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My father taught me photography. It was his hobby, and we had a small darkroom in the fruit cellar of our basement. It was the kind of makeshift darkroom that was only dark at night.

Sam Abell

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Sam Abell
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: February 19
Photographer
Sylvania
Ohio
Taught
Cellar
Small
Cellars
Dark
Basement
Father
Basements
Night
Hobby
Kind
Hobbies
Fruit
Photography
Makeshift

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A very big part of the life of a photograph is the afterlife.
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A mad, keen photographer needs to get out into the world and work and make mistakes.
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I had a book come out several years ago, when there were no blogs. This is a mark to me about how the environment has changed.
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Typically I see it with photographers who go to a place like India or Nepal, and everything's so colorful and exotic and they think, therefore, a picture's been taken.
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Photographs that transcend but do not deny their literal situation appeal to me.
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There's a great quote about Virginia Woolf, she had the same spiritual stake in her diaries as she had in her writing.
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In almost every photograph I have ever made, there is something I would do to complete it. I take that to be the spirit hole or the deliberate mistake that's in a Navajo rug to not be godlike, but to be human.
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For sheer majestic geography and sublime scale, nothing beats Alaska and the Yukon. For culture, Japan. And for all-around affection, Australia.
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When I first went to 'National Geographic,' I thought I was the least qualified person to step through the doors. But because of my parents and the culture of continual learning they imposed on us, I later came to believe I was the most qualified person who ever worked there.
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I was a consultant for Kodak back in the late 80's. There were engineers there who told me that in the future, most photographs would be taken on telephones. They weren't able to do anything with that. They were engineers, not management.
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My first priority when taking pictures is to achieve clarity. A good documentary photograph transmits the information of the situation with the utmost fidelity achieving it means understanding the nuances of lighting and composition, and also remembering to keep the lenses clean and the cameras steady.
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My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it.
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It matters little how much equipment we use it matters much that we be masters of all we do use.
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It's more difficult now, to be a Geographic photographer, than it was when I came along. And it wasn't easy at that time.
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Above all, it's hard learning to live with vivid mental images of scenes I cared for and failed to photograph. It is the edgy existence within me of these unmade images that is the only assurance that the best photographs are yet to be made.
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My least favorite photographer to have would be myself. Someone who wanted a career at National Geographic. Because it's almost mathematically impossible to achieve that.
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The unusual wins out over the usual.
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There isn't an aspect of book creation I don't enjoy, and there has always been a book in my life to dream about or work on.
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Teaching has never been far from my life. It's the most natural thing I do. Apparently, as I said, I cannot not do it.
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For example, in my dorm, at the University of Kentucky, I had the only camera. I don't think anyone came to college with a camera, other than me.
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