Top 100 Art Of Photography Quotes
#1. The desire to discover, the desire to move, to capture the flavor, three concepts that describe the art of photography.
Helmut Newton
#2. I love photography, and I love the art of photography.
Helen Mirren
#3. To make the essence of man visible in the exposure is the highest art of photography.
Friedrich Durrenmatt
#4. 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
#5. The art is the challenge which you must meet every day: the technique you should learn to control with time. The science and the art of photography are really one, and not opposed to each other.
Yousuf Karsh
#6. 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
#7. The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.
Steven Pinker
#8. 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
#9. When the reality looks magnificent, a real art of photography has only one choice: To capture this beauty magnificently!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#10. For me, pointing and clicking my phone is absolutely fine. People say that isn't the art of photography but I don't agree.
Annie Lennox
#11. My greatest aim has been to advance the art of photography and to make it what I think I have, a great and truthful medium of history.
Mathew Brady
#12. To make good photographs, to express something, to contribute something to the world he lives in, and to contribute something to the art of photography besides imitations of the best photographers on the market today, that is basic training, the understanding of self.
Edward Steichen
#13. Speed, the fundamental condition of the activities of our day is the power of photography, indeed the modern art of today, the art of the split second.
Lisette Model
#14. I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms - painting, photography, music, dance, theater.
James Gray
#15. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Susan Sontag
#16. If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear - but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.
Edgar Allan Poe
#17. The art of news photography is creating compelling, graphic compositions that communicate environment and emotion. Strung together, they take the viewer on a progression of discovery until the mystery is revealed.
Rich Underwood
#19. It is because of the servility of photography that I am fundamentally contemptuous of this chance invention which will never be an art but which plagiarizes nature by means of optics. (1848)
Alphonse De Lamartine
#20. To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.
Edward Weston
#21. If it is practiced by a man of taste, the photograph will have the appearance of art (but) the photographer must ... intervene as little as possible, so as not to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses.
Henri Matisse
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. I myself happen to find, on the basis of experience and nothing else, that photography can be a high art.
Clement Greenberg
#25. It began when I was so ill that there was a good chance of dying. I promised myself that if I survived I would never again pander to a magazine's requests or follow the ideas of art directors. I would only make images which were personal, which arose out of my own life.
Helmut Newton
#26. 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
#27. Contemporary art photography, or, more specifically, what I would term mainstream art photography, represents for the most part the mining of an exhausted lode.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
#28. It would be mistaken to suppose that any of the best photography is come at by intellection; it is like all art, essentially the result of an intuitive process, drawing on all that the artist is rather than on anything he thinks, far less theorizes about.
Helen Levitt
#29. It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#30. The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
Roland Barthes
#31. One of art photography's most vigorous enterprises
[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate
but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
Susan Sontag
#32. 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
#33. Photography, when used as a representational art, is not a mere copy of nature. This is proved by the rarity of the 'good' photograph.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#34. ( ... ) photography opened up quite a little Pandora's box, kiddies. ( ... ) Once we no longer had to depend on drawing and painting to record our existence - once they became an option - they mutated ... into a form of expression. And Art for its own sake, God help us, was born.
Chip Kidd
#35. 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
#36. Contemporary art photography is paradoxical. Anyone can look at it and form an opinion about what they see. Yet it usually represents aesthetic and theoretical positions that only a small minority of well-informed viewers can access.
Lucy Soutter
#37. 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
#38. Photography is the dominant and fascinating and only folk art of the twentieth century.
John Rothenstein
#39. Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.
Susan Sontag
#40. Is photography art? ... The pure definition of the word 'art' alone is too vague today to break one's brain and soul about it. Let us take a little vacation from this word.
Ernst Haas
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. [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
#44. Not only has photography so thoroughly saturated our visual environment as to make the invention of visual images seem archaic, but it is also clear that photography is too multiple, too useful to other discourses, ever to be wholly contained within traditional definitions of art.
Douglas Crimp
#45. Photography has always reminded me of the second child.. trying to prove itself. The fact that it wasn't really considered an art.. that it was considered a craft.. has trapped almost every serious photographer.
Richard Avedon
#46. One reason I was interested in photography was to get away from the preciousness of the art object.
Cindy Sherman
#47. The discussion about whether photography is or isn't art is dated and of no interest. Your work makes you an artist, not your title.
Peter Lindbergh
#48. Unlike the photography and prints, I never catalogued, kept track of or exhibited the sketches. I sold some occasionally, but never saw myself as a graphic artist. They became more important to me thanks to the exhibition, however, and I realized that these drawings were quite interesting after all.
Gerhard Richter
#49. Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
John Updike
#50. Art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#51. Now people ask whether photography is art, but I think the question is of absolutely no interest.
Peter Lindbergh
#52. Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
Susan Sontag
#53. 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
#54. I've always thought photography is not so much of an art form but a way of communicating and passing on information.
Don McCullin
#55. Photography is an art of observation - it's about creating something extraordinary out of the ordinary. You choose a frame and then wait until the right time for something magical to come along and fill it.
Elliott Erwitt
#56. It cannot be too plainly stated that it is quite unimportant whether photography produces 'art' or not. Its own basic laws, not the opinions of art critics, will provide the only valid measure of its future worth.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#57. 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
#58. A picture was a motionless record of motion. An arrested representation of life. A picture was the kiss of death pretending to possess immutability.
Ivan Klima
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. For half a century photography has been the "art form" of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? to the finger on the button? to the law of averages?
Gore Vidal
#62. Let us ... leave art to the artists, and let us try to use the medium of photography to create photographs that can endure because of their photographic qualities.
Albert Renger-Patzsch
#63. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.
Susan Sontag
#64. But now the train had finally begun to move, and Albie had switched the fearless truth-telling eye of his camera lens from his untied laces to the walls of the tunnels under east London, because you can never have enough pictures of dirty concrete.
David Nicholls
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Photography has all the rights, and all the merits,
necessary for us to turn towards it as the art of our time.
Alexander Rodchenko
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy.
Charles Baudelaire
#72. I understood the craft of photography when done by an artist is art.
Ruth Bernhard
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. Many people misunderstand me - I'm quite happy to be called a photographer. All of a sudden, the art world has caught up with photography, and they are trying to hijack us.
Don McCullin
#76. 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
#77. If the photographer isn't going to pay attention to the picture he is making, that if he thinks the camera is just a machine and not an avenue of expression, then he has no business asking anyone for anything, let alone their time and interest. Don't show the world, he said, invent the world.
Whitney Otto
#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. The observer must learn to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of objects.
Wassily Kandinsky
#80. There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.
Sontag, Susan
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
Susan Sontag
#85. 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
#86. Photography is the art of anticipation, not working with memories, but showing their formation. As such, it has relentlessly usurped imaginative and critical prerogatives of older, slower literature and handmade visual art.
Peter Schjeldahl
#87. To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#88. 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
#89. Art can no longer be merely a mirror, it must act as the organizer of the people's consciousness ... No form of representation is so readily comprehensible to the masses as photography.
El Lissitzky
#90. 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
#91. All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.
Ansel Adams
#92. That celebrated marriage of science and art, photography, seemed at the time to join together how we look at the world, art, with how we were coming to know it, science.
Joseph Kosuth
#93. Nature is beautiful in all its chaos. However, a nature photograph is beautiful only in the absence of chaos.
Mike MacDonald
#94. My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty.
Julia Margaret Cameron
#96. The invention of photography destroyed the canons of representational, imitative art.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. I would like to do all kinds of things: photography and art and designing; I want to help do charity things for animals and things like that.
Georgia May Jagger
#100. 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
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