I always loved the fact that Harry Callahan found photography—or photography found him—as an adult in an automobile factory camera club. To me, he’s Everyman with a camera. His subject was his daily life; his art lay in his personal vision. Photographing blades of grass and sticks poking out of snow and sand was almost unthinkable when Callahan shot thousands of them. He left behind 100,000 negatives and over 10,000 proof prints. Yet, for all his photographic activity, Callahan, at his own estimation, produced no more than half a dozen final images a year.   Harry Callahan (October 22, 1912….

    Richard Avedon’s photographs always oozed with the most elegant and compelling style. Early in his career—in the 40′s—he changed the look of fashion photograph by having his models run and jump and laugh, a new vision at the time. Then, in the 60′s, he photographed what seems to be almost every famous person of the time standing stock still in front of a white piece of paper. But through it all he was prolific. He produced an incredible body of work by staying connected with his camera and cranking it out every day. He was well aware that….

No wonder Gordon Parks felt like he was just beginning. He must’ve been energized by his own accomplishments. He was some kind of creative Jeffersonian genius. There wasn’t much he couldn’t do. I love that photography was woven through so much of what he did.—he understood the power of the printed and moving images. He was Jackie Robinson with a camera. He cracked Life Magazine and Hollywood and did it all with a sense of activism. Parks said that freedom was the theme of all his work; he described it as “Not allowing anyone to set boundaries, cutting loose the….

Henri Cartier-Bresson is the Zeus of street photography. He often spoke of the “decisive moment” as the culmination and alignment of time, space, and emotion producing photographic perfection. Several of the very accomplished photographers I went to school with would tell you Cartier-Bresson is the greatest photographer who has ever lived. He’s regarded as a completely natural photographer—he was an accomplished artist at a young age—so it’s comforting to the rest of us he openly admitted that climbing the photographic ladder takes time, energy, and a willingness to recognize your mistakes. I suspect that if he had been blessed enough….

For photographers of my generation (I was introduced to Diane Arbus’s work in 1970—I was seventeen) Diane Arbus represented a bold, honest, and never before seen vision of the world. It was impossible to imagine how she was able to befriend people on the fringe of society, photograph them, and display their images in books with other social “freaks” without disrespecting them—but she did it. She pulled it off and she was amazingly eloquent about her work to boot. Her words and pictures will inspire photographers for generations to come. I believe the sentiment in this quote holds true for….

Irving Penn was born on June 16, 1917 in Plainfield, New Jersey. His younger brother, Arthur, would go on to become a film director and producer—he directed Bonnie and Clyde and The Miracle Worker. Mrs. Penn had some very talented children. Irving Penn studied drawing, painting, graphics, and industrial arts in Philadelphia in what is now the University of the Arts. Irving Penn worked for two years as a freelance designer and didn’t make his first amateur photographs until he was working as an art director at Saks Fifth Avenue. He was soon shooting photographs for Vogue which he did….

James Nachtwey has pretty much seen it all. He’s been on the road ncovering the most troubled areas of the globe for almost 30 years. This much exposure to hate, hunger and war has to change you. He has attempted to maintain his sanity and the sanity of the world with his camera and his photographs. While covering the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, Nachtwey was injured from an insurgent grenade but recovered to travel to Southeast Asia to cover the Boxing Day tsunami of 2001. Nachtwey was born in 1948, in Massachusetts and attended Dartmouth College in 1970, where he….

Yousaf Karsh (1908- 2002 ) was a Canadian photographer known for his studio portraits of famous twentieth century figures. Of the 100 most notable people of the century, named by the International Who’s Who, Karsh had photographed 51 of them. His portrait of Winston Churchill on the cover of Life magazine brought Karsh international prominence, and is claimed to be the most reproduced photographic portrait in history. The story is often told of how Karsh created his famous portrait of Churchill during the early years of World War II. Churchill, the British prime minister, had just addressed the Canadian Parliament….

The Civil War photographer Matthew Brady’s words should give comfort to amateur photographers everywhere. (And professionals for that matter.) In fact, I love this quote so much I may just have to put it on my business cards when it’s time for a reprint. Matthew Brady (1822-1896) is perhaps the most famous photographer of the 19th century. A portrait photographer who took his studio—at great personal and financial risk—to Civil War battlefields to document the war, he is often credited with being the father of photojournalism. Despite the fact that Brady’s photography required hundreds of pounds in gear and a….

