Quotes by
Ernst Haas

There are two kinds of photographers: those who compose pictures and those who take them. The former work in studios. For the latter, the studio is the world.... For them, the ordinary doesn't exist: every thing in life is a source of nourishment.

The best pictures differentiate themselves by nuances...a tiny relationship - either a harmony or a disharmony - that creates a picture.

All I wanted was to connect my moods with those of Paris. Beauty paints and when it painted most, I shot.

I want to be remembered much more for a total vision than for a few perfect single picture.

There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.

Living in a time of crusical struggle, the mechanization of men, photography for me became nothing but another example of this paradoxical problem: how to owercome, how to humanize the machine on which we are so very dependent – the camera. This mechanical instrument forces and enables us for for the first time to learn hwo to read and write stimultaneously visual aspects resulting from a discussion with reality expressed with a language of light called photography. Disinterested in scientific objectivity, I want to transform reality with a poetic conception by relating the unrelated into vision – forcing the viewer to feel what I felt as well as to think what I thought. I believe photography can be an art and I want to give everything to help achieve it. There is only you and your camera – the limitations of your photography are in yourself, for what we see is only what we are.

The limitations of photography are in yourself, for what we see is only what we are.

Best wide-angle lens? Two steps backward. Look for the 'ah-ha'.

You don’t take a photograph, but, rather, you are taken by a photograph.

You should never judge a photographer by the type of film used, but only how he uses it.

Leica, schmeica. The camera doesn’t make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But you have to see.

I am not interested in shooting new things. I am interested to see things new. In this way I am a photographer with the problems of a painter, the desire is to find the limitations of a camera so I can overcome them.

The most important lens you have is your legs.

The reporter is someone in a trench coat with a rakishly upturned collar, who runs after events, wants to capture facts, narrates, reports on so-called reality. To be honest, I’m not too interested in facts. My issues are more of an artistic nature. These are rather more the problems of the painter. I’m a painter who was too impatient to paint, and therefore became a photographer.

In every artist there is poetry. In every human being there is the poetic element. We know, we feel, we believe… one cannot photograph art. One can only live it in the unity of his vision, as well as in the breadth of his humanity, vitality, and understanding. There is no formula—only man with his conscience speaking, writing, and singing in the new hieroglyphic language of light and time.

A few words about the question of whether photography is art or not: I never understood the question.

A picture can be an answer as well as a question but if you can’t answer your question try to question your question. There are clever questions and stupid answers as well as stupid questions and clever answers. There can be questions without answers but no answers without questions.

There is no formula. Only confirmations.

Stray dogs are for him [Elliot Erwitt] a special object. He can find in them the lonely, grim life that reflects tremendously his feelings for humanity.

A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?

With photography a new language has been created. Now for the first time it is possible to express reality by reality. We can look at an impression as long as we wish, we can delve into it and, so to speak, renew past experiences at will.

I am not interested in shooting new things - I am interested to see things new.

The most important lens you have is your legs.

You become things, you become an atmosphere, and if you become it, which means you incorporate it within you, you can also give it back. You can put this feeling into a picture. A painter can do it. And a musician can do it and I think a photographer can do that too and that I would call the dreaming with open eyes.

The camera doesn't make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But, you have to SEE.

You don’t take pictures; the good ones happen to you.

..and man is really an outcome of many, many rehearsals. You can find a tree within us as much as you can find a human figure in the snow. In order to have a consciousness that can appreciate nature you have to create man.

Don’t take pictures. Be taken by your pictures.

Photography is a bridge between science and art. It brings to science what it needs most, the artistic sense, and to art the proof that nothing can be imagined which cannot be matched in the counterpoints of nature.

I prefer to be noticed some day, first for my ideas and second for my good eye.

The final stage of photography is transforming an object from what it is into what you want it to be.

Women held bleached-out photographs in the air to the new arrivals. “Do you know him? Have you seen my son?” They called out the names of their men. Children with pictures of fathers they had never seen compared the photographs with the faces of the arrivals. It was almost too much. I staggered home as if in a trance. (On photographing the return of WWII prisoners from the camps in eastern Europe.)

No one gives you freedom—you take it.

My theory of composition? Simple: do not release the shutter until everything in the viewfinder feels just right.

I have always felt better taking a risk than an easier route for what I believe in.