About Photography Quotes

#1. Every day I am aware of the flow and constant change; perhaps I am at the edge of discovering what more our bodies might be able to teach about the spirit of life. At least, I am always exploring and trying to understand our relationship to the whole universe.

Ruth Bernhard

#2. The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.

Imogen Cunningham

#3. A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.

Richard Avedon

#4. For me, Picasso was the ultimate man. He taught me that photography is all about how you approach an image: what you do and what you don't do. He inspired me to go beyond what you think is in front of you.

Rene Burri

#5. What I love about photography, and it's the same thing I love about acting, really, is that it forces you, like, right into the moment, where you can't be distracted, where you can't be, like, thinking about other things or ahead of yourself or behind yourself.

Jessica Lange

#6. Photography is about how you look and how you dream and how you see and what your interests are.

David Doubilet

#7. I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph.

Berenice Abbott

#8. To me, photography was a completely new medium, and I did not ... feel the urge to transfer to it my ideas about painting.

John Gutmann

#9. It's just seeing - at least the photography I care about. You either see or you don't see. The rest is academic. Anyone can learn how to develop. It's how you organize what you see into a picture.

Elliott Erwitt

#10. The photograph is completely abstracted from life, yet it looks like life. That is what has always excited me about photography.

Richard Kalvar

#11. My photography has really always been about what I feel I'm getting out of it. What people on the outside get doesn't concern me.

Ari Marcopoulos

#12. 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

#13. I got really excited about finding new ways of using video, and the immediacy is different, in a way, than painting and photography. The creativity comes with the editing. You can layer and cut and paste. I really love that it's like another form of making my smaller collages but in video form.

Mickalene Thomas

#14. My work is my language and I don't discuss it very easily. It's difficult for me to verbalize my feelings, or to intellectualize my work. In fact, it used to annoy me when Ansel Adams and Paul Strand yak-yak-yakked about what photography meant, and I told them so.

Brett Weston

#15. Nothing is more hateful to me than photography coated with gimmicks, poses and false effects. Therefore let me speak the truth in all honesty about our age and the people of our age

August Sander

#16. I was always in front of the camera. My mom was really passionate about photography - I have pictures of my whole life. I've always just been in front of my mom's camera, and it's always comfortable to me.

Gigi Hadid

#17. Photography's about the surface, what's happening at the top of the sea. Literature's about all the stuff below.

Max Pam

#18. I'm not modest about myself. I know for a fact that I am good. But good in the sense that I can put things together. I expound vociferously to students of architecture and photography, the significance of design. A photograph is a design in which you assemble thoughts in your mind.

Julius Shulman

#19. The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope. This is not to say that he is unconcerned with the truth.

Robert Adams

#20. There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone's person.

Richard Avedon

#21. Everyone is a photographer now, remember. That's the great thing about photography.

Martin Parr

#22. People think photography is about photographing. To me, it's about relationships.

Lynsey Addario

#23. For me, the act of photography is all about discovery and finding new things.

Alec Soth

#24. I try to use whatever I know about photography to be of service to the people I'm photographing.

James Nachtwey

#25. When I first started 'Humans of New York,' I was writing short stories. There were about 50 of them. And, you know, they were a great part of the site, but the photography just started growing so fast that I didn't have time to make them anymore.

Brandon Stanton

#26. Writing, photography...art. It's all about what's in focus.

Kelly E. Lindner

#27. Words are more thoughts;
the photographed images always
ends up having a romantic gloss about it
- no matter how I try to avoid it.

Robert Frank

#28. I don't speak emotionally about my pictures. That's for other people to do. I will say that I love my photographs. That's what keeps me going.

George A Tice

#29. Scientists are usually nice, organized, logical people who are very cooperative. I always learn a lot of science while shooting science stories and it helps to be able to speak intelligently to a subject about his or her field of work, i.e., do your homework before the photography.

Peter Menzel

#30. Music defines decades, and quite clearly shapes the rhythm, vitality of fashion, attitude and social behaviors. The anthology, just like most of my work, from photography to fashion design, is about and around music.

Hedi Slimane

#31. Good photography is not about Zone Printing or any other Ansel Adams nonsense. It's just about seeing. You either see or you don't see. The rest is academic. Photography is simply a function of noticing things. Nothing more.

Elliott Erwitt

#32. 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

#33. The important thing is, you have to have something important to say about the world.

Paul Strand

#34. For me, going back to itinerant landscape painting, it's not about returning to an older method, but about building on what happened in the 20th century in photography. And also highlighting what the differences are between a painting and a photograph in picturing space.

