Quotes from Alfred Stieglitz

Photographers must learn not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs.

I was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth my obsession.

When I make a picture, I make love.

My cloud photographs are equivalents of my most profound life experiences, my basic philosophy of life. All art is an equivalent of the artist's most profound life experiences.

Several people feel I have photographed God. May be.

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.

When I make a picture, I make love.

The trouble with most photographers, and for that matter also with painters, and other people, is, that they are always trying to do something which is outside of themselves. In consequence they produce nothing that means anything to those who have the gift or intuition for truth: all else is really not worth a tinker's damn.

The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.

I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.

Wherever there is light, one can photograph.

Before the people at large, and for that matter, the artists themselves, understand what photography really means, as I understand that term, it is essential for them to be taught the real meaning of art.

The fight for photography became my life.

We had many books and pictures... my parents' way of life doubtless left a lasting impression on me. They created an atmosphere in which a certain kind of freedom could exist. This may well account for my seeking a related sense of liberty as I grew up.

Everything is relative except relatives, and they are absolute.

Photography my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.

I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing.

There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.

The camera was waiting for me by predestination and I took to it as a musician takes to the piano or a painter to canvas. I found that I was master of the elements, that I could work miracles.

A work is not art until enough noise has been made about it and someone rich comes along and buys it.

Beautiful dreams - if the world were more beautiful they would come true - But the world is relentless & cruel - people are - they must be, I suppose, or they could not live.

Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere.