Quote

To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.

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
Person
Motion
Complete
Picture
Demand
Single
Condensed
Stills
Futile
Still
Portrait
Persons
Portraits

More quotes by Alfred Stieglitz

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The fight for photography became my life.
Alfred Stieglitz
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Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze.
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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Technically perfect, pictorially rotten. (Stieglitz's standard comment on photographs he rejected for publication in The American Amateur Photographer.)
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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Snow. White, white, white, soft and clean, and maddening shapes, with the whole world in them.
Alfred Stieglitz
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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
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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
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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
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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 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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Several people feel I have photographed God. May be.
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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Photography is my passion.
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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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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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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Photographers must learn not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs.
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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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