Top 100 Art Photography Quotes
#1. What inspires me still: travel, art, photography, my kids, the places I haven't been to yet.
Jillian Barberie
#2. I am interested in computers and technology, and art, photography, and design.
William Landay
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Real photography is a wonderfully inclusive, democratic medium, whereas art photography is more often a private pursuit by conmen.
Philip Jones Griffiths
#12. 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
#13. When I was at college, the idea of fashion was more immediate to me, whereas art photography, the depth of it, was a different thing. Storytelling - fanciful storytelling - can only be told through fashion photography. It's the perfect way to play with fantasy and dreams.
Tim Walker
#14. Edward [Weston] was the first artist - and I don't use the word lightly - to make a living doing art photography. Other photographers did commercial work, or worked for the government.
Rondal Partridge
#15. The key is to integrate our art into our life, not the other way around.
Brooks Jensen
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms - painting, photography, music, dance, theater.
James Gray
#19. 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
#20. I took courses at USC in film editing and art direction and photography when I was still in high school.
Ray Harryhausen
#21. Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
Susan Sontag
#22. All along I've had an ambivalent relationship to photography - but as to whether I thought it an art form, or a craft, or a technique, well, I've always been taken with Henry Geldzahler's answer to that question when he said, I thought it was a hobby.
David Hockney
#23. [Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008] helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art - not to mention between art and life.
Michael Kimmelman
#24. Photography captures a moment in time. Art captures time in a moment.
Joyce Wycoff
#25. 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
#26. 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
#28. Photoghraphic projects can be as short as an afternoon or as long as a lifetime.
George Barr
#29. As an allegorical art, then, photography would represent our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable and stabilizing image.
Craig Owens
#30. There are two dirty words in photography, one is art, the other is good taste
Helmut Newton
#32. What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that's gone forever, impossible to reproduce.
Karl Lagerfeld
#33. I was an artistic dilettante for a while, in photography and collage and the visual arts.
Thomas F. Wilson
#34. 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
#35. Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.
Andre Bazin
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. I myself happen to find, on the basis of experience and nothing else, that photography can be a high art.
Clement Greenberg
#41. If you take pictures does that make you an art thief?
Bill Jay
#42. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Science strives for answers, but art is happy with a good question.
James Turrell
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.
Annie Leibovitz
#51. Art is nothing more than creating an emotion in your own form.
Shannon L. Alder
#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. If it looks like art, chances are it's somebody else's art.
Chuck Close
#54. 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
#55. Regarding the creative: never assume you're the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you're masterful.
Don Roff
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. ( ... ) 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
#59. 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
#60. I'd love to go off to college to study photography, art history, humanities.
Mia Wasikowska
#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. Photography is the dominant and fascinating and only folk art of the twentieth century.
John Rothenstein
#63. Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.
Susan Sontag
#64. The desire to discover, the desire to move, to capture the flavor, three concepts that describe the art of photography.
Helmut Newton
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Writing, photography...art. It's all about what's in focus.
Kelly E. Lindner
#70. [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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. One reason I was interested in photography was to get away from the preciousness of the art object.
Cindy Sherman
#75. 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
#76. When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.
Ansel Adams
#77. Photography is an itch that wont go away. No matter how much you scratch it.
Dara McGrath
#78. But O, Photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing!
Philip Larkin
#79. 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
#81. 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
#82. Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
John Updike
#83. Art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#84. Now people ask whether photography is art, but I think the question is of absolutely no interest.
Peter Lindbergh
#85. Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
Susan Sontag
#86. 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
#87. It's the first time that I've ever had an art show based on a film, but it's a photography collage.
Val Kilmer
#88. We've lost these qualities, these abilities to do something by hand. Some illustrators have it still, but it's just not art. We have photography. We have cameras and computers that do it better and faster.
Gerhard Richter
#89. 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
#90. I've always thought photography is not so much of an art form but a way of communicating and passing on information.
Don McCullin
#91. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. I love photography, and I love the art of photography.
Helen Mirren
#96. 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
#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. 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
#100. 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
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