Top 100 About Photography Quotes
#1. I've seen so many photographers rush to do books the minute they start shooting, but one great thing about photography is that the images don't go away, so the more I sit with these images, the more I learn which ones have had the most impact.
Lynsey Addario
#2. 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
#3. The hardest part about photography is getting out of bed.
Ken Duncan
#4. The photograph is completely abstracted from life, yet it looks like life. That is what has always excited me about photography.
Richard Kalvar
#5. Although I get a lot of ideas from things that have happened in my life, I see the final product as a place where my imagination meets my experience. What I love about photography is that nothing is really as it seems.
Laurel Nakadate
#6. 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
#7. A fact about photography: we can look at people's faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states - for a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
Adam Gopnik
#8. Everyone is a photographer now, remember. That's the great thing about photography.
Martin Parr
#10. I try to use whatever I know about photography to be of service to the people I'm photographing.
James Nachtwey
#11. My first pictures are from 1972, and my first proper camera dates back to 1973. During the first year I used my father's camera. It had a flash on it, which I don't like, but I didn't know anything about photography back then, so it was just what I did.
Anton Corbijn
#12. 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
#13. [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
#14. Contrary to the general belief about photography, you don't need bright sunlight: the best moodiest pictures are taken in the dim light of almost dusk, or of rainy days ...
Jack Kerouac
#15. TV-makers usually don't know much about photography.
Martin Parr
#16. I really don't have any idea about photography, but I take pictures.
Alex Majoli
#17. I'm not particularly invested in, nor do I really care about, photography in a general sense. It's a medium that's relatively ubiquitous, readily accessible, and that I have some facility with, so it makes sense for me to use it.
Walead Beshty
#18. There is a terrible truthfulness about photography that sometimes makes a thing look ridiculous.
George Bernard Shaw
#19. We really care about photography at 'Vanity Fair.'
Graydon Carter
#20. I've been taking photographs since I was a teenager, and fashion has taught me a lot more about photography. It's definitely inspired me.
Daria Werbowy
#21. I think that, in a sense, there's something about photography in general that we could associate with memory, or the past, or childhood.
Gregory Crewdson
#22. 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
#23. My first reaction at the very idea of this interview was to refuse to talk about photography. Why dissect and comment a process that is essentially a spontaneous reaction to a surprise?
Marc Riboud
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. The thing about photography is, some people surround themselves with extremely strong subject matter. And unless you're a moron, you're going to get a really strong photograph.
Andy Summers
#27. There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.
William S. Burroughs
#28. In fact, I probably learned more about photography from studying black-and-white photography in those magazines [Look Magazine and LIFE Magazine] than I did from watching movies here. That's the truth.
Vilmos Zsigmond
#29. 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
#30. It's in trying to direct the traffic between Artiface [sic] and Candor, without being run over, that I'm confronted with the questions about photography that matter most to me.
Richard Avedon
#31. There are rules about perception, but not about photography.
Jay Maisel
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. I know about photography - I'm really good at it.
Kerry Stokes
#36. I talk a lot about photography. It's cheap becuase my supply always exceeds demand.
Bill Jay
#37. A photograph isn't necessarily a lie, but nor is it the truth. It's more of a fleeting, subjective impression. What I most like about photography is the moment that you can't anticipate: you have to be constantly watching for it, ready to welcome the unexpected.
Martine Franck
#38. The thing that interests me about photography, and why it's different from all other media, is that it's the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece.
Chuck Close
#40. What I've always liked about photography is that it's such a direct way of showing what's on my mind. I see something. I show it to you.
Zoe Leonard
#41. I come from a visual background. I used to work in the camera department at Warner Bros. when I was a teenager. I grew up dusting lenses and learning about photography.
Colin Hanks
#42. 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
#43. The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.
Imogen Cunningham
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Photography is about how you look and how you dream and how you see and what your interests are.
David Doubilet
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Photography's about the surface, what's happening at the top of the sea. Literature's about all the stuff below.
Max Pam
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone's person.
Richard Avedon
#59. People think photography is about photographing. To me, it's about relationships.
Lynsey Addario
#60. For me, the act of photography is all about discovery and finding new things.
Alec Soth
#61. 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
#62. Writing, photography...art. It's all about what's in focus.
Kelly E. Lindner
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. The important thing is, you have to have something important to say about the world.
Paul Strand
#70. 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
#71. [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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. The photographs don't arouse me. All I can think about is the hard work it took to make them.
Helmut Newton
#86. 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
#87. Photography is more about money now but then so are most things.
David Bailey
#88. I guess I've shot about 40,000 negatives and of these I have about 800 pictures I like.
Harry Callahan
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. That's one of the wonderful things about the whole process of photography - eye contact can be very revealing.
Derek Ridgers
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#98. 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
#99. The purpose of photography is to create an emotion about the world through what has been carefully seen and selected.
Eli Siegel
#100. 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
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