Quotes by
Burk Uzzle

A photographer's best pictures are from deep inside him, and also some of the worst. Some photographers enjoy distinguished careers without ever taking personal photographs. Others, audaciously and arrogantly and courageously discharge their most private feelings through photography. Trouble is, sometimes it all adds up to baloney.

I had my young eyes opened by the impersonal blood and guts of the news photography... I was running the gamut every low man on the totem pole runs - country clibs to mass murderers.

For two years I have made it a point to carry my two Leicas with me everywhere I go; I feel the habit has produced many pictures, not only because I happen to always have a camera handy, but because it encourages me to relate to things around me as a photographer — more aware and responsive. The habit has made me a more visual person, and life a little richer.

Good pictures can only come from a strong response to life—this response is the fabric of all that our lives have been, all the experiences. Once I scribbled in a camera case, 'Photography is a love affair with life'. Surely the basis for this kind of response, however sentimental it may sound, comes from the strongest themes of a lifetime: a wonderful, love-filled marriage, children and the riches of parenthood, love of people and the earth.

Photography is a powerful means of communication. A photographer's work represents the essence of his dimension. His responsibility is to tell it true.

After all these years of wandering around as a street photographer and a journalist, I decided that this world is such a curious, screwed up place so full of contradictions... that I couldn’t look at it any more in the raw form without trying to find some way of balancing it in a more philosophical context—less in a reportorial manner and more in an artistic one.

Photography is a love affair with life.

You see fleeting perfection of form merging with a significant substance, and you make a clicking noise only a hair's breadth away. You have then judged something, reported something, ostensibly truthfully... And when you made a clicking noise you said something eloquently if you are skilled.

I love to look around me, I rejoice in the opportunity to respond to life through photography. So delighted to see, to be alive and feeling well and free to take pictures. I feel most challenged by the ordinary, the average, the common experience. Not surprising considering my ordinary, average frame of reference. There is nothing I can pretend to, nothing special ever happened in my childhood except photography, to which I have been totally committed since the age of fourteen.

A photographer's best pictures are from deep inside him, and also some of the worst. Some photographers enjoy distinguished careers without ever taking personal photographs. Others, audaciously and arrogantly and courageously discharge their most private feelings through photography. Trouble is, sometimes it all adds up to baloney.