Sam Abell Quotes

My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it.

It matters little how much equipment we use; it matters much that we be masters of all we do use.

Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.

Essentially what photography is is life lit up.

We know that photographs inform people. We also know that photographs move people. The photograph that does both is the one we want to see and make.

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.

A mad, keen photographer needs to get out into the world and work and make mistakes.

Photographs that transcend but do not deny their literal situation appeal to me.

For sheer majestic geography and sublime scale, nothing beats Alaska and the Yukon. For culture, Japan. And for all-around affection, Australia.

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.

Actually, ambition won't get you that far. You'll shift gears. You'll see something that's shinier. But if you believe... then you're the long-distance runner.

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.

Editorial photography has to be energetic and visually competitive.

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.

My connection to Santa Fe is very closely, and continuously a connection with Reid. I believe in him and his philosophy of photographic education.

People say to me, "Who's your favorite kind of photographer?" Or "Who would be your favorite photographer to have in a workshop?" And I always say, "My Dad."

Richard Prince's most famous photograph was made by me.

Even though I teach with 35mm, my method takes people by surprise, because it isn't fast, and it isn't about hardware or software, or even great results. It's about great process.

Increasingly, it's people not interested in National Geographic.

The longer we lived with it the more we wanted something less about process and more about life.

It actually has transcended my career at the Geographic, so that when my career there ended, I had momentum as a teacher, and a belief in photographic education at the workshop level.

I had a book come out several years ago, when there were no blogs. This is a mark to me about how the environment has changed.

Teaching has never been far from my life. It's the most natural thing I do. Apparently, as I said, I cannot not do it.

Aboriginal Australia is a tough place to work, rough and tough.

There's a great quote about Virginia Woolf, she had the same spiritual stake in her diaries as she had in her writing.

Typically I see it with photographers who go to a place like India or Nepal, and everything's so colorful and exotic and they think, therefore, a picture's been taken.

My least favorite photographer to have would be myself. Someone who wanted a career at National Geographic. Because it's almost mathematically impossible to achieve that.

[ My time and our common culture] it's what I'm photographing, and I'm very involved with that.

I'm very involved in photographing America now, so I don't think of faraway places, as I did when I was young.

I would like to go to Antarctica. That's about all.

The unusual wins out over the usual.

The best lesson I was given is that all of life teaches, especially if we have that expectation.

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.

What I'm interested in is modern American history. I'm taken with the changes that have occurred in America in my lifetime.

I now want to be a photographer of my time, and our common culture.

That's who comes to my workshops. I jokingly tell my students that the class could be called "Your photographs: Better."

My dad had been an ardent amateur photographer, and he taught me to compose a photograph from the back to the front, and then populate the picture.

[In the late 80's] that's the first time I heard about that astonishing idea [that most photographs would be taken on telephones]. And now I've been watching the tsunami of images.

I was known as a 35-mm photographer with a view-camera mentality.

For example, in my dorm, at the University of Kentucky, I had the only camera. I don't think anyone came to college with a camera, other than me.

It's more difficult now, to be a Geographic photographer, than it was when I came along. And it wasn't easy at that time.

A very big part of the life of a photograph is the afterlife.