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

More quotes by 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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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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In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.
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 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 fight for photography became my life.
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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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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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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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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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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Several people feel I have photographed God. May be.
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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We had many books and pictures... my parents' way of life doubtless left a lasting impression on me. They created an atmosphere in which a certain kind of freedom could exist. This may well account for my seeking a related sense of liberty as I grew up.
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 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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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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Photography my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.
Alfred Stieglitz