Quotes from Brassai

I think education and intelligence (are) important, but not art. Not artistic education.

My ambition was always to show aspects of daily life as if we were seeing them for the first time.

There are many photographs which are full of life but which are confusing and difficult to remember. It is the force of an image which matters.

A poor photographer meets chance one out of a hundred times and a good photographer meets chance all the time.

My images were surreal simply in the sense that my vision brought out the fantastic dimension of reality. My only aim was to express reality, for there is nothing more surreal than reality itself. If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary.

I've always felt that the formal structure of a photo, its composition, was just as important as tje subject itself... You have to eliminate every superfluous element, you have to guide your own gaze with an iron will.

I don't invent anything. I imagine everything... most of the time, I have drawn my images from the daily life around me. I think that it is by capturing reality in the humblest, most sincere, most everyday way I can, that I can penetrate to the extraordinary.

If you take your inspiration from nature, you don't invent anything, because what you want to do is to interpret something. But still, everything passes throught your imagination. What you produce at the end is very different from the reality you started with.

There are two gifts which every man of images needs to be a true creator: a certain sensitivity to life, to living things, and at the same time, the art which will enable him to capture that life in a certain specific way. I'm not talking about a pure aesthetics...

To me photography must suggest, not insist or explain.

When you shoot a lot you stand a better chance, but then you are subjecting yourself to the law of accident?if accident has a law. I prefer to try and if necessary fail. When I succeed, however, I am much happier than I would be if I shot a million pictures on the off-chance. I feel that I have really made it myself, that picture, not won it in a lottery.

The photograph has a double density.... It is the daughter of the world of externals, of the living second, and as such will always keep something of the historic or scientific document about it; but it is also the daughter of the rectangle.

Night does not show things, it suggests them. It disturbes and surprises us with its strangeness. It liberates forces within us which are dominated by our reason during the daytime.

The purpose of art is to raise people to a higher level of awareness than they would otherwise attain on their own.