David Burnett Quotes

The greatest photographs are motivated by human feeling.

I love New York, but am happy to be away from it. I really like small towns, with welcoming barbecue restaurants.

Do not settle for easy. Do not settle for that first image. Craft it, work it, and make something more out of it. And finally, don't forget that the biggest joy in photography is making pictures of those things in your own life.

I see myself as a recorder of history, sort of a visual historian.

War isn't a TV show with plot twists to keep the viewers interested. The proliferation of images and blanket media coverage have suffocated the life out of old-style photojournalism.

The satisfaction comes from working next to 500 photographers and coming away with something different.

The fact that I have a little ten-megapixel camera with me all the time, is way better than having the greatest camera in the world sitting at home on a desk instead of on my shoulder.

As an emerging photojournalist in the early 70s, my focus was on trying to create stories for magazines to the exclusion of almost everything else. I wish someone had told me then that the most personally important pictures you’ll ever make are those about you and your life. I’m glad I had the chance to work for some great magazines, but I really miss those little everyday images, the ones that take place in and around your own life, which will never make the news. Don’t sell yourself short: photograph your own life, not just everyone else’s.

Shooting film is not for everybody, but if you're crazy enough it might be for you.

It's a given your family will be tired of being photographed, but don't give up. In another couple of decades, those are the pictures you will be glad to have.

The loss of letters in today's world is one of the great losses we are experiencing, though we shan't know the full extent of it for another twenty or thirty years when we'll wish we had those letters never written.

When you've lived through the golden age of photojournalism, there's no point in being nostalgic.

I hate being away, but I understand that for me, that's where the work, the stories are.