Here, There, and Everywhere

"My interest in snapshot photography began because, every now and then, I would come across a picture that was startling in its directness. Made without pretense to art, these images were without artifice, and their simplicity gave them a special vitality. While there are certainly visual conventions among snapshots, at their best they are seemingly unmediated and unconditioned, the result of an accident or chance. This immediacy has become rarer and rarer as people are more and more exposed to images, and it indicates a path toward understanding, by contrast, what part of a typical photograph is the overlay of visual convention."

--Stephen Shore here

"Picasso famously said that it took him a lifetime to paint like a child. I takes many professional photographers that long to strip their pictures of artiness. How humbling to realize that simple mechanical reproduction can offer so much more than creative interpretation."  

--Alec Soth there

"It rarely occurs to such a photographer to take a picture of something, say a Venetian foundation, without a loved one standing directly in front of it and smiling into the lens. What artistic results he obtains are almost inevitably accidental and totally without self-consciousness. Perhaps because of his very artlessness, and his very numbers, this nameless picturetaker may in the end be the truest and most valuable recorder of our times."

--Jean Shepherd here

"I am a passionate lover of the snapshot, because of all photographic images it comes closest to the truth. The snapshot is a specific spiritual moment. It cannot be willed or desired to be achieved. It simply happens to certain people and not to others. Some people may never take a snapshot in their lives, though they take many pictures."

--Lisette Model there

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."

--Shunryu Suzuki everywhere