Photography Photographer Quotes

There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. I photograph to see what something will look like photographed. ~ Garry Winogrand

I was there less than a year before I was assigned to the Paris bureau. I spent two years there and, in fact, before I even went on the staff I was sent to Europe to do assignments which they wouldn't normally do for a young photographer just starting out. ~ Gordon Parks

I think the problem with the arts in America is how unimportant it seems to be in our educational system. ~ Chuck Close

To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things. ~ Ansel Adams

I realized I didn't want to be a photographer. I gave it up, but I still worked that job in the restaurant and I found myself constantly hanging out in the kitchen. ~ Sally Schneider

Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes. ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

Thus, during the winter of 2003 I ventured into a new arena as a professional photographer. ~ Janine Turner

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

It's always a pleasure to talk about someone else's work. ~ Chuck Close

Part of the joy of looking at art is getting in sync in some ways with the decision-making process that the artist used and the record that's embedded in the work. ~ Chuck Close

I am sure the next step will be the electronic image, and I hope I shall live to see it. I trust that the creative eye will continue to function, whatever technological innovations may develop. ~ Ansel Adams

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

Photography is my only language. ~ Andre Kertesz

It's not the photographer who makes the picture, but the person being photographed. ~ Sebastiao Salgado

The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates. ~ Susan Sontag

I am a firm believer that digital imaging has already rivaled the chemical process in its ability to make fine prints. An exceptional digital print, on a fine quality paper, can take on all the delicacy of a masterful photogravure. Each is, after all, ink on paper. The unfortunate thing is that skillful digital fine art photography is being created by so few, and today's artworld is brimming with hastily made, conceptually oriented, digital bric-a-brac. ~ Waswo X. Waswo

My wife Mariana is a good photographer too and, like me, she just picks up a camera and takes a picture when she sees something, rather than looking too deeply into it. ~ Graeme Le Saux

[Photography] underlines the photographer. That's the Barthesian this has been. Well, this has been for the photographer as well. The photographer is the hidden placeholder in the Barthesian equation. ~ James Welling

We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium. ~ Ansel Adams

Experience has shown that the more fascinating the subject, the less observant the photographer. ~ Andreas Feininger

Notebook. No photographer should be without one! ~ Ansel Adams

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. ~ Susan Sontag

I'm inviting the spirits into my photography. It's an act of God. ~ Hiroshi Sugimoto

Photography is a love affair with life. ~ Burk Uzzle

A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it? ~ Ernst Haas

I want pictures like these. The kind that can capture a moment, make it real, make it last. I need pictures that do more than reflect. I need pictures that are truth. ~ Lisa Mangum

Why do photographers photograph? To make unreality visible. ~ Bill Jay

When you take the picture of the people, you take the picture of the whole stories of their past because every person is nothing but a combination of their entire past stories! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are. ~ Ellen Von Unwerth

If I could find them (assemblages) in nature I would photograph them. I make them because through photography I have a knowledge of things that can't be found. ~ Frederick Sommer

It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos. ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

I've heard many times that with all good artists it's ultimately a self-portrait even if it's an abstraction. I feel my work is very much who I am. I didn't try to make it that way; it just is. It reflects who I am and also my interests. ~ Joyce Tenneson

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a Leitmotiv. ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

There's nothing worse than a brilliant beginning. ~ Pablo Picasso

Everyone is a photographer now, remember. That's the great thing about photography. ~ Martin Parr

Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere ... ~ John Szarkowski

The precise instant of creation is when you choose the subject. (meaning that the essential thing occurs at the moment when he, the photographer, meets the reality he wishes to capture. ~ Brassai

I only wanted Uncle Vernon standing by his own car (a Hudson) on a clear day, I got him and the car. Ialso got a bit of Aunt Mary's laundry and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on the fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and 78 trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It's a generous medium, photography. ~ Lee Friedlander

Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us. ~ Paul Gauguin

I became enamored with photography when I was about 13 or 14 years old. I've been at it ever since. I studied seriously in the '70s. ~ Leonard Nimoy

Photography ruins marriages, and I've been married three times - so there's a downside to it as well. ~ Jack Welpott

The pictures have a reality for me that the people don't. It is through the photographs that I know them. ~ Richard Avedon

Photography is a craft. Anyone can learn a craft with normal intelligence and application. To take it beyond the craft is something else. That's when magic comes in. And I don't know that there's any explanation for that. ~ Elliott Erwitt

His Holiness [the Dalai Lama] has told me, urgently and repeatedly, that he thinks my photographs are crap. His exact words were, 'These photos are of poor quality. Why is there no sharp focus? There is no clarity!' I said, 'But your Holiness, it's Goyaesque.' And he said, 'No! It's out of focus!' ~ Richard Gere

