Top 100 From Photography Quotes
#1. When I first moved from photography to filmmaking, I was worried about how big I had to become. I was one person, or maybe me and an assistant, and I had these small cameras, and maybe a flash.
Lauren Greenfield
#2. 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
#3. I believe that the source of your inspiration is very important. I sometimes see this problem with photographers, even very good ones, who have drawn too much inspiration from photography and who, over time, have a problem forming their own identity.
Peter Lindbergh
#4. I don't need the money I generate from photography to support myself.
Kim Weston
#5. Apart from photography and music videos, I also do graphic design.
Anton Corbijn
#6. The durational aspect of video art is very different from photography or sculpture. The idea of looping things interferes with that a little bit. It eliminates that finite viewing period which I think is not so expressive sometimes.
Marco Brambilla
#7. My biggest challenge was moving from photography to film without losing my way of working - which is very intimate and learning to collaborate with more people, since photography for me is a very solitary process.
Maya Goded
#9. To me, the work I do is a means of interpreting unsettling truths, of bearing witness, and of sounding an alarm. The beauty of formal representation both carries an affirmation of life and subversively brings us face to face with news from our besieged world.
Richard Misrach
#10. I always feel it's necessary to look at my images from two distances. Here is my criterion: If I can look at it from a distance and then come up close but find nothing more to see, it's printed too large. It's not giving me any new information when I come up to it.
Bruce Barnbaum
#11. I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one badass flower, captured in time-lapse photography, going from bud to wild radiant blossom in ten seconds flat.
Jandy Nelson
#12. The photograph is completely abstracted from life, yet it looks like life. That is what has always excited me about photography.
Richard Kalvar
#13. In photography one should surely proceed from essence of the object and attempt to represent it with photographic terms alone.
Albert Renger-Patzsch
#14. Most musicians I know don't just play music on Saturday night. They play music every day. They are always fiddling around, letting the notes lead them from one place to another. Taking still photographs is like that. It is a generative process. It pulls you along.
Henry Wessel Jr.
#15. My way of photographing is my way of life. I photograph from my experience, my way of seeing things ...
Sebastiao Salgado
#16. Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.
Andre Bazin
#17. If there is any method in the way I take pictures, I believe it lies in this: See the subject first. Do not try to force it to be a picture of this, that or the other thing. Stand apart from it. Then something will happen. The subject will reveal itself.
Bill Brandt
#18. For me there are no rules. I think I learned that from artists-from painters and sculptors. It took photography a while to catch up to them.
Larry Clark
#19. Yet it seems so easy to take a photograph! One forgets that, apart from the technical aspects, photography can be a mental creation and the affirmation of a personality. What is marvelous about a photograph is that its possibilities are infinite; there aren't any subjects 'done to death'.
Gisele Freund
#20. I believe it was probably less than ten minutes that went by from the invention of photography to the point where people realized that they could lie with photographs.
Errol Morris
#21. Photography has saturated us as spectators from its inception amidst a mingling of laboratorial pursuits and magic acts to its current status as propagator of convention, cultural commodity, and global hobby.
Barbara Kruger
#22. I'm a photographer and retoucher from Sweden. I use photography as a way of collecting material to realize the ideas in my mind.
Erik Johansson
#23. I photograph from the heart. I adore little babies and I think that shows. My images are really very positive, very simple, and from the heart. Babies speak a universal language.
Anne Geddes
#24. The context in which a photograph is seen affects the meaning the viewer draws from it.
Stephen Shore
#25. 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
#26. I would say that the off-frame effect in photography results from a singular and definitive cutting-off which figures castration and is figured by the click of the shutter.
Christian Metz
#27. I think that emotional content is an image's most important element, regardless of the photographic technique. Much of the work I see these days lacks the emotional impact to draw a reaction from viewers, or remain in their hearts.
Anne Geddes
#28. As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used - as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts - to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera.
Lewis Mumford
#29. How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world. Photography can teach you to improve your awareness level.
Ansel Adams
#30. 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
#31. I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense ... symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller - to find out how they are.
