Maggie Steber
[Photographer, b. 1949, born in Electra, Texas, lives in Miami, Florida.]
Every time we click the shutter, it’s like a new day, a new chance to make a clean start, to be original. It’s a very exciting and exhausting thing to do.
... respect is the most important thing you put into your camera. It’s like slicing off a little piece of your heart and putting it in with the film.
If you really are sincerely interested and beyond “getting a great picture,” people will tell you everything about themselves, and it enriches your own life.
If you’re just there for a picture, forget it. In fact, please don’t go if that’s all you’re trying to do in a country, is document people who are suffering, just because you’re trying to build a portfolio. Please don’t go.
Nothing is ever going to describe in words what your mother looked like at twenty when the moonlight just fell on her face in such a way. Only a picture can show you that.
Photographs are like our children. We put the best of ourselves into them—the best of our vision, our minds, our hearts—and then we send them out into the world. At some moment, perhaps the moment we click the shutter, they are being released. From that moment on, they don’t really belong to us anymore.
