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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
Father
Basements
Night
Hobby
Kind
Hobbies
Fruit
Photography
Makeshift
Taught
Cellar
Small
Cellars
Dark
Basement

More quotes by Sam Abell

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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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I think that it's workshops, honestly, that have kept me keen about photography, and about my photography. My career as a workshop photographer came while I was at the Geographic in the late 70's, and has continued consistently since then.
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I wanted life to be episodic. I wanted to be a magazine photographer and I was willing to do what it took to become that.
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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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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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As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.
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When assignments were over, photography continued. One of the primary reasons it did was that I wanted and needed to have fresh work. Also, it's very stimulating to be around non-professional photographers. They're the ones with the purest flame burning about their photography. I appreciate that.
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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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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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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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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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Though Geographic didn't publish that photo in the story that it was done for, The Life of Charlie Russell, a cowboy artist in Montana. But later, maybe a year and a half ago, they named it one of the 50 greatest pictures ever made at National Geographic.
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The class that I teach is called The Life of a Photograph. It takes up the question, of the billion photographs that were taken today, how many will have a life, and why? So the new reality has made the question more pertinent, not less pertinent.
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I'm interested in smokers standing on ledges, and big box stores, the rise of the suburbs, and the hollowing out of small towns. Self-storage. Things that didn't exist 50 years ago. Our common culture. What we have agreed is OK to live with.
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I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I've always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.
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Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.
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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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How the visual world appears is important to me. I'm always aware of the light. I'm always aware of what I would call the 'deep composition.' Photography in the field is a process of creation, of thought and technique. But ultimately, it's an act of imaginatively seeing from within yourself.
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First of all, I appropriate photographs.In presenting the Richard Prince photograph I tried to be as neutral as I could be. I put down the fact of it. I wanted it to be the same thing he wanted it to be, an open ended invitation to think about authorship, and who owns a created work. So I pair it with my appropriated picture.
Sam Abell