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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Elliott Erwitt Quotes

The ratio of successful shots is one in God-knows-how-many. Sometimes you’ll get several in one contact sheet, and sometimes it’s none for days. But as long as you go on taking pictures, you’re likely to get a good one at some point.

– Elliott Erwitt

In those simpler days, you could just take pictures of movie stars and show them the way they were, as normal human beings. And if I felt part of any movement at the time, it was just to do that – to be journalistic and photograph what is, rather than what is made up.

– Elliott Erwitt

Photography is pretty simple stuff. You just react to what you see, and take many, many pictures.

– Elliott Erwitt

Making books is a very specific kind of activity. It’s not really a collection of your best pictures – although it is – but it’s also a way of presenting your work so that it’s not repetitive, so that it flows, and so that it makes sense in a book.

– Elliott Erwitt

If your subjects are eternal… they’ll survive.

– Elliott Erwitt

Now very often events are set up for photographers… The weddings are orchestrated about the photographers taking the picture, because if it hasn’t been photographed it doesn’t really exist.

– Elliott Erwitt

I’ll always be an amateur photographer.

– Elliott Erwitt

Most photographers work best alone, myself included.

– Elliott Erwitt

I appreciate simplicity, true beauty that lasts over time, and a little wit and eclecticism that make life more fun.

– Elliott Erwitt

My ‘work’ is about seeing not about ideas.

– Elliott Erwitt

The thing is that when you don’t carry a camera, that’s when you see pictures in particular, or at least that’s when you think you see pictures in particular. When you do carry it, if you do see one on the occasion that you do, you can take it.

– Elliott Erwitt

I’ve been around so long, most editors think I’m dead.

– Elliott Erwitt

When I get up in the morning I brush my teeth and go about my business, and if I am going anywhere interesting I take my camera along.

– Elliott Erwitt

To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.

– Elliott Erwitt

Professionally I’ve evolved with what’s required, but the pictures I do for pleasure haven’t changed, except for the cars in the background, the clothing. I haven’t changed at all.

– Elliott Erwitt

A visual sense is something you either have or you don’t.

– Elliott Erwitt

I enjoy nothing more than spending time with my loved ones, young and old, and at least once a year we get together for a formal family photograph.

– Elliott Erwitt

Be sure to take the lens cap off before photographing.

– Elliott Erwitt

Everybody’s got to do something… I’d been on my own since an early age and I thought I better find something to do to buy biscuits and stuff. From high school onwards I was earning my way with photography, one way or another, working in darkrooms and taking pictures of weddings, neighbors’ children and so on.

– Elliott Erwitt

The advantage of taking pictures of the famous is that they get published.

– Elliott Erwitt

Somehow Photoshop and the ease with which one can produce an image has degraded the quality of photography in general.

– Elliott Erwitt

I don’t really have a favorite camera. I use a Leica and Canon a lot. It depends, especially professionally, on the requirements. But my carry-around camera is a Leica.

– Elliott Erwitt

It’s almost embarrassing, but I do have one trick for taking portraits on commission. I carry one of these little bicycle horns in my pocket, and once in a while, when someone is sour-faced or stiff, I blow my horn. It sort of shatters the barriers. It’s silly, but it works.

– Elliott Erwitt

I’m an amateur photographer, apart from being a professional one, and I think maybe my amateur pictures are the better ones.

– Elliott Erwitt

I’m not a serious photographer like many of my contemporaries. That is to say, I am serious about not being serious.

– Elliott Erwitt

You can find pictures anywhere. It’s simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what’s around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy.

– Elliott Erwitt