Cynthia Daignault

#35. [I]n general, my work is less about expanding the possibilities of photography than about re-investing it with a truer perception of things by returning to a simple method, one that photography had from the beginning of its existence.

Thomas Struth

#36. But slowly I began to use cameras and then think about what it was that was going on. It took me a long time, I mean I actually played with cameras and photography for about 20 years.

David Hockney

#37. Sometimes, without effort, you live in the moment. You don't regret the past or worry about the future, and in that moment everything flashes before your eyes , a clear snapshot of what has to be done, and everything pauses.

Rebecca McNutt

#38. There's this way that photography is always about going out searching. I'm not the kind of a photographer who can photograph my home.

Justine Kurland

#39. To me, the main and most exciting thing about photography is to meet people. The picture is the result of what happened between me and them on the set.

Francesco Carrozzini

#40. [The most important factor in making a good picture is] to know who or what you are photographing. It is not about photography; it should be about life.

Mona Kuhn

#41. As the language or vocabulary of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted, shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.

Aaron Siskind

#42. It's entirely ridiculous and hopeless to try to compete with somebody who made such a huge contribution to photography ... I knew when I went into photography that I would be compared to my mother. I thought to myself, what can I do about that?

Amy Arbus

#43. What I like best about underwater photography is giving a visual voice to the invisible. What I like least is the prospect of drowning.

David Doubilet

#44. So, I'm always around video games but I've always been interested in them from a visual perspective, with the graphic design and that whole thing. I don't know if that comes from my love of photography or what but that's always what's held my interest about them.

Sophia Bush

#45. There is always a subjective aspect in landscape art, something in the picture that tells us as much about who is behind the camera as about what is in front of it.

Robert Adams

#46. 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

#47. I love being photographed, or I should say I love the art of photography. It's about people taking photographs of you, stealing them, and then presuming or assuming or captioning. Words can never be taken back, photographs can never be taken back, nothing can ever be taken back.

Madonna Ciccone

#48. For 'Star Wars' I had to develop a whole new idea about special effects to give it the kind of kinetic energy I was looking for. I did it with motion-control photography.

George Lucas

#49. It's a process of getting to know people. That's what photography is to me. It's about paying attention, not screwing up and blowing a great opportunity.

Eugene Richards

#50. I can't go into Oklahoma without thinking about Larry Clark's photography book 'Tulsa.' It's a great book about how life works.

Buzz Osborne

#51. The photographs don't arouse me. All I can think about is the hard work it took to make them.

Helmut Newton

#52. Fashion photography should say something about the stability of a certain time you live in or what kind of women you like. The most interesting thing is not what they're wearing but who they are.

Peter Lindbergh

#53. There is a terrible truthfulness about photography that sometimes makes a thing look ridiculous.

George Bernard Shaw

#54. Photography is more about money now but then so are most things.

David Bailey

#55. I guess I've shot about 40,000 negatives and of these I have about 800 pictures I like.

Harry Callahan

#56. I need there to be documentary photographers, because my work is meta-documentary; it is a commentary about the documentary use of photography.

Joan Fontcuberta

#57. Searching is everything - going beyond what you know. And the test of the search is really in the things themselves, the things you seek to understand. What is important is not what you think about them, but how they enlarge you.

Wynn Bullock

#58. What I find most satisfying about photography is the way in which it allows me to document 'reality' while at the same time creating my own version thereof; in other words, the reality I present is a reality based upon what I choose to include in the frame and what I choose to leave out.

Alix Smith

#59. For me photography had an immediacy ... I was trying to resolve certain issues. What was fair or unfair about how people lived, and how they had to live? I thought the most penetrating and most immediate way to get to some of those questions was through photography.

Jerome Liebling

#60. I think it's all absolute nonsense how people talk about photography as being an art. It's a very menial career that you do if you draw badly. Now they teach it at the Royal College of Art and get grand about it. It's the only course there that I don't understand.

Antony Armstrong-Jones

#61. That's one of the wonderful things about the whole process of photography - eye contact can be very revealing.

Derek Ridgers

#62. What I like so much about photography is precisely the moment that cannot be anticipated; one must be constantly on the alert, ready to acclaim the unexpected.

Martine Franck

#63. The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.

Susan Sontag

#64. Photography isn't about seeing, it's about feeling. If I don't have some kind of feeling for what I'm shooting, how can I expect the person who looks at it to feel anything?

Don McCullin

#65. There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.

