“The truth is no portrait of substance has people smiling. Look at the history of painting: Rembrandt, Titian, Goya, Velasquez, Sargent, Vermeer, DaVinci, etc. The subjects gaze to the viewer is neutral at best, neither inviting nor forbidding. It is there for the viewer to see and feel. Smiling is, like much of American popular culture, superficial and misleading. It is part of our vernacular, but it should be expunged in photographs.”

- Rodney Smith, Photographer, via his blog, via A Photo Editor

“Forget about the profession of being a photographer. First be a photographer and maybe the profession will come after. Don’t be in a rush to pay your rent with your camera. Jimi Hendrix didn’t decide on the career of professional musician before he learned to play guitar. No, he loved music and created something beautiful and that then became a profession. Larry Towell, for instance, was not a ‘professional’ photographer until he was already a ‘famous’ photographer. Make the pictures you feel compelled to make and perhaps that will lead to a career. But if you try to make the career first, you will just make shitty pictures that you don’t care about.”

- Christopher Anderson, Magnum Photographer, via Ideas Tap, via A Photo Editor

“I’ll say this, making your photography, doing your art, is something that for a lot of people is a combination of technical skill, professional know-how, and personal dream and fantasy. Being an artist is this incredibly fantasized notion, and for a lot of people it’s a place where they put their dreams. When you’re doing that you tend to forget your practical business skills, or you tend not to think about bringing all the other skills you have to it. Because it’s about being ‘creative.’ To put it in a concise term, being creative doesn’t mean not being professional.”

- Ariel Shanberg, Curator, via A Photo Editor

“A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he’s being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he’s wearing or how he looks. He’s implicated in what’s happening, and he has a certain real power over the result. Lisette Model told me she felt [the] photographs of my father were ‘performances,’ and I agree with her. We all perform. It’s what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintentionally. It’s a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we’d like to be. I trust performances. Stripping them away doesn’t necessarily get you closer to anything. The way someone who’s being photographed presents himself to the camera and the effect of the photographer’s response on that presence is what the making of a portrait is about.”

- Richard Avedon, Photographer, via American Suburb X

“It’s funny that photography seems to be the only area I can think of where you magically join the guild (so to speak) merely on the basis of owning the tools. Isn’t it funny that you never hear writers worry about the fact that everybody knows how to write?”

- Joerg Colberg, Photography Critic, via his Conscientious blog