Photographing Quotes

Over the years, I have perfected the art of dancing and photographing at the same time: it's a great double act. If you're dancing, you are joining in. If you stand there rigid, you are not in the flow of things. ~ Martin Parr

I didn't react visually. This girl came up and knelt over the body and let out a God-awful scream that made me click the camera. (On photographing Mary Vecchio with slain student Jeffery Miller during the shootings of students at Kent State, April, 1970.) ~ John Filo

I try to use whatever I know about photography to be of service to the people I'm photographing. ~ James Nachtwey

Americans. They came right out with things. Hitchens family lore related the tale of how once, when I was but a toddler, my parents were passing with me through an airport and ran into some Yanks. 'Real cute kid,' said these big and brash people without troubling to make a formal introduction. They insisted on photographing me and, before breaking off to resume their American lives, pressed into my dimpled fist a signed dollar bill in token of my cuteness. This story was often told (I expect that Yvonne and the Commander had been to an airport together perhaps three times in their lives) and always with a note of condescension. That was Americans for you: wanting to be friendly all right, but so loud, and inclined to flash the cash. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Photographing a culture in the here and now often means photographing the intersection of the present with the past. ~ David DuChemin

My first serious project was photographing badgers - very, very difficult as they are shy and nocturnal. ~ Nigel Dennis

The first day at the power plant I found myself photographing some steam vents on the roof of the structure. And I remember consciously thinking that they were just like trees but they were metal. ~ John Sexton

Just as long as it pays enough to give me the option to go back to work part-time if I decide to pursue my hobby professionally, which is photographing cool manicures for Instagram. ~ Mindy Kaling

He [Andy warhol] went out every evening to five or six parties with a tape recorder in one pocket and a camera with extra film and batteries in the other pocket, constantly recording and photographing everyone he came across. ~ Bob Colacello

I begin by not photographing. ~ Jeff Wall

The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don't have to explain things with words. ~ Elliott Erwitt

I can see myself as a very old man in a terrific wheelchair. Only, I won't be photographing the tree outside my window, the way Steichen did. I'll be photographing other old people. ~ Richard Avedon

When you're working on a film, it's almost like photographing paintings at a museum. You're photographing somebody else's world. I just try and interpret it and make it real, and make it what the actors are about, what the director is about, and what the film is about. ~ Mary Ellen Mark

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

Sometimes something is so frightening I must look at it this closely or dismiss it altogether. Sometimes it's so stunningly beautiful I feel completely left out. With either extreme, photographing makes me have to deal with it. ~ Andrea Modica

I'm more interested in photographing people who have done something, like writers or directors - even billionaires - as long as I can study them before I photograph them. ~ Francesco Carrozzini

When I began to photograph nudes, I let myself be guided by this camera, and instead of photographing what I saw, I photographed what the camera was seeing. I interfered very little, and the lens produced anatomical images and shapes which my eyes had never observed. ~ Bill Brandt

There's always been something illicit about the way I work. I'm photographing people I don't know, when nobody else is home - there's a necessary degree of secrecy. ~ Katy Grannan

I don't want someone photographing my cellulite - I can't take it! ~ Shania Twain

I love meeting 'the Odd Man Out' - like fans of 'Baywatch' who regret, as I do, that Tower 12 Productions didn't put nearly as much energy into writing and directing the show as they put into photographing and editing it. ~ Nicole Eggert

I've always been fascinated by twins. In my forty years of photographing, whenever there was an opportunity, I would take a picture of twins. I found the notion that two people could appear to look exactly alike very compelling. ~ Mary Ellen Mark

Photographing attractive people who were doing attractive things in attractive places. (Summary of his photographic career) ~ Slim Aarons

At some point during my travels, I had a slight change of focus which would end up defining the rest of my career. I began taking pictures of people. In addition to all the buildings, street signs and fire hydrants, I started photographing some of the interesting humans that passed by me on the street. ~ Brandon Stanton

