Photographers Quotes

Some photographers are compulsively effusive. "Beautiful. Amazing. Gorgeous! Ugh, so gorgeous!" they yell at shutter speed. If you are anything less than insane, you will realize this is not sincere. It's hard to take because it's more positive feedback than you've received in your entire life thrown at you in fifteen seconds. ~ Tina Fey

There is enormous need for professionals who know how to tell stories with narrative punch and nuance, who can work proactively and not just reactively, and whose approach is multi-faceted. We need more "useful photographers." ~ Fred Ritchin

Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home'. It is all these things but one thing - it is never dull. ~ Beryl Markham

Pay no heed to the average photographer's remarks upon "flat" and "weak" negatives. Probably he is flat, weak, stale, and unprofitable; your negative may be first-rate, and probably is if he does not approve of it. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not only is Cinderella Castle the symbol of the Magic Kingdom, it is also the most photographed item by amateur photographers in the entire world. ~ Brent Dodge

Even though photographers are only shooting the outside, beauty is more about who you are as a person - the life you lead - not your facade. ~ Nigel Barker

I don't meet stockbrokers or carpenters or coal miners; I spend all day with actors, composers and photographers. ~ Michael Caine

Some photographers take reality ... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation. ~ Ansel Adams

I am no worshiper of cloth of any color, but I love the red flag and what it symbolizes to me and other Socialists. I have a red flag hanging in my study, and if I could I should gladly march with it past the office of the Times and let all the reporters and photographers make the most of the spectacle. ~ Helen Keller

Of course I don't like the fact that my wife goes to the supermarket and there are photographers. But I realise that the press attention is the same wherever you go. ~ Luis Suarez

The neatest part of this book I'm working on - to me - are the pictures that show the process ... Because photographers ... think things through and ... it isn't luck, and it isn't random and it isn't accidental. It isn't. ~ Sam Abell

It was my mom and I against the world. We lived in New York in this bohemian lifestyle where an extended group of artists and photographers were like my aunts and uncles. ~ Brooke Shields

I've done over 125 posters and I have worked with some of the best photographers in the world. They made me America's Number one Pin Up. ~ Cindy Margolis

The most embarassing is when friends ask you to meet up with them and you have to tell them "Sorry I can't go to that place" because you're fully aware photographers will be waiting for you there. I feel like such a weasle when things like that happen, like the world has to revolve around me. ~ Robert Pattinson

Some photographers could vomit on a piece of paper and call it art, you know ... Hang it in the Guggenheim, or whatever. Sell a print for two hundred pounds? But I can't do that. I just
Maybe I have too much respect for walls ... or something. ~ Pansy Schneider-Horst

The only way that Hollywood ever skews toward liberal is because part of what we make out of Hollywood involves writers, actors, directors, musicians, set designers, and photographers. In general, people like that are going to be more progressive, more open minded, a little more altruistic. ~ Adam McKay

To quote out of context is the essence of the photographer's craft. ~ John Szarkowski

When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear. ~ Alfred Eisenstaedt

I love going out and it is a bit sad when the photographers stop asking you for your picture. ~ Alice Evans

When I see old photos of me on the beach I don't look too bad ... but it's hard trying to breathe in for such a long time when I spot the photographers! ~ Gary Lineker

Fine-art photography is a very small world associated with galleries, museums, and university art programs. It's not like rock music; the products of this world have never been widely seen because the artists are often exploring things that are not already coded in general consciousness. It's not that photographers don't want to be famous, it's just that very few of the views from the edges of culture make the mainstream. Ansel Adams was an exception. ~ Mark Klett

One view of photography is that it is a zen-like act which captures reality with its pants down - so that the vital click shows the anatomy bare. In this, the photographer is invisible but essential. A computer releasing the shutter would always miss the special moment that the human sensibility can register. For this work, the photographer's instinct is his aid, his personality a hindrance. ~ Peter Brook

A lot of paparazzi wanted to be real photographers but they failed, and they did that instead, and it's not right; it's stalking. ~ Peaches Geldof

If you accept the idea that photographers, or some of them, are actually artists, then you have to look at their work less as a document of something than as a personal vision of the world. ~ Tod Papageorge

I love the Dutch impressionists - Vermeer, Rembrandt. What they were able to do with light was astonishing. As for photographers, I think mostly of the Hungarians: Robert Capa, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Jozsef Pesci. In fact, I have one of his photographs hanging in my house. ~ Vilmos Zsigmond

