I Like Photography Quotes

#1. I like photography as a recording device. It's the best possible two-dimensional representation of 3D living things that we have.

Andrew Zuckerman

#2. I like photography and I write; I also write music. One day I would like to direct [films] as well .

Zoe Kravitz

#3. I like photography and writing and travel, so I have a lot of cerebral occupations. I am going to become a sailor and do a world tour on my yacht if I don't get any more work.

Audrey Tautou

#4. I absolutely forbade all public photographs of myself. I like photography, I don't have anything against it, but ...

Jacques Derrida

#5. I like photography because it is a reality medium, unlike drawing which is unreal. I like to mess with reality ... to bend reality. Some of my works beg the question of is it real or not?

Storm Thorgerson

#6. I like the stories. I like the narratives that you get in fashion photography. And I like what the clothes do to the body - the patterns and stripes and all of that.

Chantal Joffe

#7. I read like a crazy person, I play the piano, and I'm a photographer. I always say my photography keeps me sane. I spend a lot of time in the darkroom. It's a very solitary, quiet life when I'm not working.

Alaina Huffman

#8. As a young person, and I know it's hard to believe that I was shy, but you could take your camera, and it would take you to places: it was like having a friend, like having someone to go out with and look at the world. I would do things with a camera I wouldn't do normally if I was just by myself.

Annie Leibovitz

#9. People are always trying to find the next groovy thing, and it hasn't gone back to painting ... I'd like it to go back to painting. I'm sick of all this photography and video. There's so much of it, it's almost annoying.

Cindy Sherman

#10. What I love about photography, and it's the same thing I love about acting, really, is that it forces you, like, right into the moment, where you can't be distracted, where you can't be, like, thinking about other things or ahead of yourself or behind yourself.

Jessica Lange

#11. I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph.

Berenice Abbott

#12. I love photography. I like to write. I like coaching. I've made jewelry. I'm very creative.

Diandra Asbaty

#13. My photography changed from being more documentary-like to arranging things more, and that came into being partly because I started doing music videos, and I incorporated some things from the music videos into my photography again, by arranging things more.

Anton Corbijn

#14. To me, photography is like a quest, or a pilgrimage, or a hunt. I love painting, I love music, but photography is what has allowed me to get outside of myself.

Edouard Boubat

#15. Everything I do, it's a bit painterly. I like being surrounded by objects, mostly on paper. I like the images. I like the painting. I like good photography. It's something that makes me an emotional connection, and I feel comfortable around it.

Mikhail Baryshnikov

#16. What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that's gone forever, impossible to reproduce.

Karl Lagerfeld

#17. I'm a photographer, period. I love photography, the immediacy of it. I like the craft, the idea of saying 'I'm a photographer.'

David LaChapelle

#18. When I started working in film, I loved photography, I loved the image, I loved telling the story within a frame, but as I started playing around with film and video, it was like, 'Oh my god.' You just have so much more to play with.

Lynn Shelton

#19. You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. (In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz)

Marcel Duchamp

#20. My introduction to photography and a lot of how I developed aesthetically was through '50s and early-'60s fashion magazines like Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.

Patti Smith

#21. Just like zillions of children, album covers educated and informed me, and certainly did I later transpose organically, rather than by intent, those principles both in fashion design and photography.

Hedi Slimane

#22. With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society's natural prejudice and giving this a twist.

Martin Parr

#23. I got really excited about finding new ways of using video, and the immediacy is different, in a way, than painting and photography. The creativity comes with the editing. You can layer and cut and paste. I really love that it's like another form of making my smaller collages but in video form.

Mickalene Thomas

#24. Judging by the photograph it seemed like I hadn't been there at all. As if it was my camera that had been on holiday, and not me.

Ida Lokas

#25. To me, photography is 90% a retrospective experience. There's the part of pursuing the image, and exposing the film, but once you make the exposure, you're always looking backwards in time. I like that aspect of photography.

