Art In Photography Quotes

#1. Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste, and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt.

Walker Evans

#2. 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

#3. I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography - that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms.

Joel Meyerowitz

#4. A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.

Ansel Adams

#5. We are living in a moment where we have broken the equilibrium of the planet. We are not paying attention to our intuitive side. We only pay attention to our reason. We have become an urban animal

Sebastiao Salgado

#6. The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

Edward Steichen

#7. Throughout the history of art it has been art itself - in all its forms - that has inspired art ... today's photographs are so geared to life that one can learn more from them than from life itself.

Van Deren Coke

#8. I went to university in Colorado and studied art history. I did some photography classes there, although it felt really pretentious.

Pamela Hanson

#9. Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

Susan Sontag

#10. Art does not in fact prove anything. What it does do is record one of those brief times, such as we each have and then each forget, when we are allowed to understand that the Creation is whole.

Robert Adams

#11. I was so impressed with the work we were doing and I was very involved ideologically in photography - that I arranged an exhibition at the College Art Association. The first exhibition I picked the photographs and so on and we had an exhibition in New York.

Ben Shahn

#12. Twentieth-century art has allowed me to see things in a cryptic way. I love the butterfly's wings, which disappear when folded and when open leave this brilliant, intense pronouncement of nature, 'Here I am.'

Emmet Gowin

#13. As sounds in a musical composition can be used not to express physical objects but ideas, emotions, harmonies, rhythmic orders and most any expression of the human mind and spirit, so light can be used visually to express the mind and spirit.

Wynn Bullock

#14. We are all photographers, that's how we remember things; with pictures in our minds. Some of us have good taste and passion to make it an art form and just a few warriors who know the technicalities and marketing make a living out of it.

Ben Tolosa

#15. I have been using the art of photography to research the ways in which the pictorial strategies of the Nineteenth Century color the way in which the American landscape is apprehended by today's viewers.

John Pfahl

#16. I was always interested in photography and other forms of art.

Mikhail Baryshnikov

#17. Nature is beautiful in all its chaos. However, a nature photograph is beautiful only in the absence of chaos.

Mike MacDonald

#18. Only in art can you make something that no one wants and still be considered successful.

Bill Jay

#19. The video camera dominates art. It's a bore, it makes everything look a bit the same. If you look at things with a pencil and paper in your hand, you are going to see far more.

David Hockney

#20. I cannot draw to save my life, and I'm not a big art scholar, but I worked with many designers throughout my career - in theater, in dance, costume designers, set designers, and I have a lot of artist friends and I do photography, and I think it's kind of in my life.

Mikhail Baryshnikov

#21. Only in black and white can I see the design and textures. I don't consider color photography art. Black and white is an interpretation. Color is a duplication.

Clyde Butcher

#22. Is photography an art? There is no point in trying to find out if it is an art. Art is old-fashioned. We need something else.

Man Ray

#23. The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.

Susan Sontag

#24. To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

#25. No one can really explain in a rational way what makes a good photograph or a bad photograph ... This is why the art world will not throw billions of dollars at photography the way it has at painting; and that is what makes it an exciting medium.

David Wojnarowicz

#26. PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne.

Ambrose Bierce

#27. Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already.

Helmut Newton

#28. I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.

Sydney Pollack

#29. In terms of art, the only real answer that I know of is to do it. If you don't do it, you don't know what might happen.

Harry Callahan

#30. Loving photography and wanting to be a painter, it all ended up in the process of filmmaking. It's strange professionally be to connected because it connects you to architecture, it connects you to painting, it connects you to writers, to actors. It connects you to really all of the arts.

Wim Wenders

#31. No photographer should be blamed when, instead of capturing reality, he tries to show things he has seen only in his imagination. Photography is the youngest art form. All attempts to enlarge its frontiers are important and should be encouraged.

Philippe Halsman

#32. I have a master's degree in photography as a fine art, and I would call my work primarily conceptual. I don't carry cameras with me wherever I go. I get an idea of a subject matter I want to deal with and I pull out my cameras.

Leonard Nimoy

#33. Ome INSIDE is home shining brightly above all homes in physical world.