One impulse of photography, as immediate as its impulse to extend the visible, is to theatricalize its subjects. The photographer's command, Watch the birdie! is essentially a stage direction. ~ Stanley Cavell

One shouldn't be only two photographers but thousands. ~ Jacques-Henri Lartigue

It is not sociologists who provide insights but photographers of our sort who are observers at the very center of their times. I have always felt strongly that this was the photographer's true vocation. ~ Brassai

Those reporters, writers, photographers, and editors are the best Americans I know. They cherish the ideals of their imperfect profession and of the Republic whose freedoms, equally imperfect in practice have so often made those ideals real. They want desperately to do good, honorable work. In spite of long hours and low pay, they are insistently professional. They are also brave.

I can't ever forget that in Indochina 65 journalists were killed in the course of recording the truth about that war. . . .Reporters and photographers did not stop dying when Vietnam was over. They have been killed in Lebanon and Nicaragua, in Bosnia and Peru, and in a lot of other places where hard rain falls.

I can't believe that these good men and women died for nothing. I know they didn't. They died because they were the people chosen by the tribe to carry the torch to the back of the cave and tell the others what is there in the darkness. They died because they were serious about the craft they practiced. They died because they believed in the fundamental social need for what they did with a pen, a notebook, a typewriter, or a camera. They didn't die to increase profits for the stockholders. They didn't die to obtain an invitation to some White House dinner for a social-climbing publisher. They died for us.

As readers or journalists, we honor them when we remember that their dying was not part of a plan to make the world cheaper, baser, or dumber. They died to ~ Pete Hamill

Edward [Weston] was the first artist - and I don't use the word lightly - to make a living doing art photography. Other photographers did commercial work, or worked for the government. ~ Rondal Partridge

A new love came into my life, a most beautiful one, one which will, I believe, stand the test of time ... Perhaps C. will be remembered as the great love of my life. Already I have achieved certain heights reached with no other love. ~ Edward Weston

A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they'll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won't do a thing for you if you don't have anything in your head or in your heart. ~ Arnold Newman

These days, photographers have expensive contracts with actresses, but then the actresses have to have their names written in the column because nobody recognizes them. That's kind of strange. ~ Peter Lindbergh

[The photographer's task] is to describe the existing light ... Chances are, if you believe the light, you're going to believe that the things photographed existed in the world. ~ Henry Wessel, Jr.

He was very concerned about his children potentially being kidnapped or attached, and that's why they were covered up. When he went to Berlin zoo, there were 200 photographers. ~ Martin Bashir

I take my camera to shoots and ask all the photographers and assistants to show me what to do with it. ~ Suki Waterhouse

I find it strangely beautiful that the camera with its inherent clarity of object and detail can produce images that in spite of themselves offer possibilities to be more than they are a photograph of nothing very important at all, nothing but an intuition, a response, a twitch from the photographer's experience. ~ Joel Meyerowitz

It entered the visual vocabulary of photographers, painters and sculptors and focused on what pictures and words look like and what they can mean. ~ Barbara Kruger

The best photographers are super nice people and that its not a coincidence. Great photographers genuinely like people, and people can feel that. That's what makes people feel comfortable. It is important to appear confident with clients, but it is more important to not be afraid to act like a fool, have fun, laugh and shake your hips to get people comfortable. ~ Sergio Leone

Today, the paparazzi are not just photographers: everyone has a cell phone with a camera. If they see an actor, they click pictures to show it to their friends or have it on their phones and, as an actor, I don't see anything wrong with it. Having said that, there is a limit that has been crossed, but there is nothing right or wrong. ~ Ranbir Kapoor

There must be a reason why photographers are not very good at verbal communication. I think we get lazy. ~ Annie Leibovitz

The satisfaction comes from working next to 500 photographers and coming away with something different. ~ David Burnett

Is giving in to the photographer's presumably natural impulse to compose and light well sometimes okay and not okay other times? ~ David Byrne

Many photographers feel their client is the subject. My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I'm trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader. The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader. ~ Irving Penn

I have always avoided photographing in the studio. A woman does not spend her life sitting or standing in front of a seamless white paper background. Although it makes my life more complicated, I prefer to take my camera out into the street ... and places that are out of bounds for photographers have always had a special attraction for me. ~ Helmut Newton

Many photographers are apt to confuse color with noise, and to congratulate themselves when they have almost blown you down with screeching hues alone-a bebop of electric blues, furious reds, and poison greens. ~ Walker Evans

