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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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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
Photographer
Amateur
Photograph
Technically
Standards
Publication
American
Rotten
Perfect
Photographs
Rejected
Comment
Standard

More quotes by Alfred Stieglitz

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Let me here call attention to one of the most universally popular mistakes that have to do with photography - that of classing supposedly excellent work as professional, and using the term amateur to convey the idea of immature productions and to excuse atrociously poor photographs.
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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Photographers must learn not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs.
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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Wherever there is light, one can photograph.
Alfred Stieglitz
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The goal of art was the vital expression of self.
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 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
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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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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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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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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
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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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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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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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Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze.
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
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All I want is to preserve that wonderful something which so purely exists between us.
Alfred Stieglitz
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Photography is my passion.
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