ourselves right, too obsessed with ideas to stand and stare Very rarely are we able to free our minds of thoughts and emotions and just see for the simple pleasure of seeing. And so long as we fail to do this, so long will the essence of things be hidden from us.

Bill Brandt

jobs country children

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

light photography dark

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

shade photography paper

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

Bill Brandt

sentimental erotic photograph

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

Bill Brandt

mediums dare photography

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

finals essentials photography

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

photography jobs country

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

photography waiting patience

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

admitting photographer fields

Photographers should follow their own judgment, and not the fads and dictates of others.

Bill Brandt

fads judgment photographer

I am not very interested in extraordinary angles. They can be effective on certain occasions, but I do not feel the necessity for them in my own work. Indeed, I feel the simplest approach can often be most effective. A subject placed squarely in the center of the frame, if attention is not distracted from it by fussy surroundings, has a simple dignity which makes it all the more impressive.

Bill Brandt

often-is photography simple

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

produce distinction photographer

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

individual environment photographer

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

photography believe lying

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.