  Robert Doisneau (1912-1994) was yet another French photographer who helped invent photo-journalism as we know it. He contributed to all of the well-known magazines of his era and photographed twenty books. He is credited with giving an unusual sense of dignity to children’s street culture. Children have not always been an subject for sensitive photographers. Doisneau gave a new found respect to a subject he photographed all of his life. The way you photograph children has probably been influenced by Robert Doisneau, regardless of whether you know it or not. Ironically, when he started to take photographs, he was….

Mary Ellen Mark (1940) is one of the American photographers that inspired photographers of my generation. When I was in journalism school, we worshiped her for her work in Rolling Stone Magazine. She photographed people on the fringe—her words. She shot memorable photographs of homeless kids in America and prostitutes in New Delhi. We loved her. When I moved to Philadelphia my new dentist asked what I did for a living. I told him and he suggested that I may have heard of one of his good friends in high school. She was the head cheerleader. Of course, it was….

I recently attended a Creative Memories event in Minneapolis. A sweet CM consultant named Junie Dahlem approached me and flattered me about my photo tips and because she knew I love quotes gave me one to share. She found it in a photo book in a hotel lobby, hand written on a blank page, unsigned. An anonymous quote about photography. I couldn’t resist. Someone took the time to put these words down in a book and not leave their name. I hope you enjoy it.   This classic photo is by Andreas Feininger.        

Annie Leibovitz is one of those photographers that you’d likely have trouble naming a celebrity she hasn’t photographed—especially in the 80’s and 90’s. But I also have to believe, based on the quote, that she’s a typical photographer in that she has to change behavior gears to make it work. I know photographers that seem to go into a bit of a trance when they finally decide to get serious. You probably have another personality inside you, too. Good photography requires concentration—multi-tasking while you’re looking through a viewfinder is probably a bad idea. Annie Leibovitz is best known for her….

What I love about National Geographic photographer Jim Richardson is that his heart and camera are rooted in small-town America. He has seen the world several times over, but continues to find, in his words “interesting stuff” in his hometown of Lindsborg, Kansas. Interesting stuff is in the eye of the beholder to be sure, and when you’re looking through curious, observing eyes it’s obviously everywhere—easier said than done. Jim continues to inspire photographers of all levels with his gorgeous color magazine photography and his respectful, down-home, simple black-and-white photographs of real people living their very real day to day….

He’s the ultimate amateur’s amateur; a pure photographer apparently born to take pictures. (And born, I might add with a silver spoon in his mouth to a wealthy French family in 1894 that could finance his photographic habit, but it’s impossible to hold that against him considering the incredible body of work.) He started at the age of seven and never stopped; he was discovered when he was well past 60 and has since become a photograph icon himself. Very simply, he shot photographs for himself. In the end they made other people happy, too. He essentially documented a century…..

The next time you feel too lazy to run upstairs to get your camera consider the plight of Edward Curtis. In the first decade of the 20th century he produced a classic set of photographs of the the vanishing native American Indian. He traveled thousands of miles often working from the back of a horse-drawn wagon. According to wikipedia: “Curtis made over 10,000 wax cylinder recordings of Indian language and music. He took over 40,000 photographic images—many on glass plates—from over 80 tribes. He recorded tribal lore and history, and he described traditional foods, housing, garments, recreation, ceremonies, and funeral….

    You only need to spend a little time with a camera to know what Modell was talking about. Photography is a two-way street for sure. Everybody can do it and almost nobody can do it. You barely have to read the instruction manual to get a decent picture and you could study the art for decades and never take a truly great one. It’s the deceptive ease of the medium that keeps toying with your head. Just when you think you got it, it slaps you back down. But it’s also accessible and welcoming to anyone who is….

  Garry Winogrand had ample opportunity to see what things did actually look like in photographs. He was one of the more prolific photographers that ever lived. At the time of his death he left 2500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6500 rolls of developed but not proofed film, and contact sheets made from about 3000 rolls of other film—you do the math. Those are numbers that indicate the man rarely stopped taking pictures. His wife was quoted as saying that being married to Gary was like being married to a lens. He had an obvious appreciation for the alternate universe….

I’m rather proud of this quote. I heard him say it, I wrote it down, and I’ve never seen it in print anywhere else. Alfred Eisenstaedt, the great Life Magazine photographer, was visiting North Dakota State University in Fargo, North Dakota in 1972. I was a staff photographer at the student newspaper there, The Spectrum. I imagine that most photographers within a wide radius of the event were there that day; it was all very exciting. One of the photography students asked him the standard question. “Do you have any advice for young photographers?” Let me translate that question for….

