Quotes by
Peter van Agtmael

Patience and persistence are the two most important factors in photography.

It’s only in analyzing the images that you’ve taken and the editing process that you can really start to see what works and what doesn’t, because what you see and feel, especially early on in photography, and how that translates into a frame, into an individual image, oftentimes those things are in disconnect. So constantly looking at what you are doing and thinking critically about what you’re doing...is really important, especially in the early days of working. But [this] lesson never goes away and in fact, the more you work, the more humble you have to be with your failures.

Their expressions are always changing, every face is different, they’re always in movement. There can be an elegance or lack thereof to the way limbs are in motion, to body types, to skin color, all of these things are infinite, interesting variables within photographing people, and so for me, they’re an endlessly fascinating subject as a result.

I'm a constant editor. Every few months or so I make a ton of 4x6 prints. I put them on a magnetic board and I live with them for a while to see what bubbles to the surface. A lot of this was part of Disco Night originally, and I suddenly started realizing, "If I keep working on this because I'm not done and I put all that in Disco Night, how can this be one book? Is it going to be too long and bloated and crazy?

The notion that [beauty] can be discovered in any given moment, on your daily walk to the store say, is something that has been profoundly transformative for me.

It begins this process of trying to justify to yourself and justify to them why it is you like an image. And if you find you can’t justify that, it may be that the picture itself isn’t actually that great, so it becomes this dialogue almost with oneself and with one’s work.

Sometimes the picture is more interesting than what is going on. Sometimes the picture is suggestive of greater things in society or the history of what might be connected to the theme in the pictures and those are worth exploring.

Street photography can be virtually anything at all.