Top 100 My Photography Quotes
#1. I began photographing in 1946. Before that, I was a painter and drawer, with my mother and father's support. They were a bit pissed when I went into photography. They thought photographers were guys who took pictures at weddings.
Harold Feinstein
#2. Did I express my personality? I think that's quite unimportant because it's not people's selves but what they have to say about life that's important.
Paul Strand
#3. My focus is anything that allows me to express myself. Rap, dance, photography. Those are my forms of expression.
Keith Stanfield
#4. And if a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it's as though I've neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up. I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.
Richard Avedon
#5. 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
#6. The thing that was most interesting to me was getting my first prints back from the printer and realizing photography doesn't end with the click of a button, it starts there. Printing is so exciting.
Bryan Adams
#7. My father was a psycho-analyst and I think that fact was very influential on my development as an artist. Trying to search beneath the surface of things for an unexpected sense of mystery.
Gregory Crewdson
#8. If acting doesn't work out, I plan to do food photography and just eat my way through the entire world. I'm a big foodie, and if I could make some career out of it, that would be fantastic.
Jamie Chung
#9. I'm designing a seductive frame to attract an audience to a subject they would otherwise ignore. And that's what I do in all of my photography - give a stage to things that wouldn't normally receive that stage.
Taryn Simon
#10. What inspires me still: travel, art, photography, my kids, the places I haven't been to yet.
Jillian Barberie
#13. I don't know if I can articulate how I feel. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would make it here.
Keith Carter
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Photography, to me, is the dewdrop that reflects my inner and outer worlds simultaneously.
Raghubir Singh
#17. Now Ben Folds is my photography older brother. He was kind enough to give me a photo of his for my 40th birthday.
Jason Sudeikis
#18. One of my passions is photography. I always carry a camera in my bag whenever I travel. I always take pictures wherever I go, and some of them end up being really crazy ones.
Sunidhi Chauhan
#20. To me, photography was a completely new medium, and I did not ... feel the urge to transfer to it my ideas about painting.
John Gutmann
#21. 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
#22. 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
#24. Oh my goodness gracious, what you can buy off the Internet in terms of overhead photography. A trained ape can know an awful lot of what is going on in this world, just by punching on his mouse, for a relatively modest cost.
Donald Rumsfeld
#25. Without my photography life would be boring. Photography adds an extra dimension to my life. Somehow it confirms my place in the world
Rennie Ellis
#26. Although I get a lot of ideas from things that have happened in my life, I see the final product as a place where my imagination meets my experience. What I love about photography is that nothing is really as it seems.
Laurel Nakadate
#27. When I worked as a music and fashion photographer, I always had the nagging feeling that there was something missing, that I wasn't using my skills productively. I gave up photography - I walked away from it completely - and started doing care work.
Giles Duley
#28. When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.
Aleksandar Hemon
#29. My photography has really always been about what I feel I'm getting out of it. What people on the outside get doesn't concern me.
Ari Marcopoulos
#30. In the beginning of my photography I controlled everything: rearranging the room, lighting it, and telling people what to do and where to put their hands. By the last project, I was basically totally at the mercy of serendipity.
Philip-Lorca DiCorcia
#31. 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
#32. As I progressed further with my project, it became obvious that it was really unimportant where I chose to photograph. The particular place simply provided an excuse to produce work ... you can only see what you are ready to see - what mirrors your mind at that particular time.
George A Tice
#33. The most important part of fashion photography, for me, is not the models; it's not the clothes. It's that you are responsible for defining what a woman today is. That, I think, is my job.
Peter Lindbergh
#34. I'm really into my photography and am trying to catch up with digital generation - I was used to the old 35mm cameras.
David Suchet
#35. 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
#36. The beauty of women was the first expression of my photography.
Alberto Korda
#37. My way of photographing is my way of life. I photograph from my experience, my way of seeing things ...
Sebastiao Salgado
#38. Photography is my one recreation and I think it should be done well.
Lewis Carroll
#39. When I say that a good picture has surprise quality or shock appeal, I do not mean that it is a loud or vulgar picture but, instead, that it stimulates my thinking and intrigues me.
Alexey Brodovitch
#40. 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
#42. My work is my language and I don't discuss it very easily. It's difficult for me to verbalize my feelings, or to intellectualize my work. In fact, it used to annoy me when Ansel Adams and Paul Strand yak-yak-yakked about what photography meant, and I told them so.
Brett Weston
#43. Filmmaking became a possible way for me to combine my interest in photography and in gathering stories, as well as my interest in journalism and political science and international relations.
Joshua Marston
#44. I could ramble on forever, I just love photography. It's my passion, it drives my family crazy. I live it and breathe it.
Russell James
#45. I was a dog groomer. I delivered radiators; I was a photography producer. I typed classified ads for many years. It was my longest term job - years of typing classified ads while I was in bands.
Janet Weiss
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. When gifts are given to me through my camera, I accept them graciously.
Minor White
#49. I wasn't imposing my presence on anyone, which is very important for a would- be journalist. I stayed back. Always let people be themselves.
Elliott Erwitt
#50. Born Berlin 1931, Germany, father a British diplomat, mother an American artist. Educated at various schools all over the world. 1958 Settled down to live in London. 1966 Became interested in photography through photographing my young children. No formal training.
Fay Godwin
#51. Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like.
Robert Rauschenberg
#52. His Holiness [the Dalai Lama] has told me, urgently and repeatedly, that he thinks my photographs are crap. His exact words were, 'These photos are of poor quality. Why is there no sharp focus? There is no clarity!' I said, 'But your Holiness, it's Goyaesque.' And he said, 'No! It's out of focus!'
