On Photography Quotes

#1. The French have a different take on photography than Americans do. They consider photography to be absolutely parallel to literature. That often makes for a deeper perception of the work.

Ralph Gibson

#2. Magazines that depend on photography, and design, and long reads, and quality stuff, are going to do just fine despite the Internet and cable news.

Jann Wenner

#3. The greatest statesmen, philosophers, humanitarians ... have not been able to put an end to war. Why place that demand on photography?

James Nachtwey

#4. Working on photography is working on oneself.

Irving Penn

#5. The over-reliance on photography holds so many artists back.

Jacob Collins

#6. I started out on photography accidentally. A policeman came to a stop at the end of my street, and a guy knifed him at the end of my street. That's how I became a photographer. I photographed the gangs that I went to school with.

Don McCullin

#7. When we concentrate on photography, we make it possible to see the walls of photographs in black homes as a critical intervention, a disruption of white control over black images.

Bell Hooks

#8. Photograph because you love doing it, because you absolutely have to do it, because the chief reward is going to be the process of doing it. Other rewards - recognition, financial remuneration - come to so few and are so fleeting ... Take photography on as a passion, not a career.

Alex Webb

#9. It's good to be around people who see [photography] as a reasonable enterprise when everyone in the neighborhood may think it's ridiculous. (On the benefit of teaching photography)

John Divola

#10. It seems so utterly naive that landscape - not that of the pictorial school - is not considered of "social significance" when it has a far more important bearing on the human race of a given locale than excrescences called cities.

Edward Weston

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. I usually befriend the camera department very early on in the film and drive them nuts. I'm constantly bombarding them with questions and going through the stills photography. A film set is a great place for me and I love it.

Eric Bana

#15. 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

#16. Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.

Franz Kafka

#17. For me photography was the means to the end, but they made it the most important thing. (On the discovery of X-ray photography.)

Wilhelm Rontgen

#18. 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.

#19. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each to himself. And that is the most complicated thing on earth.

Edward Steichen

#20. 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

#21. I worked a little as a messenger on a bicycle and then decided to study photography and film.

Ori Gersht

#22. 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

#23. Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

#24. Photography is a demanding action sport. The light can change so quickly. I often find myself sprinting so that I can catch the perfect light falling on a photogenic subject.

Steven Pinker

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. Photography has clarity in the same way that language has. A word is precise, but its meaning can change based on the words around it: think tank, tank top.

Jason Fulford

#29. ( ... ) 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

#30. Most of the information we now get is through television and is mutilated. Photography offers the opportunity to spend much more time on a topic. It's relatively cheaper medium, and can allow a photographer really to live in another place, show another reality, get closer to the truth.

Sebastiao Salgado

#31. Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

Susan Sontag

#32. 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

#33. I am trying to make some kind of connection to what is going on in the world, to make some sort of contact. And I use the instruments that our modern world offers, these extraordinary instruments of photography and film and computers.

Leon Golub

#34. Of course [photography] cannot create, nor express all we want to express. But it can be a witness of our passage on earth, like a notebook.

Mario Giacomelli

#35. Photography Cannot Record Abstract Ideas (Title of a 16x20 inch photograph depicting an index card on which that phrase is handwritten.)

Mel Bochner

#36. 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

#37. I love photography. Photographers and photos. I took a ton of pictures in Paris, and I find that I'm most inspired by following other photographers on Instagram.

Abigail Spencer

#38. For me, going back to itinerant landscape painting, it's not about returning to an older method, but about building on what happened in the 20th century in photography. And also highlighting what the differences are between a painting and a photograph in picturing space.

Cynthia Daignault

#39. I've always thought photography is not so much of an art form but a way of communicating and passing on information.

Don McCullin

#40. But slowly I began to use cameras and then think about what it was that was going on. It took me a long time, I mean I actually played with cameras and photography for about 20 years.

