Quote

I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing.

Alfred Stieglitz

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alfred Stieglitz
Age: 81 †
Born: 1864
Born: January 1
Died: 1946
Died: January 1
Exhibition Curator
Photographer
Photography Critic
Publisher
Hoboken
New Jersey
Alfred Steiglitz
Artist
May
Undoing
Painter
Photographer
Straight
Photography
Therefore

More quotes by Alfred Stieglitz

Image
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
Image
I was sad to leave Europe in 1890, after my student days in Germany... But then, once back in New York, I experienced an intense longing for Europe, for its vital tradition of music, theatre, art, craftsmanship... I felt bewildered and lonely. How was I to use myself?
Alfred Stieglitz
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs [rather than paintings, etchings, etc.] that unless one has eyes and sees, they won't be seen - and still everyone will never forget having once looked at them.
Alfred Stieglitz
Image
Standing up here on the hill away from all humans - seeing these Wonders taking place before one's eyes - so silently... watching the silence of Nature. No school - no church - is as good a teacher as the eye understandingly seeing what's before it. I believe this more firmly than ever.
Alfred Stieglitz
Image
All art, like all love, is rooted in heartache.
Alfred Stieglitz
Image
Before the people at large, and for that matter, the artists themselves, understand what photography really means, as I understand that term, it is essential for them to be taught the real meaning of art.
Alfred Stieglitz
Image
There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art.
Alfred Stieglitz
Image
Photography my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.
Alfred Stieglitz
Image
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
Image
The goal of art was the vital expression of self.
Alfred Stieglitz
Image
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
Image
I have all but killed myself for Photography. My passion for it is greater than ever. It's forty years that I have fought its fight... I am not fighting to make a 'name' for myself. Maybe you have some feeling for what the fight is for. It's a world's fight... All that's born of spirit seems mad in these days of materialism run riot.
Alfred Stieglitz
Image
The camera was waiting for me by predestination and I took to it as a musician takes to the piano or a painter to canvas. I found that I was master of the elements, that I could work miracles.
Alfred Stieglitz
Image
If you can imagine photography in the guise of a woman and you’d ask her what she thought of Stieglitz, she’d say: He always treated me like a gentleman.
Alfred Stieglitz
Image
The fight for photography became my life.
Alfred Stieglitz
Image
When I make a picture, I make love.
Alfred Stieglitz
Image
I detest tradition for tradition's sake the half-alive that which is not real. I feel no hatred of individuals, but of customs, traditions superstitions that go against life, against truth, against the reality of experience, against the spontaneous living out of the sense of wonder-of fresh experience, freshly seen and communicated.
Alfred Stieglitz