John Sexton

#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. I never tried to revolutionise photography; I just do what I do and keep my fingers crossed that people will like it.

David Bailey

#28. I was a make believe ethnographer: treating New Yorkers like an explorer would treat Zulus - searching for the rawest snapshot, the zero degree of photography.

William Klein

#29. One day I was speculating on how I would like to look back on life and I decided I wanted to feel that I was a photographer rather than a teacher. As simple as that.

David Hurn

#30. And I don't like having my picture taken. I'm almost like an old African in that sense. I think it steals a bit of the soul.

Eric Clapton

#31. Ideally I would like the work to be a hybrid between painting and photography.

John Baldessari

#32. I don't have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions.

Garry Winogrand

#33. I like to think of photographing as a two-way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject, by describing it as it is. A photograph must be responsible to both.

Garry Winogrand

#34. I'm pretty used to people not liking having their picture taken. I mean, if you do like to have your picture taken, I worry about you.

Annie Leibovitz

#35. Photography is a hobby born out of my time in undergrad at USC. It is more of a pleasurable hobby, a stress reliever. I don't consider it a professional endeavor like acting or directing.

Lee Thompson Young

#36. I really like photography, and I'd like to do more of that kind of thing. If I had to choose a different job within the industry and do it well, I would love to do cinematography.

Sarah Snook

#37. You think too much and I bet it kills the magic," he says simply. "Some things are just instinct and if you try and replace that with thinking they die. You can read and think as much as you want before and after, but in the moment, man, you have to, like, let go.

Blue GhostGhost

#38. Even in manipulating the images, I would like to do my dailies in a digital way because you can do so many things in that stage that I cannot do in real photography.

Vilmos Zsigmond

#39. I went into photography because it seemed like the perfect vehicle for commenting on the madness of today's existence.

Robert Mapplethorpe

#40. I work to attain a 'state of heart', a gentle space offering inspirational substance that could purify one's vision. Photography, like music, must be born in the unmanifest world of spirit.

Paul Caponigro

#41. A photograph is just a little, teeny-weeny, small piece of life. I feel like I see so much more than what I can actually get.

Annie Leibovitz

#42. The one thing that seems to be consistent through all my work that I like, and I experimented a lot, is the viewer is allowed to meditate on something that normally we don't stop and stare at, whether it's people or a cactus.

Richard Misrach

#43. [Love] can be found in making little dresses for stuffed birds, or in a garden of tenderness like I have done - mixing writing, photography, and real spaces. There are all kinds of acts of love.

Annette Messager

#44. But I always liked the fact that you get these totally unacceptable images, but they're taken by a really expensive photographer, with great light, and in terms of the quality of the photograph it's a great photograph, but in terms of imagery it's unacceptable, and I like that contradiction.

Damien Hirst

#45. I am inspired by great food, theater, books, the beach, black-and-white photography, and great vocalists, like Dianne Reeves, Alice Smith, and Shirley Horn. I am inspired by my mentor Diana Castle, who is guiding me towards a truth and honesty in my life and work that I have always longed for.

Erica Tazel

#46. Photography of any living being, according to Taliban rule, was illegal. So when I went to Afghanistan, immediately I was worried about photographing people. But it was what I wanted: to show what life was like under the Taliban, specifically for women.

Lynsey Addario

#47. There's no great mystique to photography. A lot of photographers like to put their hands up to their forehead and tell you how they've suffered and so forth. Well, I just rent a car and drive to the place and take the pictures.

Elliott Erwitt

#48. I like to think I keep my mind open. When I walk the streets I don't look for anything in particular. I come from a philosophy that believes you shouldn't have preconceived notions - that you don't need a gimmick. That you should just photograph what you react to - what you see.

Elliott Erwitt

#49. Photography is like life What does it all mean? I don't know - but you get an impression, a feeling. An impression of walking through the street, walking through the park, walking through life. I'm very suspicious of people who say they know what it means.