Robert Frank did collect the alternatives of hope and despair in what many people consider to be the greatest photography book of all time, The Americans. Ironically, it required a non-American to stand back with his camera and view us objectively. Robert Frank is Swiss. Tens of thousands of art and photography students have been emulating his casual, honest style since the book was published in 1958. For those people it is unthinkable that The Americans could have been shot in color. Robert Frank was peeling back the layers of distraction getting down to the soul of our country. His….

  Today we take for granted the beauty of an intentionally blurred, long-shutter speed image. There was a time, however, when, that was seen as nothing more than bad technique—Ernst Haas changed all that. He has inspired generations of photographers to break the mold—the mold inside you that is holding you back. What photo student hasn’t stood in front of a wall of peeling paint,trying to stretch the way they see the world? Subjects that seem obvious now, or even cliches, had to be let out of confinement. We have Ernst Haas to thank for opening those doors. Someone had….

Admittedly, there’s not a man in this photograph, but it works for me anyway. Imogene Cunningham is known for reducing things to their most unsentimental form, an approach all of us can learn from. There were probably not many women  looking for ugly men to photograph in Hollywood in the twenties and thirties, so her crystal clear vision jumps out of the pack. Watching what other photographers are doing and deciding to do something else is a great way for any photographer to change directions.   —Nick Kelsh   Imogene Cunningham (1883-1976) took an early interest in the chemistry of….

No wonder Gordon Parks felt like he was just beginning. He must’ve been energized by his own accomplishments. He was some kind of creative Jeffersonian genius. There wasn’t much he couldn’t do. I love that photography was woven through so much of what he did.—he understood the power of the printed and moving images. He was Jackie Robinson with a camera. He cracked Life Magazine and Hollywood and did it all with a sense of activism. Parks said that freedom was the theme of all his work; he described it as “Not allowing anyone to set boundaries, cutting loose the….

I always loved the fact that Harry Callahan found photography—or photography found him—as an adult in an automobile factory camera club. To me, he’s Everyman with a camera. His subject was his daily life; his art lay in his personal vision. Photographing blades of grass and sticks poking out of snow and sand was almost unthinkable when Callahan shot thousands of them. He left behind 100,000 negatives and over 10,000 proof prints. Yet, for all his photographic activity, Callahan, at his own estimation, produced no more than half a dozen final images a year.   Harry Callahan (October 22, 1912….

    Richard Avedon’s photographs always oozed with the most elegant and compelling style. Early in his career—in the 40′s—he changed the look of fashion photograph by having his models run and jump and laugh, a new vision at the time. Then, in the 60′s, he photographed what seems to be almost every famous person of the time standing stock still in front of a white piece of paper. But through it all he was prolific. He produced an incredible body of work by staying connected with his camera and cranking it out every day. He was well aware that….

The word funny somehow doesn’t do Elliott Erwitt’s pictures justice, but the longer you look at his pictures they funnier they get. I’m not a big collector of other people’s photographs, but I do have two signed Elliott Erwitt prints hanging in my home and they have been bringing me pleasure for decades. At the heart of Erwitt’s brilliance is the ability to see things other people don’t. He has been given the “ability to notice” like a gift from the photo gods. And although his technique is as good as a street-shooter’s technique can be, it’s only technique and….

No wonder Gordon Parks felt like he was just beginning. He must’ve been energized by his own accomplishments. He was some kind of creative Jeffersonian genius. There wasn’t much he couldn’t do. I love that photography was woven through so much of what he did.—he understood the power of the printed and moving images. He was Jackie Robinson with a camera. He cracked Life Magazine and Hollywood and did it all with a sense of activism. Parks said that freedom was the theme of all his work; he described it as “Not allowing anyone to set boundaries, cutting loose the….

Henri Cartier-Bresson is the Zeus of street photography. He often spoke of the “decisive moment” as the culmination and alignment of time, space, and emotion producing photographic perfection. Several of the very accomplished photographers I went to school with would tell you Cartier-Bresson is the greatest photographer who has ever lived.

For photographers of my generation (I was introduced to Diane Arbus’s work in 1970—I was seventeen) Diane Arbus represented a bold, honest, and never before seen vision of the world. It was impossible to imagine how she was able to befriend people on the fringe of society, photograph them, and display their images in books with other social “freaks” without disrespecting them—but she did it.

When I was young, Ansel Adams was famous for being the cuddly bear of a man on Grape Nuts TV commercials. But that was the older Ansel Adams. The young Ansel Adams was a wild, mountain-man artist. He would pack his cumbersome view camera and ten glass plates on the back of a donkey and disappear into the mountains for days—returning with photographic history.