Quote

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

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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
Perfect
Next
Imperfect
Place
Offer
People
Satisfied
Offers
Difference
Differences
Alone

More quotes by Alfred Stieglitz

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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
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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
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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
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Snow. White, white, white, soft and clean, and maddening shapes, with the whole world in them.
Alfred Stieglitz
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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
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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
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Wherever there is light, one can photograph.
Alfred Stieglitz
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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
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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
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All art, like all love, is rooted in heartache.
Alfred Stieglitz
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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
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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
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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
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My ideal is to achieve the ability to produce numberless prints from each negative, prints all significantly alive, yet indistinguishably alike, and to be able to circulate them at a price not higher than that of a popular magazine, or even a daily paper. To gain that ability there has been no choice but to follow the road I have chosen.
Alfred Stieglitz
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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
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Photography my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.
Alfred Stieglitz
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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
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The fight for photography became my life.
Alfred Stieglitz
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There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.
Alfred Stieglitz
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Everything is relative except relatives, and they are absolute.
Alfred Stieglitz