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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.

Sam Abell

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Sam Abell
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: February 19
Photographer
Sylvania
Ohio
Camera
Thinking
Cameras
University
College
Example
Dorm
Came
Dorms
Anyone
Kentucky
Think

More quotes by Sam Abell

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My parents, grandmother and brother were teachers. My mother taught Latin and French and was the school librarian. My father taught geography and a popular class called Family Living, the precursor to Sociology, which he eventually taught. My grandmother was a beloved one-room school teacher at Knob School, near Sonora in Larue County, Ky.
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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A mad, keen photographer needs to get out into the world and work and make mistakes.
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'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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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.
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
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The unusual wins out over the usual.
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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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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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 thing with my workshops is, photography is a thoughtful process. In an atmosphere of fast photography, and generally thoughtless, quick, automatic photography, I think that there is an interest in the slowed down, thoughtful approach.
Sam Abell
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A very big part of the life of a photograph is the afterlife.
Sam Abell
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That's who comes to my workshops. I jokingly tell my students that the class could be called Your photographs: Better.
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 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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Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.
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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[ 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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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