Elliott Erwitt's Quotes

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.

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.

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.

The most awful museums are in China. They have magnificent stuff on display and just the worst way of displaying it. They just don't spend money on lighting and installation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm almost violent about that stuff - electronic manipulation of pictures. I think it's an abomination. I reject it all. I mean, it's OK for selling corn flakes or automobiles or for taking pimples out of Elizabeth Taylor's face, but it undermines the thing that photography is about, which is about observation and not about manipulation of images.

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.

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

All of my marriages lasted seven years.

Be sure to take the lens cap off before photographing.

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

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.

I like museums in Berlin a lot, especially in the eastern part. They're extraordinarily good.

I'll always be an amateur photographer.

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

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

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

If your subjects are eternal... they'll survive.

Most photographers work best alone, myself included.

My 'work' is about seeing not about ideas.

My life has been quite interesting professionally.

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

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