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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.

Sam Abell

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Sam Abell
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: February 19
Photographer
Sylvania
Ohio
Along
Wasn
Came
Difficult
Easy
Time
Geographic
Photographer

More quotes by Sam Abell

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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.
Sam Abell
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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.
Sam Abell
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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.
Sam Abell
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[ My time and our common culture] it's what I'm photographing, and I'm very involved with that.
Sam Abell
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Aboriginal Australia is a tough place to work, rough and tough.
Sam Abell
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Photographs that transcend but do not deny their literal situation appeal to me.
Sam Abell
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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.
Sam Abell
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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.
Sam Abell
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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.
Sam Abell
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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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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.
Sam Abell
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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.
Sam Abell
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What I'm interested in is modern American history. I'm taken with the changes that have occurred in America in my lifetime.
Sam Abell
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The unusual wins out over the usual.
Sam Abell
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There are grander and more sublime landscapes - to me. There are more compelling cultures. But what appeals to me about central Montana is that the combination of landscape and lifestyle is the most compelling I've seen on this earth. Small mountain ranges and open prairie, and different weather, different light, all within a 360-degree view.
Sam Abell
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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.
Sam Abell
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I was giving a lecture and I said, that's enough about The Photographic Life, meaning my biography, now let's talk about the life of a photograph. And in that one instant I got the title for a potential next book.
Sam Abell
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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.
Sam Abell
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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.
Sam Abell
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The neatest part of this book I'm working on - to me - are the pictures that show the process... Because photographers... think things through and... it isn't luck, and it isn't random and it isn't accidental. It isn't.
Sam Abell