Josef Koudelka Inspirational Quotes (8)

What matters most to me is to take photographs to continue taking them and not to repeat myself. To go further, to go as far as I can.

I have never had any hero in my life or in photography. I just travel, I look and everything influences me. Everything influences me. I am quite different now than I was 40 years ago. For 40 years I have been traveling. I never stay in one country more than three months. Why? Because I was interested in seeing, and if I stay longer I become blind.

If I am dissatisfied, it's simply because good photos are few and far between. A good photo is a miracle.

I would like to see everything, look at everything, I want to be the view itself.

I don't like captions. I prefer people to look at my pictures and invent their own stories.

The maximum, that is what has always interested me.

When I photograph, I do not think much. If you looked at my contacts you would ask yourself: What is this guy doing? But I keep working with my contacts and with my prints, I look at them all the time. I believe that the result of this work stays in me and at the moment of photographing it comes out, without my thinking of it.

When I first started to take photographs in Czechoslovakia, I met this old gentleman, this old photographer, who told me a few practical things. One of the things he said was, Josef, a photographer works on the subject, but the subject works on the photographer.