The photographer's art is a continuous discovery which requires patience and time. ~ Andre Kertesz

Photographers are artists, they capture and bring emotion in the motions of life. ~ Unarine Ramaru

WATCH THAT QCD POSITION! While I was writing this book, I hosted a lighting seminar for neophyte photographers using cameras of all breeds, and out of 30 photographers in two sessions, no fewer than four Canon shooters were having trouble setting the aperture when using the Manual exposure mode I was having them use while working with studio flash units. (Each of them rarely used Manual.) All four had accidentally set the QCD switch to Lock (if they were 7D owners) or to the On (only) position (if they were 50D or 40D users), disabling the Quick Control Dial. I expect that this happens more frequently than I suspected, so I'm calling it to your attention once more in these two sidebars. ~ David D. Busch

I think the greatest photographers are the amateur photographers who do it because they love it. Arnold Newman is a good example; he is a consummate professional, but he's also an 'amateur' in the pure sense of the word. ~ John Sexton

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man. ~ Edward Steichen

I think all photographers fit their vision to their personality. ~ Kim Weston

Like most portrait photographers, I aim to record the instant the subject is not thinking about being photographed, striving to get beyond the practiced facial performance, reaching for something unplanned. While trying to be as objective as possible, I acknowledge that every gesture is still an act of artifice. ~ Martin Schoeller

Photography should be redefined. It's largely technical ... Photography is just unbelievably limiting. I always think of David Bailey and all the fashion photographers - they overlap, you can't always tell who did it. I don't really even like photography all that much. I just think it's so overdone. ~ Peter Beard

I sometimes like the pictures photographers take of me. ~ Sidney Poitier

The possibility of one particular photographer's pictures lying around the corner is never realized until the photographer is there. It's one of the enigmas of photography. ~ Alex Webb

People were murdered for the camera; and some photographers and a television camera crew departed without taking a picture in the hope that in the absence of cameramen acts might not be committed. Others felt that the mob was beyond appeal to mercy. They stayed and won Pulitzer Prizes. Were they right? ~ Harold Evans

There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa
and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else's, but likely to be haugthily disagreed with by all those who believed in some other Africa ... Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers.
Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home. ~ Beryl Markham

I love photography. Photographers and photos. I took a ton of pictures in Paris, and I find that I'm most inspired by following other photographers on Instagram. ~ Abigail Spencer

Photography is very presumptuous. Photographers are always photographing other people's lives - something they know nothing about - and drawing great inferences into it. ~ Duane Michals

Photographers don't take pictures. They create images. ~ Mark Denman

It's the time when brides-to-be argue with their mothers about what colours and cuts will work for the many wedding functions. Young couples try to find polite ways to tell their parents that the invites are old-fashioned and hunt for photographers who ~ Anonymous

Photographers have always been each other's biggest fans. ~ Rick Smolan

Every photograph is the photographer's opinion about something. It's how they feel about something: what they think is horrible, tragic, funny. ~ Mary Ellen Mark

Photographers who carry 60 pounds of equipment up a hill to photograph a view are not suffering enough, although their whining causes enough suffering among their listeners. No, if they really expect us to respect their search for enlightenment and artistic expression, in [the] future they will drag the equipment up the hill by their genitals and take the view with a tripod leg stuck through their foot. ~ Bill Jay

I went on a long trip through South America with Prince Charles where I was the only journalist there - a couple of photographers but no other writers. ~ Anthony Holden

We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.

"No one sees the barn," he said finally.

A long silence followed.

"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."

He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.

We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies."

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.

"Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collect ~ Don DeLillo

When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm. ~ Marina Warner

I do find it strange, doing magazine shoots. Photographers always go, 'Why don't you like to have your picture taken? That's what you do for a living anyway. Just pretend you're acting. It's the same thing!' ~ James McAvoy

Photographers are the history makers, because every picture is a moment which gone fore ever and can not be re shoot."
― Biju Karakkonam Nature and Wild life Photographer ~ Biju Karakkonam Nature And Wild Life Photographer

I didn't take inspiration from other photographers, which in a way helped to find my own images. ~ Peter Lindbergh

People of my generation who became photographers in the late fifties, early sixties, there were no rewards in photography. There were no museum shows. Maybe MOMA would show something, or Chicago. There were no galleries. Nobody bought photographs. ~ Duane Michals

[Women photographers] provide an inspiring reminder to all women that the choice to see, or be seen, is ours. We live in a culture in which this decision is undermined by the notion that the single most valuable contribution a woman can make is to be visually attractive. Women photographers make a strong case for seeing and an even stronger case for recording what you see. ~ Diane Keaton

