Photography Quotes

I've enjoyed photography, ever since I was a teenager, and I'm still at it. I've had shows in various cities, around the country, and I have a number of pieces in permanent collections in museums that I'm very proud of. ~ Leonard Nimoy

Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness. ~ Andre Bazin

[Photography] is the non-complacence of the eye. To practice my right to look is also a critical attitude. If I stare at you, I will make you uncomfortable, and culturally we have a difficulty of staring and being stared at. ~ Pedro Meyer

It's not that photography recaptures the world you have been in; more that it creates a new one: photographs are like Post-It Notes reminding us of the deep architectonic forms of space and thought. ~ Luke Davies

My point is that meaning is always personal, changeable and subjective. There is no 'correct' interpretation of a photograph. ~ Bill Jay

Looking at Loh's photographs, it is obvious that there is nothing simpler and richer than a face when stripped of all effects and affects, poses and postures, stances and pretences. The Singaporeans featured here are almost
expressionless, as if the photographer wanted to leave us clueless about them. What do their faces tell us? Why are they so familiar? Why do we feel we know this auntie that we don't know? And this guy with the nondescript look? And this girl with no distinguishing mark? Have we met before? ~ Raphael Millet

It's never as good the second time. Things don't get better. You can't always go back, a lot of it has been erased. The photograph is a record of it having existed. ~ George A Tice

I just love the world of photography. ~ Brooke Burke

But I would like to reach the point where I could cut up an illustrated magazine at random and see to it that the parts would each become a painting. I cannot properly explain it right now. Already now I am searching for the most boring and irrelevant photo material that I can find. And I would like to get to the point soon where this determined irrelevance could be retained, in favor of something that would be covered up otherwise by artifice. ~ Gerhard Richter

But sports photography isn't something you just pick up overnight. You can't do it once a year for fun and expect to do a good job. And I take pride in what I do. ~ Drew Carey

The hardest thing in photography is to create a simple image. ~ Anne Geddes

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation. ~ Ansel Adams

There's this idea that photography is a kind of testimony and therefore we're forbidden to tell lies with it. I think that's nonsense. Photography isn't testimony. ~ Frank Horvat

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

A work of art is itself an object, first of all, and so manipulation is unavoidable: it's a prerequisite. But I needed the greater objectivity of the photograph in order to correct my own way of seeing: for instance, if I draw an object from nature, I start to stylize and to change it in accordance with my personal vision and my training. But if I paint from a photograph, I can forget all the criteria that I get from these sources. I can paint against my will, as it were. And that, to me, felt like an enrichment. ~ Gerhard Richter

I seldom think when I take a picture. My eyes and fingers react - click. But first, it's most important to decide on the angle at which your photograph is to be taken. ~ Alfred Eisenstaedt

I tell you (dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well) a square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that were ever dipped in acid ... Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against sculpture. That and no more. (1865) ~ John Ruskin

If you can't make the image bigger or more important than what you see, then don't push the button ~ Ruth Bernhard

As an allegorical art, then, photography would represent our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable and stabilizing image. ~ Craig Owens

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

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

The only nature I'm interested in is my own nature. ~ Aaron Siskind

Actually, no. I won't ever go digital. I work with thirty-five or large format. I like the hand-jobs, you know. And I still do most of my own printing. I've developed such a profound distaste for touch-up and modern artifice - comes from snapping too many derelicts and detritus, perhaps, but I love it. Photo bloody Shop can go stuff it. A picture should be honest, even if the subject is contrived on the ground, you know; not dolled-up for advertising punch or sex appeal. ~ Pansy Schneider-Horst

I want to allow others to reveal and celebrate aspects of themselves that are usually hidden. My camera is a witness. It holds a light up for my subjects to help them feel their own essence, and gives them the courage to collaborate in the recording of these revelations. ~ Joyce Tenneson

In many ways, unexpected results are what have most inspired my photography. ~ Harold Eugene Edgerton

To the vast majority of people a photograph is an image of something within their direct experience: a more-or-less factual reality. It is difficult for them to realize that the photograph can be the source of experience, as well as the reflection of spiritual awareness of the world and of self. ~ Ansel Adams

I don't see a big difference between painting and photography. Moreover, such distinctions mean nothing to me. ~ Sigmar Polke

I often say I've spent more time with photography than I have with literature just in terms of hours. ~ Teju Cole

Photography has taken me from isolation. ~ Anton Corbijn

It is to be regretted that no mental method of daguerreotype or photography has yet been discovered by which the characters of men can be reduced to writing and put into grammatical language with an unerring precision of truthful description. How often does the novelist feel, ay, and the historian also and the biographer, that he has conceived within his mind and accurately depicted on the tablet of his brain the full character and personage of man, and that nevertheless, when he flies to pen and ink to perpetuate the portrait, his words forsake, elude, disappoint, and play the deuce with him, till at the end of a dozen pages the man described has no more resemblance to the man conceived than the signboard at the coner of the street has to the Duke of Cambridge? ~ Anthony Trollope

