Words matter. These are the best Sam Abell Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment – this very moment – to stay.
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.
Editorial photography has to be energetic and visually competitive.
My father taught me photography. It was his hobby, and we had a small darkroom in the fruit cellar of our basement. It was the kind of makeshift darkroom that was only dark at night.
As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.
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.
‘Woman on the Plaza,’ with its distinct horizon, snow-like surfaces, wintry wall, stunning sunlight, sharp shadows, and hurrying figure, would become the most biographical of my photographs – an abstract image of the landscape and life of northern Ohio where I grew up and first practiced photography.
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.
It matters little how much equipment we use; it matters much that we be masters of all we do use.
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.
Life rarely presents fully finished photographs. An image evolves, often from a single strand of visual interest – a distant horizon, a moment of light, a held expression.
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.
I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I’ve always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.
I was known as a 35-mm photographer with a view-camera mentality.