Leonard Freed

#50. I love this life. I feel like I am always catching my breath and saying, 'Oh! Will you look at that?' Photography has been my way of bearing witness to the joy I find in seeing the extraordinary in ordinary life. You don't look for pictures. Your pictures are looking for you.

Harold Feinstein

#51. A photo is like a map, a way of giving me a foot into a kind of reality I want ... I'm not trying to make paintings look like photos. I want to make paintings using photos as a reference, the way painters did when photography was first invented.

Peter Doig

#52. I think that it was a great advantage to go into photography not knowing much about it. Not thinking. I think one of the problems with many photographers today is that they never see for themselves, but just like everybody else ...

Robert Mapplethorpe

#53. I love all of these new products that are coming out, things like headphones with cute, catchy names. There is also so much going on with the marketing of fashion. And then, I still love the classic stuff, like great dresses and wonderful photography.

Stephanie Seymour

#54. Photography is just a medium. It's like a typewriter. Photography as an art doesn't interest me an awful lot; as a participant, though I like to look at it.

Ezra Stoller

#55. I've always been obsessed with penetrating the female psyche. When I shoot, I'm like a tornado. I never sit down, never take a break, never eat. I'm focused on getting that moment of revelation, of insight, of poignancy, of meaning.

Joyce Tenneson

#56. I did photography, painting, and drawing, but I prefer sculpture. I like it because it's very physical.

P.J. Harvey

#57. I still maintain several different outlets of artistry, like my music, photography, writing and all those things. I don't pigeonhole myself into one thing. I do all sorts of things, and that's so important to me.

Jesse Johnson

#58. I want pictures like these. The kind that can capture a moment, make it real, make it last. I need pictures that do more than reflect. I need pictures that are truth.

Lisa Mangum

#59. I'd like my coffin to be a camera obscura so I can see what's going on outside.

Bill Jay

#60. I guess I've shot about 40,000 negatives and of these I have about 800 pictures I like.

Harry Callahan

#61. I felt like I was in the best photography school in the world - I had Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn teach me.

Helena Christensen

#62. 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

#63. I have very interesting hobbies like archeology and photography.

Bill Wyman

#64. I have tried to bring about better communication between people. I believe that humanitarian photography is like economics. Economy is a kind of sociology, as is documentary photography.

Sebastiao Salgado

#65. I never shot on sets, but if I was traveling somewhere or on location, I would always have my camera, and I'd always be - it's that kind of fly on the wall approach to photography, though. I don't engage the subject. I like to sneak around, skulk about in the dark.

Jessica Lange

#66. What I like so much about photography is precisely the moment that cannot be anticipated; one must be constantly on the alert, ready to acclaim the unexpected.

Martine Franck

#67. I think this is the most exciting time in the history of photography. Technology is expanding what photographers can do, like the microscope and the telescope expanded what scientists could do.

Richard Misrach

#68. I enjoy singing, I enjoy music as much as I enjoy photography, doing filming and stuff like that. I do a lot of things to express who I am.

Nonito Donaire

#69. I have no chips on my shoulder. I like to be constructive. As I have said, I have inspired many persons to take up photography. As a matter of fact, I inspire myself. (When I take a good picture I give myself a bonus.).

Weegee

#70. When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.

Roland Barthes

#71. Most people feel that the world looks like the photograph. I've always assumed that the photograph is nearly right, but that little bit by which it misses makes it miss by a mile. This is what I grope at.

Martin Gayford

#72. It was around the age of 18 when I started to feel like I had learned everything I could learn from being a model - modeling is a really incredible form of expression, but I got into modeling because I loved fashion so much and I really loved photography.

Jaime King

#73. There are some elements of digital photography that I don't really like, such as the fact that you see the results immediately.

Anton Corbijn

#74. I don't see how a woman in documentary photography could have children. I think it's a very difficult thing to do to raise a family, and I have enormous respect for people who do it. I'd hate to do something like that and not be good at it.

