Quote

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

More quotes by 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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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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Photography is my passion.
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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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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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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Several people feel I have photographed God. May be.
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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The fight for photography became my life.
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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Photographers must learn not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs.
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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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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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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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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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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Snow. White, white, white, soft and clean, and maddening shapes, with the whole world in them.
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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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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I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.
Alfred Stieglitz