Richard Gere
#53. I did take my camera along, as I felt there wouldn't be enough time to draw the things I wanted to do. I did some drawing and did a lot of photography but I was not part of Stryker's outfit at all.
Ben Shahn
#54. I don't think science is necessarily incompatible with mystical or spiritual sensibilities. I often weigh them equally in my thinking, which sometimes finds itself into the work.
Keith Carter
#55. I was always in front of the camera. My mom was really passionate about photography - I have pictures of my whole life. I've always just been in front of my mom's camera, and it's always comfortable to me.
Gigi Hadid
#56. My aim in photography is always to convey a mood and not to impart local information. This is not an easy matter, for the camera if left to its own devices will simply impart local information to the exclusiveness of everything else.
Alvin Langdon Coburn
#57. I just picked up a camera without any kind of ambition to be good or bad. And especially without any ambition to make a living ... My whole freedom working in photography comes because I say to myself, Let's see what is going on in this world. Let's find out. How do these people look?
Lisette Model
#58. A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.
Annie Leibovitz
#59. 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
#60. On many days my primary artistic struggle is, in fact, photography because it is harder to do good work with that. I see myself as an observer of the world who has a strong drive to testify, which I can do because I have the privilege of living in New York with enough food to eat and shelter.
Teju Cole
#61. 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
#62. The idea that any photography can't be personal is madness! I see something; it goes through my eye, brain, heart, guts; I choose the subject. What could be more personal than that?
Cornell Capa
#63. 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
#64. My passion is to open people's eyes to the sea using the power of photography as a universal language to convince the unconvinced among us that the oceans are fragile and finite.
David Doubilet
#65. I never tried to revolutionise photography; I just do what I do and keep my fingers crossed that people will like it.
David Bailey
#66. The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope. This is not to say that he is unconcerned with the truth.
Robert Adams
#67. 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
#68. You've gotta taste the light, like my friend and fellow shooter Chip Maury says. And when you see light like this, trust me, it's like a strawberry sundae with sprinkles.
Joe McNally
#69. 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
#70. When I came home, I was asked to put my pictures in a photo exhibit at the Cinematography College ... my pictures won first prize. I began to ask myself what I was doing, and why. A few months after the exhibit, I dropped out of college, left my wife and began to write this book.
Vladislav Tamarov
#71. Poetry at least in my own life, is really about your own mortality. Everything in poetry makes me think of my mortality. It is not a dark thing in life; it prepares you for the graceful things that happen in your life. It gives me a license to make any kind of picture I want with great courage.
Keith Carter
#72. I wanted [my photography] to appear as though the camera was seeing by itself.
Lewis Baltz
#73. 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
#74. Beware of color theories. Theories in color photography are dangerous. The plain fact that there are so many of them proves my point.
Ernst Haas
#75. My enthusiasm for joining the New York Film Academy is predicated on my personal explorations into video as well as a sense of responsibility to share my extended experience of photography with committed students in both mediums.
Ralph Gibson
#76. 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
#77. I don't go out looking for pictures. I go out, and if something catches my eye, that's reason enough to photograph it.
Henry Wessel Jr.
#78. My friend who I went to boarding school with was interested in photography. He insisted that I buy a camera and marched me downtown.
William Eggleston
#79. It pleases me to take amateur photographs of my garden, and it pleases my garden to make my photographs look professional.
Robert Breault
#80. My photography is very European. In America, I always get the sense that people are comforted by understanding what they're looking at. Photography's quite clear here [in the U.S.], it's very well-explained. My photography's perhaps not as well-explained.
Anton Corbijn
#81. When you're shy, a camera becomes an entry into life. It was a kind of shield I could hide my shyness behind, and it allowed me to become an active observer rather than a passive one.
Lynn Johnston
#82. There are an awful lot of people in the world and it's going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them ... It was my teacher Lisette Model who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it will be.
Diane Arbus
#83. [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
#84. My theory of composition? Simple: do not release the shutter until everything in the viewfinder feels just right.
Ernst Haas
#85. 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
#86. I hope my work isn't dismissed by the critics as illustration or photography.
E. J. Hughes
#87. I see my finished platinum print (in the viewfinder) in all its desired qualities, before my exposure.
Edward Weston
#88. I don't speak emotionally about my pictures. That's for other people to do. I will say that I love my photographs. That's what keeps me going.
George A Tice
#89. My blog is actually all self-photography unless it's a photo shoot.
Solange Knowles
#90. My taking pictures means I'm taking a series of pictures which become an essay and then get extended into a book. That's what's exciting, to take an idea and work it through to completion.
George A Tice
#91. My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.
Steve McCurry
#92. 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
#93. I loved photography but was frustrated by the limitations of cameras. When trying to take a picture of a friend's young, active daughter using my DSLR, it was impossible to capture the fleeting moments.
Ren Ng
#94. Photography is, by its nature, exploitative. It's whether you use this process with a sense of responsibility or not. I feel that I do so. My conscience is clear.
Martin Parr
#95. I believe in the relation between photography and music; And thats my inspiration.
Man Ray
#96. 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
#97. Poetry is my first love. Photography often fails to look into things. It looks at things. Poetry is so much more truthful.
Larry Towell
#98. "I've always been a proponent of "if you're going to do something, do it right." I applied that across all aspects of my shooting - planning, setting up shoots, getting up early, working with athletes and models, working with clients etc. Just being a pro about it."
Jimmy Chin
#99. I always said it kept me alive - photography - because it did. It was my catharsis.
Bruce Gilden
#100. No, I don't work here, I'm taking pictures of messy bathrooms for a photo essay on the American West. But I'm always up for clean, so if you want to pitch in, I've got Pine Sol and a sponge in my car ... It's that VW microbus parked next to the dumpster, and you don't need a key, just pull hard.
Pansy Schneider-Horst
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