96 Quotes by Sam Abell

In almost every photograph I have ever made, there is something I would do to complete it. I take that to be the spirit hole or the deliberate mistake that's in a Navajo rug to not be godlike, but to be human.

How the visual world appears is important to me. I'm always aware of the light. I'm always aware of what I would call the 'deep composition.' Photography in the field is a process of creation, of thought and technique. But ultimately, it's an act of imaginatively seeing from within yourself.

My dad had been an ardent amateur photographer, and he taught me to compose a photograph from the back to the front, and then populate the picture.

I had luck, but I worked hard and I suffered. It's not just photography I'm talking about. It's about whatever dream you want it to be.

I wanted life to be episodic. I wanted to be a magazine photographer and I was willing to do what it took to become that.

There isn't an aspect of book creation I don't enjoy, and there has always been a book in my life to dream about or work on.

That statement [ Stephen Ambrose:'You, Sam, have the hardest job, which is, pretend like nothing has happened in the last 200 years.'] woke me up to the fact that the landscape that Lewis and Clark came across was greater than the Serengeti. And it's gone.

Though Geographic didn't publish that photo in the story that it was done for, "The Life of Charlie Russell," a cowboy artist in Montana. But later, maybe a year and a half ago, they named it one of the 50 greatest pictures ever made at National Geographic.

That's who comes to my workshops. I jokingly tell my students that the class could be called "Your photographs: Better."