Childhood has been idealised as a lost garden paradise to which we can never return. We are excluded from this world of carelessness, innocence and unity. But the imaginary kingdom is nothing more than a projection of adult ideas and concerns onto the image, an expression of our own yearnings. By photographing children alone, divorced from any social setting, I allow them to exist on their own ... I am exploring the equivocal connection between self and world. ~ Loretta Lux

My wife Ann and I had been digging during the day, transplanting lilies from the front of this abandoned farmhouse back down the road to where we live. We finished. She was tired and laid in the grass. I took a picture. The house is now gone. The walnut trees have been bulldozed and burned. I saw this picture the other day for the first time in years and realized how photographing life within a hundred yards of my front porch had helped me focus on everything I cared about. ~ Larry Towell

When you work fast, what you put in your pictures is what your brought with yoiu - your own ideas and concepts. When you spend more time on a project, you learn to understand your subjects. There comes a time when it is not you who is taking the pictures. Something special happens between the photographer and the people he is photographing. He realizes that they are giving the pictures to him. ~ Sebastiao Salgado

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

I just happened to have my camera and be photographing my friends. It was totally innocent; there was no purpose to the photographs. There was a purity to them that wasn't planned; it was realism. ~ Larry Clark

The Bahamas has mangrove nurseries, coral reefs, shallow sea grass beds, and deep oceanic trenches - all perfect ecosystems for sharks. Photographing multiple shark species in exquisite water was the assignment I had dreamed about from the start. ~ Brian Skerry

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

It's one thing when you are photographing others, but when you are exposing yourself and your insecurities, that's the biggest risk. That's always scary. ~ Petra Collins

You were the thing
worth photographing,
the stillness
that begged
for a matte finish
and far off stare. ~ Tyler Knott Gregson

I don't believe a person has a style. What people have is a way of photographing what is inside them. What is there comes out. ~ Sebastiao Salgado

I think when you're photographing - when anybody's photographing another person in a private situation, it's a kind of a seduction but it's not always a sexual seduction ... I feel like when Jack [Welpott] was doing it, it was a sexual seduction and when I was doing it, it was more of a psychological seduction in order to get them to cooperate with me ... Not because I wanted them to spread their legs or ... be, you know, Wanna sleep with me? , or whatever. ~ Judy Dater

I was only photographing in words the reality of it all. ~ Charles Bukowski

My stepfather gave me a Kodak camera when I was 17 years old. I started working at a local photo store in Le Havre, France, taking passport pictures and photographing weddings. ~ Patrick Demarchelier

At any rate, when I began photographing myself, I could place myself in poses that had not been investigated by other artists. It was an area other artists hadn't touched. Then, I went on from there. I manipulated my image - distorting it, brutalizing it. People thought I was mad, but I felt I had to tell these things. It gave me a kind of excitement. ~ Lucas Samaras

For me, film-making is combining images and sounds of real things in an order that makes them effective. What I disapprove of is photographing things that are not real. Sets and actors are not real. ~ Robert Bresson

It adds up, but I deem it all necessary, even the camera gear. I enjoy photographing the otherworldly colors and shapes presented in the convoluted depths of slot canyons and the prehistoric artwork preserved in their alcoves. ~ Aron Ralston

Another unary photograph is the pornographic photograph (I am not saying the erotic photograph: the erotic is a pornographic that has been disturbed, fissured). Nothing more homogeneous than a pornographic photograph. It is always a naive photograph, without intention and without calculation. Like a shop window which shows only one illuminated piece of jewelry, it is completely constituted by the presentation of only one thing: sex: no secondary, untimely object ever manages to half conceal, delay, or distract... A proof a contrario: Mapplethorpe shifts his close-ups of genitalia from the pornographic to the erotic by photographing the fabric of underwear at very close range: the photograph is no longer unary, since I am interested in the texture of the material.


