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

More quotes by Alfred Stieglitz

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All art, like all love, is rooted in heartache.
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Photography my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.
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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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?
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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.
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Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere.
Alfred Stieglitz
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Beautiful dreams - if the world were more beautiful they would come true - But the world is relentless & cruel - people are - they must be, I suppose, or they could not live.
Alfred Stieglitz
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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
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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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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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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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As a matter of fact, nearly all the greatest work is being, and has always been done, by those who are following photography for the love of it, and not merely for financial reasons. As the name implies, an amateur is one who works for love.
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.
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I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing.
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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A work is not art until enough noise has been made about it and someone rich comes along and buys it.
Alfred Stieglitz