Richard Avedon
#32. I came from the outside, the rules of photography didn't interest me ...
William Klein
#33. You can't teach people photography, they've got to learn how to do it the best way possible for them. They can learn from looking at pictures taken by well-known people, but they don't really get intimate with the medium until they've made a few bad shots!
Cecil Beaton
#34. 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
#35. I like the simple things. I don't know why. I'm that way. I came from a simple place.
Harry Callahan
#36. Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way.
William Gibson
#37. Photography's potential as a great image-maker and communicator is really no different from the same potential in the best poetry where familiar, everyday words, placed within a special context, can soar above the intellect and touch subtle reality in a unique way.
Paul Caponigro
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Photography is like a found object. A photographer never makes an actual subject; they just steal the image from the world ... Photography is a system of saving memories. It's a time machine, in a way, to preserve the memory, to preserve time.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
#41. Photography means releasing oneself from one type of gravity and placing oneself in a space where a different force is trying to move you.
Shomei Tomatsu
#42. The word photography comes from two ancient Greek words: photo for "light" and graph for "drawing." "Drawing with light" is a way of describing photography.
Vishal Diwan
#43. If you paint from 35mm Kodachrome, you end up with a 4x5 foot Kodachrome!
Sergei Bongart
#44. 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
#45. Black and white photography is truly quite a 'departure from reality', and the transition from one aspect of visual magic to another was not as complete as many imagine.
Ansel Adams
#46. Every adventure I've ever had with love and photography has ended in a similar misadventure. As is often the case, the rush of longing detaches from its object of desire, and my photographic ghosts lead me back to myself, alone.
Justine Kurland
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Photography by nature is spiritual, considering it comes from the darkness to show the light.
Kevin Russo
#50. Mapplethorpe presented the body as a sexual object, separating it from the humanity of the person. He added nothing to photography as a medium. I hold his work in low regard.
Jerzy Kosinski
#51. Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them.
John Berger
#52. I am just a middle-class farm boy from Dodge City and my grandparents were wheat farmers. I thought painting, acting, directing and photography were all part of being an artist. I have made my money that way. And I have had some fun. It's not been a bad life.
Dennis Hopper
#53. One thing that Life and I agreed right from the start was that one war photographer was enough for my family; I was to be a photographer of peace.
Cornell Capa
#54. Photography and writing are marvelous distractions from painting. I might even have found movies more interesting than photography. I tried it a bit, but not enough.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue
#56. Photography is always a kind of stealing. A theft from the subject. Artists are assaulters in a lot of ways, and the viewer is complicit in that assault.
Hanya Yanagihara
#57. [Photography] tells you that every second in time is different from every other second. You want people to understand that the image in front of them has something to do with the truth, and it can never be repeated.
Roger Ballen
#58. [Photography] puts a human face on issues which, from afar, can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact.
James Nachtwey
#59. My big hobby is photography. I collect stereo photographs from the 19th century.
Brian May
#60. A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.
Eudora Welty
#61. The biggest lesson in photography is that from negative we make a positive
Josef Koudelka
#62. Amber starts off as sap from a tree," Joseph said in the dark. "And sometimes insects get caught in it, and over millions of years the amber turns into a gemstone, but it traps the insect inside."
"Oh."
"A photograph is sort of like that, don't you think?
Brian Selznick
#63. Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.
Andre Bazin
#64. From my point of view, photography never got any better than it was in 1840.
Chuck Close
#65. Strike all the adjectives from your bio. If you take photos, you're not an 'aspiring' photographer, you're not an 'amazing' photographer either. You're a photographer. Don't get cute. Don't brag. Just state the facts.
Austin Kleon
#66. Slow down, take time, allow yourself to be wildly diverted from your plan. People are the soul of the place; don't forget to meet them and enjoy their company as you explore a place.
David DuChemin
#67. 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
#68. The urge to create, the urge to photograph, comes in part from the deep desire to live with more integrity, to live more in peace with the world, and possibly to help others to do the same.
Wynn Bullock
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. I cannot understand why some people try to write a history of photography that is separated from the history of modern art.
