Steichen Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy reading and share 41 famous quotes about Steichen with everyone.
Top Steichen Quotes

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding. — Edward Steichen

Steichen bought my first photographs that I ever sold. He recognized the style from the school of Black Mountain. After that, it was about twenty years before I sold another photograph. — Robert Rauschenberg

He talks and talks and talks. And if he isn't talking, he's smoking his smelly cigars all over the house. I'm so sick of the smell of cigar smoke I could just roll over and die."
"The cigars are ballast, sweetheart. Sheer ballast. If he didn't hold on to a cigar, his feet would leave the ground. We'd never see our Zooey again."
There were several experienced verbal stunt pilots in the Glass family, but this last little remark perhaps Zooey alone was coordinated well enough to bring in safely over a telephone. Or so this narrator suggests. And Franny may have felt so, too. In any case, she suddenly knew that it was Zooey at the other end of the phone. — J.D. Salinger

THE OFFICE FELT SUMPTUOUS EVEN IN NEAR DARKNESS. It reminded me of certain photographs by Edward Steichen: velvet shadows deepening into moody gloom, here and there a form suggested by a reflection of light on a radius of polished wood, the mysterious gleam of Tiffany glass in the pendant shade of a lamp not lit, the room implied rather than revealed, yet known as well as if it had been enraptured by sunshine instead of barely kissed by the ghost light of the haunted city beyond the windows. — Dean Koontz

Some day there may be ... machinery that needs but to be wound up and sent roaming o'er hill and dale, through fields and meadows, by babbling brooks and shady woods - in short, a machine that will discriminately select its subject and, by means of a skillful arrangement of springs and screws, compose its motif, expose the plate, develop, print, and even mount and frame the result of its excursion, so that there will be nothing for us to do but to send it to the Royal Photographic Society's exhibition and gratefully to receive the 'Royal Medal'. — Edward Steichen

When that shutter clicks, anything else that can be done afterward is not worth consideration. — Edward Steichen

I think prices have been moving more on speculation than reality. But this is a market that has been driven by fear for two or three years. — James Williams

Once you really commence to see things, then you really commence to feel things. — Edward Steichen

Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product. — Edward Steichen

When I first became interested in photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don't give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself. — Edward Steichen

I can see myself as a very old man in a terrific wheelchair. Only, I won't be photographing the tree outside my window, the way Steichen did. I'll be photographing other old people. — Richard Avedon

I knew, of course, that trees and plants had roots, stems, bark, branches and foliage that reached up toward the light. But I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself. — Edward Steichen

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man. — Edward Steichen

The boy and girl going hand in hand through a meadow; the mother washing her baby; the sweet simple things in life. We have almost lost track of them. On the one side, we over-intellectualize everything; on the other hand, we are over-mechanized. We can understand the danger of the atomic bomb, but the danger of our misunderstanding the meaning of life is much more serious. — Edward Steichen

My father emigrated from Lithuania to the United States at the age of 12. He received his higher education in New York City and graduated in 1914 from the New York University School of Dentistry. My mother came at the age of 14 from a part of Russia which, after the war, became Poland; she was only 19 when she was married to my father. — Gertrude B. Elion

This prolific and inventive photographer (Edward Steichen) must be given credit for virtually inventing modern fashion photography, and as the tohousands of high-quality original prints in the Conde Nast archives prove, only Irving Penn and Richard Avedon have since emerged as serious historical rivals. — William A. Ewing

I'm conjuring up a little fuck you."
-Hannah Rat Queens Vol 1 — Kurtis J. Wiebe

Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyonwith a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed. — Edward Steichen

In many ways, history is marked as 'before' and 'after' Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down. — Jesse Jackson

Art for art's sake is dead, if it ever lived. — Edward Steichen

The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each to himself. And that is the most complicated thing on earth. — Edward Steichen

To make good photographs, to express something, to contribute something to the world he lives in, and to contribute something to the art of photography besides imitations of the best photographers on the market today, that is basic training, the understanding of self. — Edward Steichen

I'm not very firey, but when I go, I go. I don't shout, I just get upset. — Nikki Sanderson

It is an error common to many artists, who strive merely to avoid mistakes, when all our efforts should be to create positive and important work. Better positive and important with mistakes and failures than perfect mediocrity. — Edward Steichen

So often the difference between success and failure is belief. Belief leads to action and execution. — Jon Gordon

The precision of hisskill places his work beyond the tentative and the experimental stage. He is continually searching and exploring both himself and his surroundings. and in this exploration of the realm of places, people and things, contrasts and relationships, Callahan is no respecter of conventional technical formula or code. His delicate sense of pattern is an integral part of his photography and not a thing by itself. — Edward Steichen

Every ten years a man should give himself a good kick in the pants. — Edward Steichen

If it were possible for any one person or group of persons to go through a photographic finishing plant's work at the end of a day, you could probably pull out the most extraordinary photographic exhibition we've ever seen. On almost any subject. The trouble is to find the things. — Edward Steichen

You know ... that a blank wall is an apalling thing to look at ...
The wall of a museum - a canvas - a piece of film - or a guy sitting in front of a typewriter. Then, you start out to do something - that vague thing called creation. The beginning strikes awe within you. — Edward Steichen

Every photograph is a fake from start to finish, — Edward Steichen

A good daguerreotype was as perfect a kind of photograph as was ever made. — Edward Steichen

Everything fades away. Fucking world peace could be accomplished if everyone got enough head. — Vanessa Waltz

Little thieves get shot, but great ones escape."
Kelly Oliver, WOLF: A Jessica James Mystery — Kelly Oliver

The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of the engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or defeat. Let nature take its course, and your tools will strike at the right moment. — Bruce Lee

There is only one optimist. He has been here since man has been on this earth, and that is man himself. If we hadn't had such a magnificent optimism to carry us through all these things, we wouldn't be here. We have survived it on our optimism. — Edward Steichen

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it. — Edward Steichen

A photograph is worth a thousand words, provided it is accompanied by only ten words. — Edward Steichen

One thought spectra are marvellous, but it is not possible to make progress there. Just as if you have the wing of a butterfly then certainly it is very regular with the colors and so on, but nobody thought one could get the basis of biology from the coloring of the wing of a butterfly. — Niels Bohr

No photographer is as good as the simplest camera. — Edward Steichen

In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time. — Albert Camus