Christina Westover

#34. Photography, as an invention, was both art and science. The view it gave us of the world was in some measure acceptable because it was a product of our vision of the world; and it did so as part of the same process which seemed to impart 'truth': science.

Joseph Kosuth

#35. The truth is that you have to fight your way through brutal, ugly realities in order to find that moment of clarity, that one slant of light or shift in emotion that yields unexpected art. That's just as true for life as it is for crime scene photography.

Maggie Ybarra

#36. Embracing the Light
Collected bits of truth
Shimmering sparks
Shards of light
Merge
Healing
Restoring
Bursting Bright
Rising
in divine ecstatic flame.

Leonard Nimoy

#37. All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.

Andre Bazin

#38. A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Richard Avedon

#39. Overcoming fear and conceiving this 'art of more' should be a fundamental practice in what it is that you do and make.

Chase Jarvis

#40. There is more in art, with an apology to that much abused word, as applied to photography, than startling display lines, on mounts and signs announcing artist Photographer, Artistic Photography Studio, etc., and the lower the standard the more frantic the claim ...

Gertrude Kasebier

#41. Original art emanates in the mind ... and lessons society's confusion from self indulgence, avarice and greed to trust, hope and love.

Louis Faurer

#42. It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.

Ansel Adams

#43. Photography is a bridge between science and art. It brings to science what it needs most, the artistic sense, and to art the proof that nothing can be imagined which cannot be matched in the counterpoints of nature.

Ernst Haas

#44. A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

Ansel Adams

#45. The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.

Sol LeWitt

#46. Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art.

Berenice Abbott

#47. I assumed from the outset that photography was already art, and that I and other people working in photography were artists. I understand now that this was a minority point of view.

Lewis Baltz

#48. Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me.

William Eggleston

#49. My intention, certainly, is to create something which is aesthetic but many things are implicit in the work that I do. For me photography is writing, it is history; it can be aesthetic, it can be many things though it does not have to be art.

Graciela Iturbide

#50. We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer.

Criss Jami

#51. Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took.

Rebecca McNutt

#52. It is my hope that photography may fall in line with all the other arts and with her infinite possibilities, do things strange and more fascinating than the most fantastic dreams.

Alvin Langdon Coburn

#53. it was montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere animated photography, in short, creating a language.

Andre Bazin

#54. Then in college, besides economics, I also majored in studio art and got involved in photography and making short films and acting. But I didn't know you could make a living that way.

Brit Marling

#55. One reason I was interested in photography was to get away from the preciousness of the art object.

Cindy Sherman

#56. I think there's a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that's music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative - they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever.

Stewart Butterfield

#57. [Photography was necessary to] make my place in the art-world: in order to do this, I had to make a picture, since a picture was what a gallery or museum was meant to hold (all the while, of course, I was claiming that I was denying the standard, rejecting it ... )

Vito Acconci

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

Kelly E. Lindner

#59. What's so incredibly amusing with photography is that while seemingly an art of the surface, it catches things I haven't even noticed. And it pains me not to have seen things in all their depth.

Jacques-Henri Lartigue

#60. When I first started making photo pieces it wasn't with the idea of a commitment to the medium. I didn't think I would have to become a photographer to make my photographs. I recall that anything could be used as material for art in that era. Photography was just one more thing.

William Wegman

#61. 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

#62. She believed photography to be the greatest of all art forms because it was simultaneously junk food and gourmet cuisine, because you could snap dozens of pictures in a couple of hours, then spend dozens of hours perfecting just a couple of them.

Tommy Wallach

#63. I was born in the '60s and grew up in the '70s - not exactly the best decade for food in British history. It was horrendous. It was a time when, as a nation, we excelled in art and music and acting and photography and fashion - all creative skills ... all apart from cooking.

Heston Blumenthal

#64. If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.

Charles Baudelaire

#65. I take pleasure in working with the non-art photographs that reside in public archives, essentially authorless and owned by the world itself, because I find the world of fine art photography to be pretty silly and pretentious.

Michael Light

#66. Art is nothing more than creating an emotion in your own form.

Shannon L. Alder

#67. A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.

Annie Leibovitz

#68. I like to work in the real world, so I do a lot of searching or just simple looking. But I'm not above tweaking reality and making something up. I don't think there are any rules in art. It's not so much what you see as it is the significance you, the artist, see in it.

