"I have seen the moment of my greatness flick'r..."

--T.S. Eliot

 

I want to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

--Norman Rush

 

If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera.

--Lewis Hine

 

Look, I'm not an intellectual -- I just take pictures.

--Helmut Newton

 

The pictures have to talk, not me.

-Robert Frank

 

I think a camera is an excuse to be curious.

-Eddy Pula

 

Ultimately photography is about who you are. It's the seeking of truth in relation to yourself. And seeking truth becomes a habit.

--Leonard Freed

 

Photography is both a process of engagement and a method by which we come to understand the world through that engagement.

--Larry Towell

 

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

 

I wanted to make something that was complex enough to stand more than one reading. I wasn’t interested in making jokes or illustrations. Straight photography, following the medium, is intoxicating—trying to wrestle it into the form of a poem.... What’s more interesting than your own life?

--Thomas Roma

 

If you have faith in the richness of the everyday world and the willingness to collaborate with chance happenings, you can make a picture that exceeds anything your mind could come up with.

-Mark Steinmetz

 

Even though most people still don't seem to understand how manipulative photography is - how it changes experience - if it didn't, it wouldn't be so magical. A clue as to why photography is so wonderful is that it does its own thing; it creates a new reality.

--Bill Dane

 

Photography is a celebration of life. That's what it is.

--John Free

 

I'm interested in people and people things.

--Lee Friedlander

 

My intention is to make interesting photographs. That’s it, in the end. I don’t make it up. Let’s say it’s a world I never made. That’s what was there to deal with.

--Garry Winogrand

 

When I'm photographing, I don't see photographs, I see faces.

-Garry Winogrand

 

For me the true business of photography is to capture a bit of reality (whatever that is) on film…if, later, the reality means something to someone else, so much the better.

-Garry Winogrand

 

A photograph should be more interesting than the subject and transcend its obviousness.

-Jeffrey Ladd

 

…to persevere, when the times are bad, when you and your wife are arguing, and you have no money, and your photography sucks that you have to keep on going. and going, and going, and going…

--Bruce Gilden

 

The primary problem is to learn to be your own toughest critic. You have to pay attention to intelligent work, and to work at the same time. You see. I mean, you’ve got to bounce off better work. It’s a matter of working.

--Garry Winogrand

  

A photograph is a fossil. That is what a camera does.

--Donna Ferrato

 

Photographs are one of mankind’s most profound expressions of stillness. They allow us the ability to hold time in our hands and facilitate a merging with time that exists in no other form.

—Dan Winters

 

Even though my photographs might be about a place or a country, ultimately my photos are my life biography.

--Jason Eskenazi

 

You know how few of the pictures you take turn out to be any good.

--Diane Arbus

 

Taking good pictures is easy. Making very good pictures is difficult. Making great pictures is almost impossible.

--Constantine Manos

 

Photography is about failure.

--Larry Clark

 

I only use the camera like I use a toothbrush. It does the job.

--Don McCullin

 

If you don't carry a camera you are not a photographer.

-Don McCullin

 

We are only as good as the people who come before us. We may think we're natural born but it's not true, it's all a lie. We learn as we go along and we owe a lot to the people who come before us.

-Larry Towell

 

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.

-Lee Friedlander

 

At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands before our camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect--a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.

- Robert Adams

 

Life should be an adventure. Anything else is a crying shame.

-Warren Haynes

 

There is no wealth but life.

-John Ruskin

 

I'm just a human being trying to make it in a world that is very rapidly losing its understanding of being human.

--John Trudell

 

I photograph to remember.

--Pedro Meyer

 

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

--Cyril Connolly

 

I'm an analog man in a digital world.

--Joe Walsh

 

I am against virtuosity for its own sake, technique should enrich the action.

--Alfred Hitchcock

 

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.

-- Matsuo Basho

 

I transmit rather than innovate. I trust and love the old ways.

--Confucius

 

Just when you learn how to do it, you're too old except in your dreams.

--William Friedkin

 

I was showing the America that I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed.

—Norman Rockwell

 

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

--T.S. Eliot

 

The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.

--Old Arab proverb

 

Flickr is my scrapbook; my memories, my work prints, my wall. I mostly do candid straight photography these days; I enjoy documenting the human condition. Film is my favorite medium ... for now. Feedback is always appreciated. And thanks for looking.

 

My flickr namesake once got me a short interview in an online magazine. (Sorry about the lousy scans.) It's here: www.smithmag.net/2006/10/31/boo-a-flickr-halloween-stream...

  

www.fluidr.com/photos/_smith_