Quotes by
Frank Meadow Sutcliffe

…a photograph gives us the naked truth,which has to be clothed by the imagination.

…it is rarely that such works [anecdotal paintings] are satisfactory as pictures or works of art. If the painter finds it difficult to paint a good genre picture, how much more difficult is it for the photographer to make one with the camera. Anyone who has tried this kind of work knows how perilously near the ridiculous is to the sublime…

May I say that a photograph gives us the naked truth, which has to be clothed by the imagination.

[My mother] would have me smothered like the Princes in the Tower if I showed any inclination for being an artist. She thought all artists little better than lunatics.

The person who looks at a photograph as a complete picture, unable to say anything about anything except the facts which existed at the moment of exposure, does not see very far.

The photographer sees the world as a child sees the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope. If he has a camera with which he can secure these ever-changing combinations, he is then able to look on them again and again, and he has the further pleasure of pleasing others with the sight of things which he, with perhaps unusual opportunities, was able to see, which his friends would otherwise not ever be able to.

Given good models… and a determination to do figure work which will stand the chaff and raillery of one’s fellow workers, the reward will come to the photographer in the shape of the pleasure which such work gives. Beautiful skies and beautiful seas may become monotonous in time, but beautiful old women, to say nothing of the younger ones, will never make him wish… to smash his machine…

To some an extremely sharp picture may be positively painful, for it will perhaps disturb and break the train of thought, whereas a less-defined one would allow the mind to wander at its own sweet will.

I used to fill the slides with plates and go out into the country in search of the picturesque, but before I had got clear of the town, I had forgotten my quest altogether, for the camera began to get so heavy that the picturesque was forgotten and my thoughts were entirely confined to the burden on my back, and the weights I carried in either hand. Yet, as an Englishman, I did not like to feel beaten, so I used to trudge on, the camera getting heavier all the way, till at last a rest was imperative. If there happened to be a picture near the spot, well and good; if not I either went on or back as the spirit moved me.