Quotes by
Beaumont Newhall

Retouching had become controversial ever since Franz Hanfstaengl of Munich showed at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris a retouched negative with a print made from it before and after retouching. It was, Nadar recollected, the beginning of a new era in photography.

If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.

More and more are turning to photography as a medium of expression as well as communication. The leavening of aesthetic approaches continues. While it is too soon to define the characteristic of the photographic style today, one common denominator, rooted in tradition, seems in the ascendancy: the direct use of the camera for what it can do best, and that is the revelation, interpretation and discovery of the world of man and of nature. The greatest challenge to the photographer is to express the inner significance through the out ward form.

I want to have in my pictures of people a vivid sense of participation: I want the viewer to realize that the subject was indeed aware of the camera, but that he neither feared it nor gloated over it, but allowed the photographer to observe him as is—unposed, unpretentious, natural.

The documentary photographer is not a mere technician. Nor is he an artist for art’s sake. His results are often brilliant technically and highly artistic, but primarily they are pictorial reports. First and foremost he is a visualizer. He puts into pictures what he knows about, and what he thinks of, the subject before his camera.

We are not going to have six million artists because six million people own this Instamatic camera that all you do is just point and shoot. If out of those six million we have six people that are artists, it will be a surprising thing. This does not mean that photography in the hands of the amateur is not a wonderful thing; it is. But we must recognize that the mere ability to get a picture, an image on a piece of paper in color, or in black and white is just the ground work in the beginning of what we call art.

We are not interested in the unusual, but in the usual seen unusually.

The fundamental belief in the authenticity of photographs explains why photographs of people no longer living and of vanished architecture are so melancholy.

More and more are turning to photography as a medium of expression as well as communication. The leavening of aesthetic approaches continues. While it is too soon to define the characteristic of the photographic style today. One common denominator, rooted in tradition, seems in the ascendancy.’ the direct use of the camera for what it can do best, and that is the revelation interpretation and discovery of the world of man and of nature. The greatest challenge to the photographer is to express the inner significance through the outward form.

Photography is at once a science and an art, and both aspects are inseparably linked throughout its astonishing rise from a substitute for skill of hand to an independent art form.

For me it is a constant source of wonder that the world becomes transformed through the finder of my camera.

Over the years, photography has been to me what a journal is to a writer—a record of things seen and experienced, moments in the flow of time, documents of significance to me, experiments in seeing.

Attempts to mix photography and painting fail... On this point the masters are unanimous: the photographic image must not be tampered with. (1958)

Photography—the spirit, I mean—is everywhere: it’s precise, lightning-like, clean cut, brilliant, alert.