William S. Burroughs

#66. 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

#67. I think photography has a huge potential to expand a circle of knowledge. There's a reality that we are all the more linked globally and we have to know about each other. Photography gives us that opportunity.

Susan Meiselas

#68. Photography is about being exquisitely present.

Joel Meyerowitz

#69. People spot a big black lens, and they worry about what they're doing, or how their hair looks. Nobody see the person holding the camera.

Erica O'Rourke

#70. The purpose of photography is to create an emotion about the world through what has been carefully seen and selected.

Eli Siegel

#71. When people talk to me about picture hunters, I very quietly laugh. I'm not a hunter of pictures, I'm a fisher of pictures.

Robert Doisneau

#72. It just struck me that one of the things about photography that made it such a compelling medium to deal with is that it is perhaps the most contradictory of mediums.

Bill Henson

#73. 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

#74. When the novice photographer starts taking pictures, he carries his camera about and shoots everything that interests him. There comes a time when he must crystallize his ideas and set off in an particular direction. He must learn that shooting for the sake of shooting is dull and unprofitable.

Alexey Brodovitch

#75. There was something pathetic about the rejected wife bravely pulling herself together, joining a tennis club, doing a photography course, cutting her hair, venturing timidly back out onto the single scene.

Liane Moriarty

#76. "Simply look with perceptive eyes at the world about you, and trust to your own reactions and convictions. Ask yourself: "Does this subject move me to feel, think and dream? Can I visualize a print - my own personal statement of what I feel and want to convey - from the subject before me?""

Ansel Adams

#77. 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

#78. A reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment. Everything in a novel is explicitly chosen, whereas some of what a film captures feels incidental, according to the vagaries of photography and sound recording.

Jonathan Lethem

#79. My photographs are not really about photography. They are about editing. I use photography but they are all taken from the TV screen. Anybody can do that, but it's the order I put the pictures in to try to create a new kind of movie, something that you can put on your wall.

John Waters

#80. I think we seem to remember things in still pictures. I never gave up on painting. When they said painting was dead, I just thought, Well, that's all about photography, and photography's not that interesting, and it's changing anyway.

David Hockney

#81. All I care about these days is painting - photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

#82. I think people just see cinematography as being about photography and innovative shots and beautiful lighting. We all want our movies to look great visually, to be beguiling and enticing, but I think that what really defines a great cinematographer is one who loves story.

Seamus McGarvey

#83. I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do - that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.

Diane Arbus

#84. Any time you talk about the look of the film, it's not just the director and the director of photography. You have to include the costume designer and the production designer.

Spike Lee

#85. The camera adds a certain sheen to things. Something about being frozen in time really makes things sparkle.

Brandon Stanton

#86. Ultimately photography is about who you are. It's the truth in relation to yourself. And seeking truth becomes a habit.

Leonard Freed

#87. When I got to NYU, I immediately inquired about doing a double major in acting and photography.

Katherine Waterston

#88. Photography is about finding things. And painting is different - it's about making something.

Saul Leiter

#89. In my teens I was interested in photography. Then I decided that I should learn something about the world of commerce. And I came to America at age 17 to escape Europe. I went to NYU - nothing better than being 17 years old and coming to New York.

Nicolas Berggruen

#90. It's about time we started to take photography seriously and treat it as a hobby.

Elliott Erwitt

#91. Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That's the thing about painting, photography, cinema.

David Lynch

#92. My paintings have an ongoing dialogue with photography. There are many painters who would say the same, I'm sure. The difference is that I'm thinking more about the temporal aspect of photography, rather than the visual.

James Nares

#93. Every time I talked about making a picture I didn't do it. I had already done it - talking about it! I quit talking.

Harry Callahan

#94. A representational photograph says, 'This is what Vienna looked like.' An interpretational photograph goes one better and says, 'This is what Vienna was like. This is how I felt about it.

David DuChemin

#95. Photography is about savoring life at 1/100th of a second.

Marc Riboud

#96. I had luck, but I worked hard and I suffered. It's not just photography I'm talking about. It's about whatever dream you want it to be.

Sam Abell

#97. To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn't think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.

Aaron Siskind

#98. There are thousands of people across the country taking photography courses. They'll never be professional photographers. They just want to understand what the photographic process is all about.

Brent Schlender

#99. We have a long history of snapshot photography that appeared to many to be more arbitrary and idiosyncratic than much of the work of professionals. We valued it for what it could tell us about the details of people's daily lives.

Fred Ritchin

#100. There's something about light field photography that's just magical.

Ren Ng