Joel Sternfeld Quotes & Sayings

“Black and white is abstract; color is not. Looking at a black and white photograph, you are already looking at a strange world.”

“Some people consider utopia to be derived from nature. For some people, utopia is the city.”

“The job of the color photographer is to provide some level of abstraction that can take the image out of the daily.”

“When you have unity, I think it squares the reach or power of the work.”

“You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo. No individual photo explains anything. That's what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium.”

“A photographer must choose a palette as painters choose theirs.”

“Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.”

“Photography has always been capable of manipulation.”

“The digital print is becoming the look of our time, and it makes the C-print start to look like a tintype.”

“All of my work has been about ideas of utopia and dystopia. I think that's what gives America interest. It's many things all at once. It's such a complicated society.”