The good photographer will produce a competent picture every time whatever his subject. But only when his subject makes and immediate and direct appeal to his own interests will he produce a work of distinction.
BILL BRANDTPhotography is still a very new medium and everything must be tried and dare.
More Bill Brandt Quotes
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Andre Breton once said that a portrait should not only be an image but an oracle one questions, and that the photographer’s aim should be a profound likeness, which physically and morally predicts the subject’s entire future.
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Photography is not a sport. It has no rules. Everything must be dared and tried!
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No amount of toying with shades of print or with printing papers will transform a commonplace photograph into anything other than a commonplace photograph.
BILL BRANDT -
Photography is still a very new medium and everything must be tried and dare.
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Indeed, I feel the simplest approach can often be most effective. A subject placed squarely in the center of the frame, if attention is not distracted from it by fussy surroundings, has a simple dignity which makes it all the more impressive.
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When I began to photograph nudes, I let myself be guided by this camera, and instead of photographing what I saw,
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And only the photographer himself knows the effect he wants. He should know by instinct, grounded in experience, what subjects are enhanced by hard or soft, light or dark treatment.
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If there is any method in the way I take pictures, I believe it lies in this: See the subject first. Do not try to force it to be a picture of this, that or the other thing. Stand apart from it. Then something will happen. The subject will reveal itself.
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It is essential for the photographer to know the effect of his lenses. The lens is his eye, and it makes or ruins his pictures.
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It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of a child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveler who enters a strange country
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The vital elements are often momentary, change-sent things … a gleam of light on water, a trail of smoke from a passing train, a cat crossing the threshold.
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Sometimes they are a matter of luck; the photographer could not expect or hope for them. Sometimes they are a matter of patience, waiting for an effect to be repeated that he has seen and lost or for one that he anticipates.
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Sometimes they are a matter of luck, sometimes of patience, waiting for an effect to be repeated that you have seen. It is usually some incidental detail that heightens the effect of a picture, stressing a pattern, deepening the sense of atmosphere.
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We are most of us too busy, too worried, too intent on proving ourselves right, too obsessed with ideas to stand and stare
BILL BRANDT -
It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveler who enters a strange country.
BILL BRANDT