The presence (the dynamics) of this blind field is, I believe, what distinguishes the erotic photograph from the pornographic photograph. Pornography ordinarily represents the sexual organs, making them into a motionless object (a fetish), flattered like an idol that does not leave its niche; for me, there is no punctum in the pornographic image; at most it amuses me (and even then, boredom follows quickly). The erotic photograph, on the contrary (and this is its very condition), does not make the sexual organs into a central object; it may very well not show them at all; it takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate this photograph and that it animates me. ~ Roland Barthes

Doctors said that the test most commonly used to screen for colon cancer doesn't go far enough. They're recommending a procedure that involves photographing the entire colon. I say, don't vie CBS an idea for another reality show. ~ Bill Maher

It doesn't matter if you use a box camera or you use a Leica; the important thing is what motivates you when you are photographing. ~ Eve Arnold

I started writing and photographing for different publications and finally ended up being the correspondent in South Asia, for the Geneva-based Journal de Geneve, which at one time used to be one of the best international newspapers in Europe. ~ Francois Gautier

I've always been interested in photographing traditions and customs - especially in America. The prom is an American tradition, a rite of passage that has always been one of the most important rituals of American youth. It is a day in our lives that we never forget - a day full of hopes and dreams for our future. ~ Mary Ellen Mark

I'm as interested in photographing the film crew as much as the actors and actresses. ~ Paul Walker

Recently, I can't seem to take a straight photograph without thinking that what I am photographing won't be the final image - like the world in front of me is not good enough or something. ~ Idris Khan

Despite all the identifying, measuring, photographing, I had managed to set the experience in a kind of present past, a having looked, even as I was temporally and physically still looking...It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same result. ~ John Fowles

When I'm photographing I see life. ~ Garry Winogrand

Everyone concedes that photography is now a medium of exchange as much as a mode of documentation ... photographing has become the visual equivalent of cellphone chatter. ~ Geoffrey Batchen

Historic American Buildings Survey - HABS for short - was one of FDR's greatest New Deal investments. Jobless folk fanned out across the country, seeking old buildings, photographing them and sketching their floor plans. Many of the structures they recorded in the 1930s were caught in the act of falling down. Some of them were documented in no other place. ~ Mary Anna Evans

There have been times where I have definitely felt like I was a john. As a pin-up photographer for ten years, when I was photographing men and women, to be honest, sometimes I felt like I was a john, especially when I was shooting guys because they - you know - they had to have big erections in the photos. ~ Annie Sprinkle

I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don't find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges. ~ William Albert Allard

I started photographing men in 1964. Fourteen years later I got a Guggenheim, even so no one would publish the male nudes. ~ Judy Dater

I just think it's important to be direct and honest with people about why you're photographing them and what you're doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul. ~ Mary Ellen Mark

Ultimately, the reward is the process - the process of photographing and discovering and trying to understand why and what am I photographing. ~ Alex Webb

I photographed the entire thing in color because to photograph it in black and white would be to keep it as a tragedy. Because there is a tragic element to photographing, in this case not war, but the collapse. It was just destruction. ~ Joel Meyerowitz

Photographing plants makes you look carefully and become aware of the many solutions plants provide to human problems ~ Andrea Jones

I used to have a theory about photographing. It was a sense of getting in between two actions, or in between acton and repose. ~ Diane Arbus

It doesn't matter if you're photographing a porter in a market in Marrakech or you're photographing the king of Morroco. You have the same sympathetic approach to everybody. You be nice to everybody, basically. ~ Albert Watson

Oh, we"re just scattering some dead fish about town, breaking some windows, photographing naked guys, hanging out in sky-scraper lobbies at three-fifteen in the morning, that kind of thing. "Not much", I answered. ~ John Green

RAW is very forgiving. I was photographing a farm woman in Ecuador cooking over a small fire and my fill flash didn't go off a few times. I was about to delete the RAW files but decided to play with the curves first because I like the composition. It turned out that the image, although underexposed by two stops, was better than the fill-flashed images because the fire was the only source of illumination and it looked more real. ~ Peter Menzel

A person is quite different from a tree or rock or stream. By introducing the nude into my pictures, I started perceiving all the things I was photographing in new ways. In contrast or opposition to each other, things became much more significant and interesting, revealing many more qualities than I had ever dreamed of knowing and expressing. By using the nude, I stopped thinking in terms of objects. I was seeing things, instead, as dynamic events, unique in their own beings yet also related and existing together within a universal context of energy and change. ~ Wynn Bullock