I came here in a car like everybody else. In a car filled with shit I thought meant something and shortly thereafter tossed on the street: DVDs, soon to be irrelevant, a box of digital and film cameras for a still-latent photography talent, a copy of On the Road that I couldn't finish, and a Swedish-modern lamp from Walmart. It was a long, dark drive from a place so small you couldn't find it on a generous map...Does anyone come to New York clean? I'm afraid not….Yes, I'd come to escape, but from what? The twin pillars of football and church? The low, faded homes on childless cul-de-sacs? Morning of the Gazette and boxed doughnuts? The sedated, sentimental middle of it? It didn't matter. I would never know exactly, for my life, like most, moved only imperceptibly and definitely forward...Let's say I was born in late June of 2006 when I came over the George Washington Bridge at seven a.m. with the sun circulating and dawning, the sky full of sharp corners of light, before the exhaust rose, before the heat gridlocked in, windows unrolled, radio turned up to some impossibly hopeful pop song, open, open, open. ~ Stephanie Danler

The trouble with flowers is that invariably, when I'm ready to photograph them, they are not in season. ~ Anne Geddes

To sum up - i f you want to be more creat ive, star t loving yoursel f enough to give
yoursel f permission to fai l . In fact , bet ter yet , don' t even wor ry about winning or
losing. Just DO. ~ Scott Bourne

I felt like I was in the best photography school in the world - I had Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn teach me. ~ Helena Christensen

The Photography is a chopper which in the eternity seizes the moment which dazzled it. ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

Of course [photography] cannot create, nor express all we want to express. But it can be a witness of our passage on earth, like a notebook. ~ Mario Giacomelli

A photograph is a mirror; mostly it reflects the prejudices of the viewer. ~ Bill Jay

Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable. ~ Edith Grossman

This is the gift of the landscape photograph, that the heart finds a place to stand. ~ Emmet Gowin

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks. ~ Richard Avedon

It would have been possible to structure my photographs in such a way that no indicators of the present were discernible. However, I wanted to incorporate into the project as a whole the jostling of time-frames I would feel as I set up my tripod on various rocky promontories. ~ John Pfahl

The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial ... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art. ~ Clement Greenberg

The danger lies in unconventional experiments signaling for a general license to do as they please, and pass off sloppy workmanship as creative intention. ~ Helmut Gernsheim

My whole artistic life has been devoted to battling myself and my ability to externalize my deepest emotions. As I have gotten older, the work has become more direct, perhaps reflecting the fact that for the first time in my life I feel really free. I have been fascinated with wings all my life. I have had an obsession with transcendence, the need to push forward and metaphorically fly. ~ Joyce Tenneson

Everything looks worse in black and white. ~ Paul Simon

After my kids were born I found myself incorporating my photography into different art endeavors and from there it just blossomed. I have always had to have an outlet for my creativity and when my life became more about raising my family than the bright lights of show business exploring my photo art was a great outlet for me. ~ Angela Cartwright

I have found my way, step by step, proceeding from touch points that have emerged, some through conscious choice and some through dream state discovery. ~ Leonard Nimoy

I started as a news photographer at the University Of Texas' Daily Texan. ~ Berkeley Breathed

To teach consequential photography, don't bother with Photoshop or f-stops. Create a craving for images. ~ Douglas McCulloh

What I find interesting is working in a society with certain taboos and fashion photography is about that kind of society. To have taboos, then to get around them that is interesting. ~ Helmut Newton

A lot of people want to make films and do photography and things, but I'm quite happy doing what I'm doing. ~ Syd Barrett

I was in Florida with Burt Stern, the photographer who shot Marilyn Monroe on the beach with a sweater, and we smoked a joint. The bathing suit kept coming off in the water, and I just ripped it off. I was very comfortable being naked. ~ Rosanna Arquette

The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera - and himself. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin

As in any person's life, there have been difficult moments: I have a son with Down's syndrome; through my photography, I have witnessed all manner of human degradation. But there have also been very happy moments. ~ Sebastiao Salgado

In college, unable to be "special" - or in demand - as a girl, I made myself useful, even essential, in my microcosm - as a writer and photographer for the band, particularly for the band director. My "specialness" was to produce something of value, not to look like something (with that different kind of "value"), so I was still fundamentally invisible, but had a significant purpose. ~ Cris Mazza

My taking pictures means I'm taking a series of pictures which become an essay and then get extended into a book. That's what's exciting, to take an idea and work it through to completion. ~ George A Tice

Maybe you are a dancer
moving to the sound of your own future;
or a musician
banging strumming bowing plucking
blowing into,
creating soundtracks
for dream trains chugging along
through thick night;
or a painter
spilling and splattering confessions
across the face of stretched canvas;
or an actor
praying at the altar
of your alter ego;
or a photographer,
finger on the button
like a quick-draw cowboy,
shooting
not to kill anyone
but to preserve forever;
or maybe even
a writer
for some strange reason,
writing expert books,
pages of good intention
and rah-rah and fantasy
and sometimes truth,
or maybe even letters to people
you don't know but
do know you love. ~ Jason Reynolds

Photography promises an enhanced mastery of nature, but photography also threatens conflagration and anarchy. ~ Allan Sekula

Instantaneity is photography. ~ Edgar Degas

Photography has saved my life, over and over again. ~ Laurel Nakadate

Photography is like an open book to the world. ~ Lisa Jones

If I didn't have a conviction that a serious painter can portray Nature more profoundly than the best colour photography, I'd probably give it all up or go abstract or take up photography. ~ E. J. Hughes