David Hockney

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

Edward Steichen

#45. What makes [photography] obscene is its terrible cruelty. Happiness may be fleeting, but it's the reason we go on living. Photography is the joy that precedes pain, the moment of life just before death.

Nobuyoshi Araki

#46. Don' t focus on NEW - focus on authent ic. Being or iginal isn' t being new - i t 's being
you.

Scott Bourne

#47. I had my young eyes opened by the impersonal blood and guts of news photography. I was running the gamut every low man on the totem pole runs - country clubs to mass murder.

Burk Uzzle

#48. 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

#49. To me, the main and most exciting thing about photography is to meet people. The picture is the result of what happened between me and them on the set.

Francesco Carrozzini

#50. Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze.

Alfred Stieglitz

#51. You can always tell the quality of an author by their cover picture. Bad writers bear an idiotic smile on the inside flap. Great writers take up the entire back cover looking slightly mad, sad, or bored. The very best writers, though, had the superior ability to die before photography was invented.

Bauvard

#52. I'm not interested into victim photography. Photographing people suffering and putting it on a museum wall is too weird.

Richard Misrach

#53. An unnoticed corner of the world suddenly becomes noticed, and when you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it becomes sacred. (On Robert Frank's photography)

Allen Ginsberg

#54. I am always surprised when I see several cameras, a gaggle on lenses, filters, meters, et cetera, rattling around in a soft bag with a complement of refuse and dust. Sometimes the professional is the worst offender!

Ansel Adams

#55. I know the best moments can never be captured on film, even as I spend nearly half my life trying to do just that.

Rosie O'Donnell

#56. I've always wanted to be aware of what's going on around me, and I've wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time.

Paul Strand

#57. Maybe that's why I love photography, which is, when you think about it, the ability to sinfke out a detail and focus on it.

Emily O'Beirne

#58. I love writing and photography and the natural world that inspires them both. I'm working on getting as lost as I can in the beauty before it is completely wiped clean by the madness of man.

Jason Reeves

#59. It's equally hard and labor intensive to create an image on the computer as it is in a darkroom. Believe me.

Jerry Uelsmann

#60. The photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what's going on and what's happening outside.

Andy Goldsworthy

#61. 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

#62. I think when you practice photography or observation, you're on high alert. You polish up your antenna and stick up your head, and you're out there. You're receptive, appreciative of details. It heightens reality. You're trying to step into your alertness.

Debra Granik

#63. The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.

Diane Arbus

#64. 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

#65. The photogram, image formation outside the camera is the real key to photography,it embodies the essence ... that allows us to capture light on light sensitive material without the use of any camera.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

#66. Why are all the artists so dead-set on distorting? It seems to be a reaction against photography, but I'm not sure.

Marcel Duchamp

#67. Photographs deceive time, freezing it on a piece of cardboard where the soul is silent.

Isabel Allende

#68. Just put on the lens and go.

Miroslav Tichy

#69. The only other white people we saw during the three days we stayed there were a German couple intent on taking pictures of their stuffed sheep in a variety of locations around the world.

Tynan

#70. 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

#71. It was the era of photography. This may have influenced us, and played a part in our reaction against anything resembling a snapshot of life. (On the year 1905)

Andre Derain

#72. Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever ... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.

Aaron Siskind

#73. In the time between records, I always have lots of stuff going on. I shoot photography, make little sculptures, play video games.

Adam Jones

#74. I seldom think when I take a picture. My eyes and fingers react - click. But first, it's most important to decide on the angle at which your photograph is to be taken.

Alfred Eisenstaedt

#75. Am I in the picture? Am I getting in or out of it? I could be a ghost, an animal or a dead body, not just this girl standing on the corner ... ?

Francesca Woodman

#76. With a painting, you're taking basic building blocks and making something that's more complex than what you started with. It is a synthetic process. A photograph does the opposite: It takes the world, and puts an order on it, simplifies it.