Adequate photographers use their sight, good photographers use their senses, and great photographers use their souls. ~ A.J. Compton

I think most serious photographers understand that there's this large gap between the world and how the world looks through a photograph. ~ Stephen Shore

The best way to get America back to work, and reduce our deficit, is hire all the photographers in the country, position them on street corners, and have them take pictures of all the license plates of red-light runners, who will then receive a fine and all will be fine. But wait! Nobody will run red lights, because not only are gas prices too high, but with no jobs to be late to, nobody has anywhere to go. ~ Jarod Kintz

The photographer's problem is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium, for it is precisely here that honesty no less than intensity of vision is the pre-requisite of a living expression. The fullest realization of this is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation, through the use of straight photographic methods. ~ Paul Strand

Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture. ~ Robert Adams

Jesus would have been one of the best photographers that ever existed. He was always looking at the beauty of people souls. In fact Jesus was constantly making pictures of God in people's life by looking at their souls and exposing them to his light. ~ Francis Bacon

Many photographers are consumed with the idea of making beautiful contact sheets. I am far more interested in making the best final print I can. ~ John Sexton

Photographers don't need to be aggressive. Some are. Henry Benson is aggressive - but then he's from Fleet Street. If you can talk to people, you don't need to push people around. ~ Alfred Eisenstaedt

I don't trust photographers. I'm now a relaxed, contented 60 year-old, but look at my pictures and you see a crazy, bug-eyed serial killer. ~ Richard Ingrams

Luck is the attentive photographer's best teacher. ~ John Szarkowski

The important thing is not the camera but the eye. ~ Alfred Eisenstaedt

If photographers are responsible for creating or reflecting an image of women in society, then, I must say, there is only one way for the future, and this is to define women as strong and independent. This should be the responsibility of photographers today: to free women, and finally everyone, from the terror of youth and perfection. ~ Peter Lindbergh

And that desire-the strong desire to take pictures-is important. It borders on a need, based on a habit: the habit of seeing. Whether working or not, photographers are looking, seeing, and thinking about what they see, a habit that is both a pleasure and a problem, for we seldom capture in a single photograph the full expression of what we see and feel. It is the hope that we might express ourselves fully-and the evidence that other photographers have done so-that keep us taking pictures. ~ Sam Abell

I print giclees for artists and photographers for a livelihood. My original idea was to somehow combine the two. ~ Donald Lambert

These are the two basic controls at the photographer's command
positi on and timing
all others are extensions, peripheral ones, compared to them ~ David Hurn

For me what photographers say about their photos doesn't have any importance. For me it is just enough to look at the pictures. Many times - for the boring pictures - people have to say so many things about them to show you there is something to them when many times there is nothing. ~ Josef Koudelka

Photographers encode their concepts as photographic images so as to give others information, so as to produce models for them and thereby to become immortal in the memory of others. ~ Vilem Flusser

It's up to us as photographers to give voice to the natural world. ~ Frans Lanting

Choice or freedom of choice is just an existential concern. But for photographers, it's a lifetime's preoccupation. ~ Marc Riboud

The traditional difficulty of balancing the mechanical with the imaginative schools of photography still operates. In schools of photography meaningful art education is often lacking and on the strength of their technical ability alone students, deprived of a richer artistic training, are sent forth inculcated with the belief that they are creative photographers and artists. It is yet a fact that today, as in the past, the most inspiring and provocative works in photography come as much (and probably more) from those who are in the first place artists. ~ Aaron Scharf

By some special graciousness of fate I am deposited - as all good photographers like to be - in the right place at the right time. Go into it as young as possible. Bring all the asset you have and play to win. ~ Margaret Bourke-White

Many photographers live in a dream world of beautiful backgrounds. It wouldn't hurt them to get a taste of reality to wake them up. ~ Weegee

Photographer's advice: Stand in the right place. ~ David Douglas Duncan

It is the photographer's decision at the two levels of seeing the picture - when it is shot and when it is chosen and printed that determines his personal style. ~ Alexey Brodovitch

Remember that most people (those who are not photographers) don't even see the things that you missed. Many don't even look. Ergo, you are way ahead of the game. ~ Jay Maisel

Today everything exists to end in a photograph. ~ Susan Sontag

Like all photographers, I depend on serendipity I pray for what might be referred to as the angel of chance. ~ Sally Mann