American Quotes

What I learned from Lennon was something that did stay with me my whole career, which is to be very straightforward. I actually love talking about taking pictures, and I think that helps everyone.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.

It's a heavy weight, the camera. Now we have modern and lightweight, small plastic cameras, but in the '70s they were heavy metal.

I wish that all of nature's magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.

I still need the camera because it is the only reason anyone is talking to me.

Sometimes I enjoy just photographing the surface because I think it can be as revealing as going to the heart of the matter.

I am impressed with what happens when someone stays in the same place and you took the same picture over and over and it would be different, every single frame.

My hope is that we continue to nurture the places that we love, but that we also look outside our immediate worlds.

I'm more interested in being good than being famous.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.

A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.

Computer photography won't be photography as we know it. I think photography will always be chemical.

Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy - your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself.

The Jewish background is not that far from the black groove. Blacks are downtrodden, Jews are downtrodden, therefore they have something in common in that affliction. Being downtrodden often makes one more empathetic and sympathetic.

The first memory I have was my sisters dancing to the radio when they played records by Benny Goodman and Harry James and of the sort. But the record that got me was a record by Derek Sampson, who was a young guy, called 'Boogie Express,' and it was boogie-woogie. Really, it was on fire, and that go

The early influences, in many ways, were in Baltimore. I was passing open windows where there might be a radio playing something funky. In the summertime, sometimes there'd be a man sitting on a step, playing an acoustic guitar, playing some kind of folk blues. The seed had been planted.

Teenagers especially are very, very conscious about what is hip and what is lame and what is square and what is out and what is in, you know. And, I mean, I grew up right there in the middle of a black culture. And I knew dead-on what it was.

Red-hot songs were born on the black streets of Baltimore, where I delivered five-gallon cans of kerosene and ten-pound bags of coal.

Our songs did not transcend being R&B hits. They were R&B hits that white kids were attracted to. And if people bought it, it became rock & roll. That's marketing. Why couldn't it still be R&B? The bass pattern didn't change. The song didn't change. It was still 'Yakety Yak' and 'Searchin'.'

Listen to any cantor, any good hazan, sing and you can hear a little bit of Ray Charles going on.

It's self-effacing, it's hard-luck, the shtetl stories. All those Coasters things are an amalgam of Yiddish and black humor.

Irving Berlin was the greatest songwriter of all time. I was in awe of him. But his music wasn't my music. My music was the blues.

I was brought up in black neighborhoods in South Baltimore. And we really felt like we were very black. We acted black and we spoke black. When I was a kid growing up, where I came from, it was hip to be black. To be white was kind of square.

I heard this music coming out of the radio and it was 'Ain't Nobody's Business.' It got me. I thought, 'I can do this.' I decided just like that. No romantic story.

I felt black. I was as far as I was concerned. And I wanted to be black for lots of reasons. They were better musicians, they were better athletes, they were not uptight about sex, and they knew how to enjoy life better than most people.

'Hound Dog' took like twelve minutes. That's not a complicated piece of work. But the rhyme scheme was difficult. Also the metric structure of the music was not easy. 'Kansas City' was maybe eight minutes, if that. Writing the early blues was spontaneous. You can hear the energy in the work.

Elvis was incredibly cooperative. He would try anything. He wasn't a diva, no prima donna. When it came to work, he was a workhorse.

Elvis Presley, you can't define him in a couple of sentences, but he was a country boy and he was very respectful.