Philippe Halsman

“The purpose of taking pictures is so that you don't have to explain things with words.”

“Every face I see seems to hide—and sometimes fleetingly to reveal—the mystery of another human being.”

“A true portrait should, today and a hundred years from today, be the testimony of how this person looked and what kind of human being he was.”

“Of the thousands of people I have photographed, I have never felt greater respect for any other human being than for Albert Einstein.”

“I drifted into photography like one drifts into prostitution. First I did it to please myself, then I did it to please my friends, and eventually I did it for the money.”

“When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears.”

“In a jump, the subject, in a sudden burst of energy, overcomes gravity. He cannot simultaneously control his expressions, his facial and limb muscles. The mask falls. The real self becomes visible.”

“Photography can be a gimmick, and it can be art.”

“What a photographer does is click, click, click. And if he's lucky, he gets a picture.”

“It is the photographer's job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time.”