Minor White Quotes

When gifts are given to me through my camera, I accept them graciously.

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.

No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen.

When you approach something to photograph it, first be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence. Then don't leave until you have captured its essence.

I'm always mentally photographing everything as practice.

All photographs are self-portraits.

One does not photograph something simply for 'what it is', but 'for what else it is.

At first glance a photograph can inform us. At second glance it can reach us.

Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence.

If all your life means to you is water running over rocks, then photograph it, but I want to create something that would not have existed without me.

There's no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class. I'm always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don't give a damn how it got made.

When I look at pictures I have made, I have forgotten what I saw in front of the camera and respond only to what I am seeing in the photographs.

Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts.

The camera is first a means of self-discovery and a means of self-growth. The artist has one thing to say - himself.

Photography is a language more universal than words.

Let the subject generate its own photographs. Become a camera.

We could teach photography as a way to make a living, and best of all, somehow to get students to experience for themselves photography as a way of life.

The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.

Before he has seen the whole, how unusually perceptive and imaginative the person must be to evolve the entire sequence by meditating on its single, pair or triplet of essential images.

To engage a sequence, we keep in mind the photographs on either side of the one in our eye.

Watching the way the current moves a blade of grass - sometimes I've seen that happen and it has just turned me inside out.

It is curious that I always want to group things, a series of sonnets, a series of photographs; whatever rationalizations appear, they originate in urges that are rarely satisfied with single images.

Reaching a 'creative' state of mind thru positive action is considered preferable to waiting for 'inspiration'.

A very receptive state of mind... not unlike a sheet of film itself - seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second's exposure conceives a life in it.

Photographers who come up with power never get accused of imitating anyone else even though they photograph the same broom, same street, same portraits.

When I looked at things for what they are I was fool enough to persist in my folly and found that each photograph was a mirror of my Self.

The development of a love of medium and a responsibility for one's own pictures is an overall goal.

In putting images together I become active, and excitement is of another order - synthesis overshadows analysis.

We emphasized the creativeness that happens at the moment of seeing over the kind that takes place in the dark room.

Students were taught by doing.

If I have anything to give you through camera, it must be of myself. … A gnawing burns inside … to make something of myself worth giving.

Camera and eye are together a time machine with which the mind and human being can do the same kind of violence to time and space as dreams.