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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.

Sam Abell

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Sam Abell
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: February 19
Photographer
Sylvania
Ohio
Back
Weren
Able
Management
Would
Photograph
Kodak
Late
Consultant
Told
Consultants
Taken
Telephones
Future
Engineers
Anything
Photographs

More quotes by Sam Abell

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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.
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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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
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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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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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My dad had been an ardent amateur photographer, and he taught me to compose a photograph from the back to the front, and then populate the picture.
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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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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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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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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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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My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it.
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