Top 100 Camera Photography Quotes
#1. Life as it unfolds in front of the camera is full of so much complexity, wonder and surprise that I find it unnecessary to create new realities. There is more pleasure, for me, in things as-they-are.
David Hurn
#2. The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.
Orson Welles
#3. It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along ... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.
Susan Sontag
#4. At age four I was a camera. I took pictures with my eyes. I framed my photo within my vision and blinked my eyes to snap the shutter of my memory. Since that time, I've been impersonating inanimate objects at every opportunity.
Sophia Amoruso
#5. The whole nature of photography has changed with the advent of a camera in everybody's hand.
Sally Mann
#6. Painting requires skill. Photography is created by the camera, and one cannot fully control what the camera sees. So people take many photographs because several must always be discarded.
Igor Babailov
#7. The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.
Brooks Atkinson
#8. ! discovered photography completely by chance. My wife is an architect; when we were young and living in Paris, she bought a camera to take pictures of buildings. For the first time, I looked through a lens - and photography immediately started to invade my life.
Sebastiao Salgado
#9. Back in the day, I actually studied photography in Florence for a few months, and my photography teacher took away my digital camera and said, 'No, use this - it's analog and it's square.' It was a Holga camera, a very cheap $3 or $4 plastic camera. And that's what inspired 'Instagram'.
Kevin Systrom
#10. I am a big fan of photography, more of being behind the camera - so when I get the opportunity to work with such great photographers, I always try and learn from their technique.
Penelope Cruz
#11. There are only two hard things in photography; which way to point the camera and when to release the shutter.
Ralph Steiner
#12. A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera 'saw' a piece of time and space.
Garry Winogrand
#13. As a teenager, I loved acting, painting, photography, and making films with my friend's Super 8 camera. But I always loved writing the best. I chose writing even before I knew poetry was available to me.
Denise Duhamel
#14. I came to photography with the desire to conquer this machine, the camera, and make it my slave. Instead, I have now a respect for it and all machines as expanders of my awareness.
Todd Walker
#15. The camera, you know, will never capture you. Photography, in my experience, has the miraculous power of transferring wine into water.
Oscar Wilde
#16. A paparazzi is merely an extremely nosy nobody with a camera - and bills to pay.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#17. As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.
Sam Abell
#18. I'd like my coffin to be a camera obscura so I can see what's going on outside.
Bill Jay
#19. In a strict sense photography can never be abstract, for the camera is incapable of synthetic integration.
Ansel Adams
#20. A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they'll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won't do a thing for you if you don't have anything in your head or in your heart.
Arnold Newman
#21. So when I became interested in photography and further being inspired by the work that I saw of Ansel and others, it was a natural extension to go back to these places that I knew as a kid and explore them with my camera.
John Sexton
#22. Your most important gear is your eye, heart and soul.
Marius Vieth
#23. I use photography as a way to help me understand why I am here. The camera helps me to see.
Trent Parke
#24. I just got this new camera. It's very advanced - you don't even need it.
Steven Wright
#25. We used the camera only as a means of expression and as a visual medium that offers possibilities found in no other artistic technique, possibilities that the eye cannot catch in their totality. We tried to establish a characteristic vision of photography.
Piet Zwart
#26. She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said 'Be careful his bowtie is really a camera'
Paul Simon
#27. 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
#28. George Lucas wanted this moving camera for all of the photography in Star Wars. He was willing to take a risk with the concepts that I advanced with regard to ways for doing that.
John Dykstra
#29. Don't pack up your camera until you've left the location.
Joe McNally
#30. The only thing they'll let you shoot with a camera.
Jodi Picoult
#31. For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#32. I discovered that this camera was the technical means in photography of communicating what the world looks like in a state of heightened awareness. And it's that awareness of really looking at the everyday world with clear and focused attention that I'm interested in.
Stephen Shore
#33. The camera's only job is to get out of the way of making photographs.
Ken Rockwell
#34. I was always painting when I was a kid. But then when I handled a camera when I was 17, that was it for me. I loved photography. I would work 4 or 5 hours a day. It was like a calling.
