Joel Sternfeld Quotes

I'm trying to take pictures of less and less.

Photography has always been capable of manipulation. Even more subtle and more invidious is the fact that any time you put a frame to the world, it's an interpretation. I could get my camera and point it at two people and not point it at the homeless third person to the right of the frame, or not include the murder that's going on to the left of the frame. You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo. There's an infinite number of ways you can do this: photographs have always been authored.

Looking at a black and white photograph, you are already looking at a strange world.

No individual photo explains anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium.

Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.

The digital print is becoming the look of our time, and it makes the C-print start to look like a tintype.

Some people consider utopia to be derived from nature. For some people, utopia is the city.

No individual photo explains anything. That's what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium. It is the photographer's job to get this medium to say what you need it to say. Because photography has a certain verisimilitude, it has gained a currency as truthful - but photographs have always been convincing lies.

Photography has always been capable of manipulation.

The job of the color photographer is to provide some level of abstraction that can take the image out of the daily.

For me it was sort of career suicide to work in color, but I did it because I perceived myself from an early stage to be interested in seasonality - the changing of the seasons - thats what I deeply loved.

Some of the people who are now manipulating photos, such as Andreas Gursky, make the argument - rightly - that the 'straight' photographs of the 1940s and 50s were no such thing. Ansell Adams would slap a red filter on his lens, then spend three days burning and dodging in the dark room, making his prints. That's a manipulation. Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.

When you have unity, I think it squares the reach or power of the work.