54 Quotes by Harry Callahan

You only do exercises in art school. That’s not the real thing. A little bit tells you so much. You have to find your own self. And you don’t know what you are! But that’s what you have to search for.

I love art because it doesn’t have rules like baseball. The only rule is to be good. That’s the toughest thing to do.

The difference between the casual impression and the intensified image is about as great as that separating the average business letter from a poem. If you choose your subject selectively – intuitively – the camera can write poetry.

It’s the subject matter that counts. I’m interested in revealing the subject in a new way to intensify it. A photo is able to capture a moment that people can’t always see.

It takes me a long time to change. I don’t think you can just go out and figure out a bunch of visual ideas and photograph. The change happens in living and not through thinking.

I can’t say what makes a picture. I can’t say. It’s mysterious.

I just don’t know what makes a picture, really – the thing that makes it is something unique, as far as I can understand. Just like one guy can write a sentence and it’s beautiful and another one can write it and it’s dead. What the difference is, I don’t know.

I can tell you for me it goes on forever. There are some things you can’t ever find out. You can’t find out in one life either.

Every time I talked about making a picture I didn’t do it. I had already done it – talking about it! I quit talking.