David LaChapelle
#36. Balance of light is the problem, not the amount. Balance between shadows and highlights determines where the emphasis goes in the picture ... make sure the major light in a picture falls at right angles to the camera.
Elliott Erwitt
#37. Photography is a very subtle thing. You must let the camera take you by the hand, as it were, and lead you into your subject.
Margaret Bourke-White
#38. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
Dorothea Lange
#39. What most artists using photography feel that they need to do is to show that they are serious, that they are not taking snapshots. To point a camera at something does not qualify you as an artist because everybody has done that.
Wolfgang Tillmans
#40. The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect.
Arthur Miller
#41. Realism and superrealism are what I'm after. This world is full of things the eye doesn't see. The camera can see more, and often 10 times better.
Andreas Feininger
#42. God creates the beauty. Through my camera, I am a witness.
Mark Denman
#43. Just as a fisherman cannot catch fish unless his line is in the water, a wildlife photographer cannot shoot great wildlife images unless he or she is out there with camera in hand and the knowledge of what to do then the 'magnificent moment' occurs.
George H. Harrison
#44. Living in a time of the increasing struggle of the mechanization of man, photography has become another example of this paradoxical problem of how to humanize, how to overcome a machine on which we are thoroughly dependent ... the camera ...
Ernst Haas
#45. Photography to me is an addiction. I get jittery after a couple of days without a camera. Everyone who knows me says I'm happiest when I'm shooting.
Rankin
#46. It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera ... they are made with the eye, heart and head.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#47. You can't use your camera as a shield against human suffering ...
Zana Briski
#48. My directors of photography light my films, but the colours of the sets, furnishings, clothes, hairstyles - that's me. Everything that's in front of the camera, I bring you.
Pedro Almodovar
#49. With the work that I do as a director, I've got dialogue, camera movement, and character blocking to help create a tone to the piece. In photography, those elements are somewhat void so that tone becomes a bit more subtle but still equally important.
Aaron Ruell
#50. A man with a camera was always suspected of being a spy. Moreover, the Jews did not want to be photographed, due to a misunderstanding of the prohibition against making graven images (photography had not been invented when the Torah was written!). I was forced to use a hidden camera ...
Roman Vishniac
#51. "Utter truth is essential, and that is what stirs me when I look through the camera."
Margaret Bourke-White
#52. If there were lies to photography, I figured, there was truth too, truths we'd never see if not through the dispassionate glass eye of a camera.
Richard E. Gropp
#53. People have been reading photography as a true document, at the same time they are now getting suspicious. I am basically an honest person, so I let the camera capture whatever it captures whether you believe it or not is up to you; it's not my responsibility, blame my camera, not me.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
#54. I wanted [my photography] to appear as though the camera was seeing by itself.
Lewis Baltz
#55. Photography through the camera is an instrument of detection. We photograph not only what we know, but also what we don't know.
Lisette Model
#56. Photography came as a substitute. I was painfully shy and found talking to people difficult; a camera in hand gave me a function, a reason to be somewhere, a witness, but not an actor.
Martine Franck
#57. The camera creates a magical transformation. It's not enough to exist; we must chronicle that existence ... Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don't feel any experience is complete unless it's recorded.
Erica Jong
#58. The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?
Edward Weston
#59. You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.
Ernst Haas
#60. Let the subject generate its own photographs. Become a camera.
Minor White
#61. Aesthetics does not exist for the camera as an isolated entity. Aesthetics, in fact, is inseparable from the purpose of the photographer and the use he makes of his theme. When photography fails ... it is usually because a false separation has been imposed on form and content.
Sid Grossman
#63. When gifts are given to me through my camera, I accept them graciously.
Minor White
#64. Why you like photography so much? Because it's just the camera and me showing everyone else what we can see. It's telling stories.
Lindsey Kelk
#65. Photography is the act of "fixing" time, not of "expressing" the world. The camera is an inadequate tool for extracting a vision of the world or of beauty.
