18 Quotes by Brassai

After twenty years you can begin to be sure of what camera will do.

A poor photographer meets chance one out of a hundred times and a good photographer meets chance all the time.

The surrealism of my pictures was nothing but the real made eerie by vision. I was trying to express reality, for there is nothing more surrealist.

Photography is the very conscience of painting. It constantly reminds the later of what it must not do.

Photography in our time leaves us with a grave responsibility. While we are playing in our studios with broken flowerpots, oranges, nude studies and still lifes, one day we know that we will be brought to account: life is passing before our eyes without our ever having seen a thing.

In the absence of a subject with which you are passionately involved, and without the excitement that drives you to grasp it and exhaust it, you may take some beautiful pictures, but not a photographic oeuvre.

If you take your inspiration from nature, you don’t invent anything, because what you want to do is to interpret something. But still, everything passes throught your imagination. What you produce at the end is very different from the reality you started with.

It is not sociologists who provide insights but photographers of our sort who are observers at the very center of their times. I have always felt strongly that this was the photographer’s true vocation.

For me the criterion of a good photograph is that it is unforgettable.