40 Quotes by Paul Strand

I like to photograph people who have strength and dignity in their faces. Whatever life has done to them, it hasn’t destroyed them.

Your photography is a record of your living - for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people's ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzche meant when he said, 'I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him.' He knew how insidious other people's ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own personal vision.

It is easy to make a picture of someone and call it a portrait. The difficulty lies in making a picture that makes the viewer care about a stranger.

It has always been my belief that the true artist, like the true scientist, is a researcher using materials and techniques to dig into the truth and meaning of the world in which he himself lives; and what he creates, or better perhaps, brings back, are the objective results of his explorations. The measure of his talent--of his genius, if you will--is the richness he finds in such a life's voyage of discovery and the effectiveness with which he is able to embody it through his chosen medium.

The important thing is, you have to have something important to say about the world.

No matter what lens you use, no matter what speed the film, no matter how you develop it, no matter how you print it, you cannot say more than you can see.

If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

The portrait of a person is one of the most difficult things to do. It means you must almost bring the presence of that person photographed to other people in such a way that they don't have to know that person personally, but that they are still confronted with a human being that they won't forget. That's a portrait.

Did I express my personality? I think that’s quite unimportant because it’s not people’s selves but what they have to say about life that’s important.