If I could be said to have any kind of aesthetic, it's sort of a magpie aesthetic - I just go and pick up whatever is around. If you think about it, the children were there, so I took pictures of my children. It's not that I'm interested in children that much or photographing them - it's just that they were there ... ~ Sally Mann

We all look in the mirror and see us a little blonder or a little thinner or a little younger, whatever that ideal might be and most of the people that I'm photographing are selling something, you know whether they're on the front of an album cover or a magazine or they're a corporate person ready to switch companies or a doctor selling a skincare line ... so I want to help them achieve that. ~ Carol Friedman

As I'm sure you know, whenever you are examine someone else's belongings, you are bound to learn many interesting things about the person of which you were not previously aware. You might examine some letters you sister received recently, for instance, and learn that she was planning on running away with an archduke. You might examine the suitcase of another passenger on a train you are taking, and learn that he had been secretly photographing you for the past six months. I recently looked in the refrigerator of one of my enemies and learned she was a vegetarian, or at least pretending to be one, or had a vegetarian visiting her for a few days. And as the Baudelaire orphans examined some of the objets in Olaf's trunk, they learned a great deal of unpleasant things. ~ Lemony Snicket

So here we are, a pack of Homo sapiens thinking that we know whether a person is female or male. Now that I've spent a few years researching and talking with people who fall under the transgender umbrella, I am confident saying that male/ female is not the only way to describe gender. The people I've come to know and love in the course of writing and photographing this book have helped me better understand the fluidity of gender and sex.

This lesson for me also reinforces what I've been writing about for years: once we get to know individuals who may be different from ourselves, it is less likely we will be wary of them. And maybe, just maybe, we will learn a little more about ourselves. ~ Susan Kuklin

Over the years I have photographed thousands of people. I have never stopped being curious and trying to discover new worlds. I have used my camera as a mirror for my subjects as well. I remember photographing a woman in her 80s for my book, Wise Women, who told me it had been a long time since anyone had really been interested in "seeing" or photographing her. When she saw the picture, she burst into tears. She saw something in the photograph, an inner beauty and soul, she felt had long ago vanished. ~ Joyce Tenneson

I had taken the photograph from afar (distance being the basic glitch in our relationship), using my Nikon and zoom lens while hiding behind a fake marble pillar. I was hiding because if he knew I'd been secretly photographing him for all these months he would think I was immature, neurotic and obsessive.
I'm not.
I'm an artist.
Artists are always misunderstood.(Thwonk) ~ Joan Bauer

I'm past photographing to see what things look like photographed. ~ Sally Mann

Sometimes I enjoy just photographing the surface because I think it can be as revealing as going to the heart of the matter. ~ Annie Leibovitz

Born Berlin 1931, Germany, father a British diplomat, mother an American artist. Educated at various schools all over the world. 1958 Settled down to live in London. 1966 Became interested in photography through photographing my young children. No formal training. ~ Fay Godwin

Everyone I'm photographing, I feel like I'm remaking a family, in a way. My brothers and sisters are my heroes. So many of my models resemble them. ~ Ryan McGinley

Since 1873, I have been back four or five times. I have used the best cameras and the most sensitive emulsions on the market. I have snapped my shutter, morning, noon and afternoon. I have never come close to matching those first plates. (On photographing The Mountain of the Holy Cross) ~ William Henry Jackson

Often people ask what I'm photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best what I've come up with is I just say: Life today. ~ William Eggleston

I wasn't interested in just photographing someone naked, I was interested in representing them as clothed in their own skin, secure in themselves. ~ Mona Kuhn

One night I had an idea while I was at the movies: to photograph the film itself. I tried to imagine photographing an entire feature film with my camera. I could already picture the projection screen making itself visible as a white rectangle. In my imagination, this would appear as a glowing, white rectangle; it would come forward from the projection surface and illuminate the entire theater. This idea struck me as being very interesting, mysterious, and even religious. ~ Hiroshi Sugimoto

The body is a place where our mind resides, and that's what I'm photographing. ~ Mona Kuhn