Stephen Shore

#77. I think when you look at architectural photography it doesn't help to have piles of old clothes lying on the floor. Architectural photography sets up an artifice.

Annabelle Selldorf

#78. The ambition of instantaneous photography ... was that of preserving the spontaneity of action and avoiding any indication that the presence of the picture taker had a modifying influence on what was going on.

Rudolf Arnheim

#79. I wanted to be a scientist. I did a thesis on lions. But I realised photography can show things writing can't. Lions were my professor of photography.

Yann Arthus-Bertrand

#80. Great photography comes about at the right time but it also needs the right cut that enhances that precise moment ... Photography must feed on both contents and form, if it gives up the one for the other it is not going to last.

Augusto De Luca

#81. It is important to understand what are you trying to capture with a camera. What you want to use this tool for. It helps to begin to search for and concentrate on thematic photography.

Leonard Nimoy

#82. The hardest part is setting the camera on the tripod, or making the decision to bring the camera out of the car, or just raising the camera to your face, believing, by those actions, that whatever you find before you, whatever you find there, is going to be good.

Sally Mann

#83. 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

#84. And the revelation was a little like what saints receive on mountains - a further chapter in the history of the mystery.

Diane Arbus

#85. Everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations, so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings ... To capture some of this - I suppose that's lyricism.

Josef Sudek

#86. Ever since the 1860s when photographers travelled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment.

Galen Rowell

#87. A reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment. Everything in a novel is explicitly chosen, whereas some of what a film captures feels incidental, according to the vagaries of photography and sound recording.

Jonathan Lethem

#88. It is very hard to say where you're going until you get there. That kind of thing is based very much on instinct. As a photographer, one of the most important lessons I have learnt is that you have to learn to listen to and trust your own instinct. It has helped to guide me - this far at least.

James Nachtwey

#89. True photographs tend to remain on the streets, the story almost about to enter the edge of the frame of the snapshot or the shutter closing a moment too late, the story having just abandoned the frame.

Doug Rice

#90. I've never been on safari because I've got a phobia of bugs. I just don't want things crawling on me when I'm sleeping. It's a shame given my passion for big cats. But I really enjoy photography, so I'd love to photograph leopards in the wild some day.

Jackie Collins

#91. What you see is real - but only on the particular level to which you've developed your sense of seeing. You can expand your reality by developing new ways of perceiving.

Wynn Bullock

#92. I'm not satirical in a traditional way. What I do is more about creating caricatures and cartoons. I am commentating on the nature of how we live through photography, and how you can twist an angle to create a different perception of a person.

Alison Jackson

#93. For the artist who practises photography, capturing the image is learning how to sketch on some medium, but is only half the challenge; learning how to print is applying a subjective pallet to that sketch, and completes the creative process.

David Travis

#94. The basic material of photographs is not intrinsically beautiful. It's not like ivory or tapestry or bronze or oil on canvas. You're not supposed to look at the thing, you're supposed to look through it. It's a window.

John Szarkowski

#95. If you are intent on drawing or painting on your prints, you must first learn to draw and paint at least as well as you photograph.

Bill Jay

#96. When we take a picture, we have a negative. We put the right solution on it and, suddenly, the picture comes to life. So what do we do? We take the negative and turn it into a positive.

Madonna Ciccone

#97. The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it.

John Szarkowski

#98. Light is my inspiration, my paint and brush. It is as vital as the model herself. Profoundly significant, it caresses the essential superlative curves and lines. Light I acknowledge as the energy upon which all life on this planet depends.

Ruth Bernhard

#99. I started photography more or less by accident when I was already 27. I was taken on as an assistant by a photographer who was a friend of a friend and I very quickly understood the potential of expression in photography.

Peter Lindbergh

#100. What attracts me in photography is not so much a fine arts approach, but rather photographs as documents ... All the ways in which human beings have documented the world in an attempt to order it, in an attempt to consume it or rule it or hang on to it in some sense.

Zoe Leonard