Top 35 Alfred Stieglitz Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

Featured in: Photography Quotes

2. “Photography is my passion.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

3. “I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

4. “Wherever there is light, one can photograph.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

5. “The ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired off-hand, but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labor.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

6. “Everything is relative except relatives, and they are absolute.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

7. “Photography my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

8. “Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

9. “The goal of art was the vital expression of self.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

10. “The great geniuses are those who have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

11. “The fight for photography became my life.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

12. “For that is the power of the camera: seize the familiar and give it new meanings, a special significance by the mark of a personality.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

13. “My cloud photographs are equivalents of my most profound life experiences, my basic philosophy of life. All art is an equivalent of the artist’s most profound life experiences.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

14. “Photographers must learn not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

15. “There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

16. “My photographs are a picture of the chaos in the world, and of my relationship to that chaos. My prints show the world’s constant upsetting of man’s equilibrium, and his eternal battle to reestablish it.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

17. “As a matter of fact, nearly all the greatest work is being, and has always been done, by those who are following photography for the love of it, and not merely for financial reasons. As the name implies, an amateur is one who works for love.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

18. “When I make a picture, I make love.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

19. “It is not art in the professionalized sense about which I care, but that which is created sacredly, as a result of a deep inner experience, with all of oneself, and that becomes ‘art’ in time.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

20. “All art, like all love, is rooted in heartache.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

21. “A work is not art until enough noise has been made about it and someone rich comes along and buys it.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

22. “Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

23. “All I want is to preserve that wonderful something which so purely exists between us.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

24. “The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

25. “The scene fascinated me: a round straw hat; the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railings made of chain; white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below; circular iron machinery; a mast that cut into the sky, completing a triangle.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

26. “I do not object to retouching, dodging or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

27. “I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

28. “Snow. White, white, white, soft and clean, and maddening shapes, with the whole world in them.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

29. “Before the people at large, and for that matter, the artists themselves, understand what photography really means, as I understand that term, it is essential for them to be taught the real meaning of art.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

30. “If you can imagine photography in the guise of a woman and you’d ask her what she thought of Stieglitz, she’d say: He always treated me like a gentleman.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

31. “If you place the imperfect next to the perfect, people will see the difference between the one and the other. But if you offer the imperfect alone, people are only too apt to be satisfied by it.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

32. “Let me here call attention to one of the most universally popular mistakes that have to do with photography – that of classing supposedly excellent work as professional, and using the term amateur to convey the idea of immature productions and to excuse atrociously poor photographs.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

33. “There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

34. “To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

35. “Several people feel I have photographed God. May be.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

36. “The camera was waiting for me by predestination and I took to it as a musician takes to the piano or a painter to canvas. I found that I was master of the elements, that I could work miracles.”

— Alfred Stieglitz

37. “The trouble with most photographers, and for that matter also with painters, and other people, is, that they are always trying to do something which is outside of themselves. In consequence they produce nothing that means anything to those who have the gift or intuition for truth: all else is really not worth a tinker’s damn.”

— Alfred Stieglitz