Keith Carter

#69. We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see.

Michelangelo Antonioni

#70. I was an artistic dilettante for a while, in photography and collage and the visual arts.

Thomas F. Wilson

#71. There are two dirty words in photography, one is art, the other is good taste

Helmut Newton

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

Craig Owens

#73. Photography captures a moment in time. Art captures time in a moment.

Joyce Wycoff

#74. I am interested in computers and technology, and art, photography, and design.

William Landay

#75. I took courses at USC in film editing and art direction and photography when I was still in high school.

Ray Harryhausen

#76. One thing that struck me early is that you don't put into a photograph what's going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.

Diane Arbus

#77. Photography is a unique art that allows people to go back, not only to rediscover themselves but also to get something in print for the first time.

David Travis

#78. 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

#79. I don't like how women's bodies are Page 3 news. I just don't think that's big news. Women's bodies are women's bodies, and that's that. And I love to see beautiful - the female form in great art and great photography.

Eliza Doolittle

#80. Photography is better than art. It is a solar phenomenon in which the artist collaborates with the sun.

Alphonse De Lamartine

#81. 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

#82. How aware were photographers in the past of other visual arts? "No photographer of any distinction at all could approach his work without some awareness of what was going on in other visual media, and for that matter neither the painter nor the draughtsman could ignore photography."

Aaron Scharf

#83. Some photographers could vomit on a piece of paper and call it art, you know ... Hang it in the Guggenheim, or whatever. Sell a print for two hundred pounds? But I can't do that. I just
Maybe I have too much respect for walls ... or something.

Pansy Schneider-Horst

#84. I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I've lost.

Nan Goldin

#85. You are either born to be a photographer or not. The art of photography is not something you can learn in the classroom or by watching someone do it.

Nobuyoshi Araki

#86. After I left school, where I studied art, photography and textiles at A-level, I started doing an apprenticeship in interior design, but I wasn't really enjoying it very much, so I decided to do something creative, and in 2009, I began blogging.

Zoe Sugg

#87. Originally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts it is the most democratic, in so far as it's instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth.

Gregory Crewdson

#88. To make the essence of man visible in the exposure is the highest art of photography.

Friedrich Durrenmatt

#89. I'm afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through magazines and through slides and I think this is dreadful, this is anti-art because art is direct experience with something in the world and photography is just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art.

Carl Andre

#90. Outstanding past work in photography, and in fact in all the arts, is very important to today's photographers. But it should be used for inspiration and not for imitation. These works should be something to be built upon, not to be repeated.

Alexey Brodovitch

#91. I've spent most of my life embracing violence in wars and revolutions. Even a famine is a form of violence. Because I photograph people in peril, people in pain, people being executed in front of me, I find it very difficult to get my head around the art narrative of photography.

Don McCullin

#92. A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.

George Bernard Shaw

#93. The recent extraordinary discovery in Photography, as applied in the operations of the mind, has reduced the art of novel-writing to the merest mechanical labour.

Lewis Carroll

#94. If art is the poetic interpretation of nature, photography is the exact translation; it is exactitude in art or the complement of art. (1854)

Charles Negre

#95. In 1967 there was no place for photography in a contemporary art gallery. It was almost impossible to get an art dealer to look at, let alone exhibit, anything photographic.

Mel Bochner

#96. I had a growing feeling that most of the best art of the world in painting and sculpture had been done, and that this newest form [photography] was more related to the progress and tempo of modern science of the eye.

Paul Outerbridge

#97. The painters have no copyright on modern art! ... I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be - compared to painting - it has different means and aims.

Edward Weston

#98. When painting portraits a lot of people say, 'Why not get a photograph of the person?' Photography is wonderful and it is an art form in itself, but ... my portrait is a culmination of elements ... a truer image of a person than just the 'click' of a snapshot.

Jamie Wyeth

#99. Above all, the photographs I use are not arty in any sense of the word. I think photography is dead as fine art; its only place is in the commercial world, for technical or information purposes.

Edward Ruscha

#100. You only do exercises in art school. That's not the real thing. A little bit tells you so much. You have to find your own self. And you don't know what you are! But that's what you have to search for.

Harry Callahan