Mary Ellen Mark

#75. A picture is like a prayer; you're offering a prayer to get something, and in a sense it's like a gift of God because you have practically no control-at least I don't.

Harry Callahan

#76. I enjoy fashion photography and textiles, that whole aspect of it. As more of an art form, I like Proenza Schouler. Those guys are really cool because they seem to have an interesting approach to it all.

Gia Coppola

#77. I never liked photography. Not for the sake of photography. I like the object. I like the photographs when you hold them in your hand.

Robert Mapplethorpe

#78. I like what Wallace Stevens said: "Poetry must almost successfully resist intelligence." I just change the word "poetry" to "my photographs".

Keith Carter

#79. The most prevalent way of working in photography right now is project oriented: you go after an idea. I like the old way, the intuitive approach. You follow your nose and take pictures and see what emerges. It happens after the fact.

Mark Klett

#80. I was given a small camera as a wedding gift from a very dear friend. My first pictures were taken on my honeymoon. As soon as I became familiar with the camera, I was intrigued with the possibilities of expression it offered. It was like a discovery for me.

Aaron Siskind

#81. 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

#82. Ultimately, I made my range wider because I wanted to suit each publication that I worked for. Talk about reinvention - I'm like the Madonna of photography.

Mario Testino

#83. [Photography] is always like a state of grace, like the appearance of something that I hadn't foreseen, that surprises me and stops me. If I only did what I had in mind, there would be no emotion. It would be like keeping one's eyes shut rather than open, like theorizing rather than seeing.

Sarah Moon

#84. I like capturing stuff that is disappearing - that's the point of photography. What I am photographing is an imaginary place that never existed, but is connected to something that has already been.

Tim Walker

#85. Like any corporation, I have the benefit of the brainpower of everyone who is working for me. It all ends up being my work, the corporate me, but everyone extends ideas and comes up with suggestions.

Chuck Close

#86. I drifted into photography like one drifts into prostitution. First I did it to please myself, then I did it to please my friends, and eventually I did it for the money.

Philippe Halsman

#87. I adore shooting photographs. It's like being a hunter. But some hunters are vegetarians - which is my
relationship to photography.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

#88. I don't like the discussions about whether photography is an art. Even though I think that if it would be just a craft I would not have stayed with it all my life.

Josef Sudek

#89. Making these photographs has often seemed to me like a kind of dance. Often I have danced badly and the world has fallen apart at my feet. But sometimes the dance has gone well and my subject and I have moved together as if with shared purpose.

Keith Carter

#90. Parks and gardens are the quintessential intimate landscapes. People use them all the time, leaving their energy and memories behind. It's what's left behind that I like to photograph.

Michael Kenna

#91. I try to consider each body of work on its own terms, discretely, so terms like 'sculpture' or 'photography', in their broad sense, don't really enter into my thinking.

Walead Beshty

#92. A photograph isn't necessarily a lie, but nor is it the truth. It's more of a fleeting, subjective impression. What I most like about photography is the moment that you can't anticipate: you have to be constantly watching for it, ready to welcome the unexpected.

Martine Franck

#93. I don't like explosions. I don't mind progress. But digital photography has made every man, woman, child and chimpanzee a photographer of sorts and consequently has numbed down the general quality of photographs.

Elliott Erwitt

#94. A Ming vase can be well-designed and well-made and is beautiful for that reason alone. I don't think this can be true for photography. Unless there is something a little incomplete and a little strange, it will simply look like a copy of something pretty. We won't take an interest in it.

John Loengard

#95. 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

#96. I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.

Garry Winogrand

#97. 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

#98. 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

#99. I like things that have to do with what is real, elegant, well presented and without excessive style. In other words, just fine observation.

Elliott Erwitt

#100. I am pessimistic about a picture's power to be the emissary of just one thing. What I hope is that the picture says, "Here I am, this is what I am like," and the person seeing the picture says in return, 'You know a lot but you don't know half of what I know.'

Emmet Gowin