Alfred Stieglitz quotes

Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and influential promoter of modern art. His work and galleries played a pivotal role in establishing photography as a recognized art form in the United States. He inspired generations of artists and helped shape the course of 20th-century art. Here are 31 of his quotes:

When I make a photograph, I make love.

Alfred Stieglitz

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

Alfred Stieglitz

The goal of art was the vital expression of self.

Alfred Stieglitz

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.

Alfred Stieglitz

Wherever there is light, one can photograph.

Alfred Stieglitz

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

Alfred Stieglitz

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

Alfred Stieglitz

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

Alfred Stieglitz

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.

Alfred Stieglitz

Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze.

Alfred Stieglitz

The fight for photography became my life.

Alfred Stieglitz

to show that [the success of my portray-] photographs was not due to subject matter – not to special trees or faces, or interiors, to special privileges – clouds were there for everyone... I wanted to photograph clouds to find out what I had learned in forty years about photography. Through clouds to put down my philosophy of life... My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs that unless one has eyes and sees, they won't be seen – and still everyone will never forget them having once looked at them.

Alfred Stieglitz

Nearly right is child's play.

Alfred Stieglitz

For that is the power of the camera: seize the familiar and give it new meanings, a special significance by the mark of a personality.

Alfred Stieglitz

All art, like all love, is rooted in heartache.

Alfred Stieglitz

It is not art in the professionalized sense about which I care, but that which is created sacredly, as a result of a deep inner experience, with all of oneself, and that becomes 'art' in time.

Alfred Stieglitz

Snow. White, white, white, soft and clean, and maddening shapes, with the whole world in them.

Alfred Stieglitz

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

Alfred Stieglitz

Several people feel I have photographed God. May be.

Alfred Stieglitz

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.

Alfred Stieglitz

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

Alfred Stieglitz

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.

Alfred Stieglitz