Super 8 film is the language of silence. ~ Rebecca McNutt

This prolific and inventive photographer (Edward Steichen) must be given credit for virtually inventing modern fashion photography, and as the tohousands of high-quality original prints in the Conde Nast archives prove, only Irving Penn and Richard Avedon have since emerged as serious historical rivals. ~ William A. Ewing

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time. ~ John Berger

It's the rejection that is hard. It's not the interviewing that's hard. It's not the photography that's hard. It's, you know, approaching people all day long and having a good portion of those people reject you and some of them be rude. ~ Brandon Stanton

My early self-portraits appeared effortlessly and seemed like equivalents for my deeper emotions. Many critics remarked that the images had an almost other-worldly haunting presence. For me, they were simply my own reality at that point in my life. What I was trying to reveal was my inner soul in all its fragile complexity. Without knowing it, I was trying to peel back the layers that shroud and bind us all as we struggle to reveal our own authentic selves. ~ Joyce Tenneson

Photography's history is bound to the mistake, to the accident. ~ Taryn Simon

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

I believe photography is about choosing to live, being brave. Looking is an act of courage. It's terrifying. It's possible to see too much, to witness things that we cannot hold. ~ Laurel Nakadate

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz. ~ Sigmar Polke

The willful amnesia afflicting the sciences in general contrasts sharply with the importance given to memory by the humanities. Literature, philosophy, politics, and the visual arts, including photography and filmmaking, feed on memory. Practitioners of the humanities need memory to deepen and refine their thinking. ~ James Hillman

I do note that photography, a despised medium to work in, is full of empty phonies and worthless commercial people. That presents quite a challenge to the man who can take delight in being in a very difficult, disdained medium. ~ Walker Evans

Most musicians I know don't just play music on Saturday night. They play music every day. They are always fiddling around, letting the notes lead them from one place to another. Taking still photographs is like that. It is a generative process. It pulls you along. ~ Henry Wessel, Jr.

I used photography to distance myself from a world that I loathed and was powerless to improve. ~ Lewis Baltz

Good pictures. Tragedy and violence certainly make powerful images. It is what we get paid for.But there is a price extracted with every such frame: some of the emotion, the vulnerability, the empathy that makes us human, is lost every time the shutter is released. ~ Greg Marinovich

Becoming emancipated at 14, my life wasn't normal. I didn't have to go to school, so I didn't. I was rebellious by nature. I spent my 20s focusing on my company, Flower Films, and producing movies. Now that I'm almost 30, I would like to try other things in lie. I'm crazy about photography, and I want to take an art history class. ~ Drew Barrymore

I love the medium of photography, for with its unique realism it gives me the power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say, This is real, too. ~ Wynn Bullock

It's all the same. It's the same face. We always look for an idea, for the same face, for the same position. There is no such thing as a European or an African photography. It's all the same thing. ~ Malick Sidibe

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt. ~ Susan Sontag

I don't know that there were any rules for documentary photography. As a matter of fact, I don't think the term was even very precise. So as far as I'm concerned, the kind of photography I did in the FSA was the kind of photography I still do today, because it is based on passionate concern for the human condition. That is the basis of all the work that I do. ~ Jack Delano

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

I forget nothing and then, one day, there will be revenge. Innocence isn't exactly everywhere. But I will say innocence also takes you far in photography. ~ Karl Lagerfeld

I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both. ~ John Baldessari

So-called 'realist' photography does not capture the 'what is.' Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example. ~ Jean Baudrillard

There is no such thing as a secret - not really, not in the modern world, not with photography and telegraphy and railways and newspaper presses. ~ Robert Harris

The snapshots in CHINA: Portrait of a People are not meant to be works of art. I was too preoccupied with participating, with reveling in the moment, to worry about their perfection. Their purpose, then, is to form a candid portrait of China exactly as China presented itself to me. ~ Tom Carter

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

In a sense, every work you do is a self-portrait because your paintings always reveal more about you than about your subject. Your experience of something, not the something itself, is the true underlying subject of every work you do. ~ Richard Schmid

Gradually, I was getting worn down. My sense of direction had evaporated by our fourth day. When south became the opposite of east, I bought a compass, but going around with a compass only made the city seem less and less real. The buildings began to look like backdrops in a photography studio, the people walking in the streets like cardboard cutouts. ~ Haruki Murakami

My theory of composition? Simple: do not release the shutter until everything in the viewfinder feels just right. ~ Ernst Haas

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

A photograph is the pause button on life. ~ Various

I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it. ~ Don DeLillo

Vaughan Telecom installers and contractors ensure the highest quality service for data and network cabling in Toronto and GTA area. ~ Edward Abbey

A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever. ~ Mark Twain

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

You've gotta taste the light, like my friend and fellow shooter Chip Maury says. And when you see light like this, trust me, it's like a strawberry sundae with sprinkles. ~ Joe McNally

