It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.

Bailey contrasts photography’s dependence on the given world with painting’s freedom to fabricate. The photographer cannot simply “invent” a subject; the raw material is the everyday, often visually dull until attention and judgment transform it. Imagination, in this view, is not fantasy but perception: the ability to notice form, gesture, light, and meaning in what others pass by. The remark also implies a discipline of looking—repeated, patient observation—through which the ordinary becomes legible as extraordinary. It’s a defense of photography as an art of selection and seeing rather than mere mechanical recording.