Jean-Francois Chevrier
#72. I was extremely irritated being photographed for a long time, then I gave up caring. Photography is a nauseating cliche, but there is a lot to it. You can tell so much about a person from it. You are exaggerating the consciousness. It's life-thickening, photography.
Peter Beard
#73. The human body is first and foremost a mirror to the soul and its greatest beauty comes from that.
Auguste Rodin
#74. "Simply look with perceptive eyes at the world about you, and trust to your own reactions and convictions. Ask yourself: "Does this subject move me to feel, think and dream? Can I visualize a print - my own personal statement of what I feel and want to convey - from the subject before me?""
Ansel Adams
#75. If you're going to paint from photos, make sure you've painted for at least ten years.
John F. Carlson
#76. 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
#77. Drones ply the liminal space between the physical and the digital - pilots fly them, but aren't in them. They are versatile and fascinating objects - the things they can do range from the mundane (aerial photography) to the spectacular - killing people, for example.
John Battelle
#79. Pure photography is a system of picture-making that describes more or less faithfully what might be seen through a rectangular frame from a particular vantage point at a given moment.
John Szarkowski
#80. Learn from the best; the second raters have nothing to offer.
David Hurn
#81. Photography does not form a separate, barren field of art. It is only a means of execution, uniform, rapid and sure, which serves the artist by reproducing with mathematical precision the form and effect of objects and even that poetry which at once arises from any harmonious combination.
Charles Negre
#82. Original art emanates in the mind ... and lessons society's confusion from self indulgence, avarice and greed to trust, hope and love.
Louis Faurer
#83. 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
#84. I really learned a lot from collecting clothes because I got to go back into the history of fashion and fashion photography and jewelry. It changed how I felt about fashion and about what I did forever because I used to look a little bit down on myself for it.
Stephanie Seymour
#85. Photography is nature seen from the eyes outwards. Painting is nature seen from the eyes inwards.
Charles Sheeler
#86. Photographs also show the way that the camera sees. It's not just me or you or anybody else. The camera does something that is different from our own setting.
Lee Friedlander
#87. Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.
Matt Hardy
#88. The gear you can't afford is not the barrier keeping you from success. Gear has very little to do with photography.
Chase Jarvis
#89. I was obsessed from the moment I took my first photograph. I wanted to make photography my career.
Giles Duley
#90. I took a workshop from him a few months after that. That experience changed my whole approach to photography. At that workshop in Yosemite in 1973 I decided I wanted to try and see if I could pursue this for myself, and I'm still trying.
John Sexton
#91. When a photo of a person looks deep into your spirit and tells you thousand stories ... .. Stories from your past even before you existed, then the photo is way above any description.
Sameh Elsayed
#92. Big game photography in Africa is mainly done from a vehicle, so then I feel I might as well take the lot.
Nigel Dennis
#93. I like small things, I like small moments that are almost elliptical, that are not necessarily linear; they're natural things that happen in the world, but if you look at them from a slight angle there's more than meets the eye.
Keith Carter
#94. 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
#95. As far as I am concerned, taking photographs is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from other means of visual expression. It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It is a way of life.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#96. How the visual world appears is important to me. I'm always aware of the light. I'm always aware of what I would call the 'deep composition.' Photography in the field is a process of creation, of thought and technique. But ultimately, it's an act of imaginatively seeing from within yourself.
Sam Abell
#97. DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)
Gustave Flaubert
#98. 'Humans of New York' wasn't the result of a fully finished idea that I thought of and then executed; it was an evolution. There were hundreds of tiny evolutions that came from me loving photography.
Brandon Stanton
#99. It would be beautiful to photograph the winners of everything from Nobel to booby prize, clutching trophy, or money or certificate, solemn or smiling or tear stained or bloody, on the precarious pinnacle of the human landscape.
Diane Arbus
#100. I am not interested in repetition. I don't want to reach the point from where I wouldn't know how to go further. It's good to set limits for oneself, but there comes a moment when we must destroy what we have constructed.
Josef Koudelka
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