It might sound crazy, but filming in a conflict zone, in Afghanistan, and being a female filmmaker was the easy part. I found people open and understanding of the importance and beauty of filmic storytelling. I never had to explain why Jake Bryant, my Director of Photography, and I were climbing up a ladder to get a high shot, or running ahead to get an arrival shot, or filming weeks after weeks, months after months, collecting so much material. The process was respected and honored. ~ Pietra Brettkelly

I don't really remember the day when I stood behind my camera with Henry Kissinger on the other side. I am sure he doesn't remember it either. But this photograph is here now to prove that no amount of kindness on my part could make this photograph mean exactly what he.. or even I.. wanted it to mean. It's a reminder of the wonder and terror that is a photograph. ~ Richard Avedon

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

I consider myself fortunate that photography exists, because otherwise I'd be stuck in the tragedy of ephemeralness that can come with installation art. ~ Sandy Skoglund

I never said the camera was truth. It is, however, a more accurate and more objective way of seeing. ~ Chuck Close

Money and fame that photography can bring you are wonderful, but nothing can compare to the joy of seeing something new. ~ Jay Maisel

I think that's the strength of photography - to decide the decisive moment, to click in the moment to come up with a picture that never comes back again. ~ Rene Burri

He was a very generous soul and was exceptionally dedicated to the medium of photography. ~ John Sexton

To me, the magic of photography, per se, is that you can capture an instant of a second that couldn't exist before and couldn't exist after. It's almost like a cowboy that draws his gun. You draw a second before or after, you miss and you're dead - not them. To me, photography's always like that. ~ Mario Testino

I have always thought that if I could turn back the pages of history and photograph one man, my choice would be Moses. ~ Margaret Bourke-White

Photography's central role is to be the absolute medium of the day. It is fantastic that there is no longer any technical intimidation. ~ Martin Parr

The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better. ~ Minor White

For me, Every day is Photography Day ~ Biju Karakkonam, Nature And Wildlife Photographer

I would say that the off-frame effect in photography results from a singular and definitive cutting-off which figures castration and is figured by the click of the shutter. ~ Christian Metz

The way the sun reflects light, the water, and vibrant color is what I can proudly call photography. ~ Tanya Van Rooyen

You sort of have to be always aware, even when you're not thinking of shooting. That's when the best stuff happens. ~ Jay Maisel

I am always surprised when I see several cameras, a gaggle on lenses, filters, meters, et cetera, rattling around in a soft bag with a complement of refuse and dust. Sometimes the professional is the worst offender! ~ Ansel Adams

If you can see it, you can shoot it. ~ Ted Grant

I've always had a passion for technology, photography, startups, and connecting people. Bringing those aspects together made me successful. ~ Kevin Systrom

The photographer must bear the responsibility for his work and its effect ... [for] photographic journalism, because of its tremendous audience reached by publications using it, has more influence on public thinking than any other branch of photography. ~ W. Eugene Smith

It was from him, and from this picture in particular, that Henri Cartier-Bresson had developed the ideal of the decisive moment. Photography seemed to me, as I stood there in the white gallery with its rows of pictures and its press of murmuring spectators, an uncanny art like no other. One moment, in all of history, was captured, but the moments before and after it disappeared into the onrush of time; only that selected moment itself was privileged, saved, for no other reason than its having been picked out by the camera's eye. ~ Teju Cole

In the time between records, I always have lots of stuff going on. I shoot photography, make little sculptures, play video games. ~ Adam Jones

I'm pretty used to people not liking having their picture taken. I mean, if you do like to have your picture taken, I worry about you. ~ Annie Leibovitz

Photography has always been about documentary, the depiction of the instant, a moment, sometimes a place. Each project is somehow an experimentation of a specific context or a character. ~ Hedi Slimane

I was drawn to photography as an extension of film, and the beauty of film is that it's a sensuous, fetishistic medium. ~ Anton Yelchin

I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models ... I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know ... ~ Francis Bacon

I think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued. ~ Galen Rowell

The oceans are in trouble. There are some serious problems out there that I believe are not clear to many people. My hope is to continually find new ways of creating images and stories that both celebrate the sea yet also highlight environmental problems. Photography can be a powerful instrument for change. ~ Brian Skerry

I became interested in photography during my first visit to the United States. I was a student at a university in Holland. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the American West. That was when I learned about the tradition of nature in American photography. ~ Frans Lanting

Because it's free, easy to use, and high-quality, photography is now a fixture in our daily lives - something we take for granted. ~ Peter Diamandis

A picture's worth a thousand words. But a single word can make you think of over a thousand pictures in your mind, over a thousand moments, a thousand memories. ~ Rebecca McNutt

Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know. ~ Ben Shahn

Photography is a way of putting distance between myself and the work which sometimes helps me to see more clearly what it is that I have made. ~ Andy Goldsworthy

An artist's job is to inspire, from the Latin inspirare: to breathe into. The primary function of art is to inspire new thought shaped by emotions using the creative mediums we master - be it painting, music, design, craft, or photography. ~ Anonymous