Imogen Cunningham Quotes

Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I'm going to take tomorrow.

I don't love the world. I think Jupiter should have hit us.

The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.

Everybody who does anything for the public can be criticized. There's always someone who doesn't like it.

I wasn't very ambitious. I think that's the solution. I just took things as they came. I wouldn't say I didn't have any problem, but I didn't care. I didn't think I was going to save the world by doing photography as some of these people do. I was just having a good time doing it, and so I still had a good time no matter what I had to photograph.

I don't think there's any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.

The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.

...There are too many people studying it [photography] now who are never going to make it. You can't give them a formula for making it. You have to have it in you first, you don't learn it. The seeing eye is the important thing.

Which is my best picture? The one I will do tomorrow.

So many people dislike themselves so thoroughly that they never see any reproduction of themselves that suits. None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.

I was invited to photograph Hollywood. They asked me what I would like to photograph. I said, Ugly men.

None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.

I just believe in working. I'm not one of those romantic explainers of my own individual point of view.

There are certain things you don't discuss with Ansel, especially if you don't agree.

I never divide photographers into creative and uncreative, I just call them photographers. Who is creative? How do you know who is creative or not?

I never stopped photographing. There were a couple of years when I didn't have a darkroom, but that didn't stop me from photographing.

You know, a documentary is only interesting once in a while. If you look at a whole book of Dorothea [Lange]'s where she has row after row of people bending over and digging out carrots - that can be very tedious. And so it's only once in a while that something happens that is worth doing.

I think San Francisco is the best place in the whole world for an easy life.

I was poor. When you're poor you work, and when you're rich you expect somebody to hand it to you. So I think being reasonably poor is very good for people.

A woman said to me when she first sat down, You're photographing the wrong side of my face. I said, Oh, is there one?

I was brought up on art. My father thought I had a great hand at art and sent me to art school. But he did not want me to become a photographer.

When people ask me silly questions about my private life, I just say, I don't discuss that.

Suppose Cartier-Bresson asked the man who jumped the puddle to do it again --- it never would have been the same. Start stealing!

My mind is vacant on names, but I know him as well as anything. When I need names they drop out of my head; when I don't need them they drop back.

When People magazine called me, I did the job on Ansel. I'm older than Ansel and he has to mind me.

I don't resent anything.

I don't know what love means.

It's silly to keep people alive who have a terrible disease.

Anybody is influenced by where and how he lives.

I told the students that whatever they did in class was for the wastebasket.

When you do portraits professionally it's not a desire, it's for money.

I became kind of a drop-out in science after I came back to America. I wanted to photograph.

Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don't know.

I'd never kill myself for a man. I wouldn't do it for anybody.

Get it out of your historic head.

I don't talk about success. I don't know what it is. Wait until I'm dead.

I turn people into human beings by not making them into gods.

Some people say to me, Isn't it too bad that people discovered you so late? I never thought that.