Daido Moriyama
#66. When you take a photo, you often take your own reality into your camera - the reality that you shaped in your mind - and not the real reality over there, whatever it is!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#67. Every photograph that is made whether by one who considers himself a professional, or by the tourist who points his snapshot camera and pushes a button, is a response to the exterior world, to something perceived outside himself by the person who operates the camera.
Eliot Porter
#68. Photography has fooled the world. There's no more convincing fraud. Its images are nothing but the expression of the invisible man working behind the camera. They are not reality, they form part of the language of culture.
Edmundo Desnoes
#69. Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
Susan Sontag
#70. Before you shoot an irresistible subject, mute all your senses except sight to find out how much is left for the camera to record.
Andreas Feininger
#71. My interest in photography did not begin with books or mentors, or with any burning desire to see the world through a camera. It evolved from an intense devotion to mountains and wilderness that eventually shaped all the parts of my life and brought them together.
Galen Rowell
#72. The camera points both ways. In expressing the subject you also express yourself ...
Freeman Patterson
#73. The first picture of his I ever saw was during a lecture at the Rhyl camera club. I was 16 and the speaker was Emrys Jones. He projected the picture upside down. Deliberately, to disregard the subject matter to reveal the composition. It's a lesson I've never forgotten.
Philip Jones Griffiths
#74. A camera can get you close without the burden of commitment. It's a nifty device that way, a magical passport into people's lives with no permanent strings attached.
Nina Berman
#75. There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.
Ernst Haas
#76. The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.
Dirk Bogarde
#77. When you see what you express through photography, you realize all the things that can no longer be the objectives of painting. Why should an artist persist in treating subjects that can be established so clearly with the lens of a camera?
Pablo Picasso
#78. You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.
Susan Sontag
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#82. With a camera like that you don't believe you're in the masterpiece business. It's enough to be able to peck at the world.
Lee Friedlander
#83. I also have to add that if Rembrandt had been given a camera then that guys understanding of light and form would have blown the rest of us shooters into a black hole of despair.
Steve Merrick
#84. War is the easiest photography in the business. Just get close, be lucky, know how your camera works. There are subjects everywhere. Everyplace you go, there is something to photograph in a war, like being in the middle of a hurricane or a train crash or an earthquake. You can't miss it.
David Douglas Duncan
#85. No matter how advanced your camera you still need to be responsible for getting it to the right place at the right time and pointing it in the right direction to get the photo you want.
Ken Rockwell
#86. Women that can work a camera with ease often work men just as effortlessly for both require the same commitment to vanity and manipulation.
Tiffany Madison
#87. My main camera is a Nikon D3. I use a French camera from the 1800s for wet plate photography, I use a Hasselblad sometimes. But to me the camera really doesn't matter that much. I don't have a preference for film or digital.
Nikki Sixx
#88. Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times ... I just shoot at what interests me at that moment.
Elliott Erwitt
#89. Leica, schmeica. The camera doesn't make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But you have to see.
Ernst Haas
#90. The photographer does the world a great disservice when he leaves his camera at home.
Mark Denman
#91. A camera is just like a woman, as long as you have one of them hanging around your neck ... life is just fine
Sunny-Drunk
#92. 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
#93. The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.
Walker Evans
#94. The act of photography is like going on a hunt in which photographer and camera merge into one indivisible function. This is a hunt for new states of things, situations never seen before, for the improbable, for information.
Vilem Flusser
#95. The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!
Ansel Adams
#96. Photography is a very forgiving medium. Anybody that can afford film and a camera can make pictures.
Todd Walker
#97. There is no such thing as a good paparazzo. A good paparazzo, that's a paparazzo who has had his camera broken. In fact, they are bandits, thieves of photography. (Statement after photographs were published showing Jackie Onassis sunbathing nude.)
Federico Fellini
#98. My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.
Steve McCurry
#99. Photography, like all camera-made images such as film and video, effaces the marks of its making (and maker) at the click of a shutter. A photograph appears to be self-generated - as though it had created itself.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
#100. A photographer went to a socialite party in New York. As he entered the front door, the host said 'I love your pictures - they're wonderful; you must have a fantastic camera.' He said nothing until dinner was finished, then: 'That was a wonderful dinner; you must have a terrific stove.
Sam Haskins
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