Old Prague was a story-book city caked in grime: ancient, soot-blackened. History lived in every detail: in the deerstalker rooftops and the blue-sparking trams. He wandered the streets in disbelief, photographing everything, images from Kafka crowding into his head. With the turn of every corner it came back to him: the special frisson you get behind enemy lines. ~ Philip Sington

Why does almost every ad agency in the world set the time on a watch at 10:10 before photographing it? ~ Philippe Petit

If you are bored with your own photography you are really bored with what you are photographing, so pick a new subject about which you are knowledgeable and enthusiastic. ~ Bill Jay

If a subject has a delicate surface to it, you do not want to go charging in there. You need to establish some kind of presence and understanding. I will say, Try to forget I'm here. I won't ask you to pose, I won't ask you to do anything. It's important that I just be allowed to be around, to be present. Photographing people requires a willingness to be rejected. So, I think the best approach is to be honest and direct. Very often, I tell them, You don't know me. There's no reason why you should trust me ... the only thing I can promise is that I'll try to do the most honest work I can. ~ William Albert Allard

I've seen my own blood and broken a few bones. I've been hit, which isn't an entirely bad thing, as at least you have a glimpse of the suffering endured by the people you are photographing. And in a sense, crumbling empires and war have been with me all my life. ~ Don McCullin

The tools I learned photographing celebrities, now I want to use them to sell ideas. ~ David LaChapelle

This week the White House proposed fingerprinting and photographing foreign visitors so they can do background checks. Officials in Saudi Arabia said this will only increase anti-American feelings in the Mideast. Is that possible? Gee, you hate to have people dislike us for no reason. Things were going so well. ~ Jay Leno

I always feel I had a very lucky life. For example, I sure didn't want to go in the army: when I was drafted in the Korean War, I wanted to go as a photographer. But luckily, they put me in the infantry - luckily because the official photographer was photographing the medal awarding and all the official situations. ~ Harold Feinstein

I never notice a difference between photographing a man and a woman; for me, it's just somebody. ~ Mario Testino

Photographing these flowers has made me see the world differently. It was as if I had lifted a secret veil from a subject I had loved and appreciated my whole life. I offer these photographs with the hope that they will open a new visual or meditative universe for you as well. ~ Joyce Tenneson

final image mosaic, a view of the planets in our Solar System as taken from a vantage point beyond the orbit of Neptune. Voyager started photographing the planets at Neptune (N), moving in to Uranus (U), Saturn (S), then Jupiter (J), Earth (E), and Venus (V). Mercury and Mars were lost in the Sun's glare. The inset view of Earth ~ Anonymous

I learned how to capture lightness of spirit while photographing you. You were my muse, my inspiration for all those shots. ~ Jill Santopolo

It was as if my eyes were a camera and I was photographing the moment, knowing that I would keep the photograph forever. ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz

The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything. ~ Diane Arbus

I like capturing stuff that is disappearing - that's the point of photography. What I am photographing is an imaginary place that never existed, but is connected to something that has already been. ~ Tim Walker

I never knew [Alfred Stieglitz] to make a trip anywhere to photograph. His eye was in him, and he used it on anything that was nearby. Maybe that way he was always photographing himself. ~ Georgia O'Keeffe

I wrote poetry from the time I could write. That was the only way I could begin to express who I was but the poems didn't make sense to my teachers. They didn't rhyme. They were about the wind sounds, the planets' motions, never about who I was or how I felt. I didn't think I felt anything. I was this mind more than a body or a heart. My mind photographing the stars, hearing the wind. ~ Francesca Lia Block

[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful! ~ Walter Benjamin

And I was very successful at baby photography ... Strange isn't it? Because some of my portraits of babies were - I used dramatic lighting, shadow lighting, and I didn't use flash. We didn't have flash in those days, we just had floodlights, and I was photographing babies as I would an object - an inanimate object, for that matter. ~ Julius Shulman

It is the photographing of ordinary things, in extraordinary light, that produces extraordinary photographs. ~ David Young

Be sure to take the lens cap off before photographing. ~ Elliott Erwitt

Photographing a cake can be art. ~ Irving Penn

Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself - so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph. ~ Susan Sontag