48 Quotes by John Szarkowski

All photographs are time exposures, of shorter or longer duration, and each describes a discrete parcel of time.

I was very young and very stupid. In the beginning it's mostly just the magic of the process. It's not easy. You don't learn overnight.

When you look at a good Ansel Adams photograph, you think you know the temperature, the relative humidity, the month.

I've always been better at photographing things I like than things I don't like,

People don't think of landscapes as moving, but they do. The light changes, the clouds move, and that's what Adams' photography is really about -- about the fact that nature is not permanent.

He photographed not so much geography as weather.

Photography was not invented to serve a clearly understood function. There was in fact widespread uncertainty, even among its inventors, as to what it might be good for.

Photography's central sense of purpose and aesthetic: the precise and lucid description of significant fact.

What's happening is that people are making a billion photographs a year of their cats, frequently with the cats wearing costumes. Do you think I should be doing shows of cat photography?