Lee Friedlander Quotes

I always wanted to be a photographer. I was fascinated with the materials, but I never dreamed I would be having this much fun. I imagined something much less elusive, much more mundane.

You don’t have to go looking for pictures. The material is generous. You go out and the pictures are staring at YOU.

I retired from everything except work.

... photographs are so loaded with information. They're remarkable. As I said, you get both the tree and the forest.

The camera is not merely a reflecting pool and the photographs are not exactly the mirror, mirror on the wall that speaks with a twisted tongue.

Photographs also show the way that the camera sees. It's not just me or you or anybody else. The camera does something that is different from our own setting.

Photography is a generous medium.

The world makes up my pictures, not me.

At first, my presence in my photos was fascinating and disturbing. But as time passed and I was more a part of other ideas in my photos, I was able to add a giggle to those feelings.

If one really knew what one was doing, why do it? It seems to me if you had the answer why ask the question? The thing is there are so many questions.

Sometimes just the facts of the matter make it interesting.

... a mysterious intersection of chance and attention that goes well beyond the existential surrealism of the 'decisive moment'.

I suspect it is for one's self-interest that one looks at one's surroundings and one's self. This search is personally born and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs.

[Garry Winogrand] was a bull of a man and the world his china shop.

With a camera like that you don't believe you're in the masterpiece business. It's enough to be able to peck at the world.

I take more to the subject than to my ideas about it. I am not interested in any idea I have had, the subject is so demanding and so important.

The West to me is where the landscape is.