Top 66 Own Photography Quotes
#1. If you are bored with your own photography you are really bored with what you are photographing, so pick a new subject about which you are knowledgeable and enthusiastic.
Bill Jay
#2. Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other peoples pictures too - photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community.
Robert Adams
#3. Now, at a moment when photography is so pervasive that it's been forced to grapple with its own identity and look inward, it feels like a natural moment for painting to look out, to reclaim that directive of picturing America.
Cynthia Daignault
#4. Photography is thus brought within reach of every human being who desires to preserve a record of what he sees ... and enables the fortunate possessor to go back by the light of his own fireside to scenes which would otherwise fade from memory and be lost.
George Eastman
#5. "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
#7. I studied photography at Bard, but I just felt tired of it. Someone asked me to be in a video but didn't want to be in it, so they told me to make my own, and that seemed more fun to me.
Gia Coppola
#8. Photography belongs to a fraternity of its own. I was young and enthusiastic and wanted to take good pictures to show the other photographers. That, and the professional pride of convincing an editor that I was the man to go somewhere, were the most important things to me.
Don McCullin
#9. I made a decision that to me, photography had to be something that I could feel. I could feel in my stomach. I could not take pictures that were not connected to my own inner life.
Jacob Aue Sobol
#10. One eye of the photographer looks wide open through the viewfinder, the other, the closed looks into his own soul.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#11. What I find most satisfying about photography is the way in which it allows me to document 'reality' while at the same time creating my own version thereof; in other words, the reality I present is a reality based upon what I choose to include in the frame and what I choose to leave out.
Alix Smith
#12. A self-help story about a man who overcomes circumstance by reminiscing over his own life's lessons. Inspired, he sets out at night on the gritty streets of New York City to capture the beauty of life thru his passion for photography.
Amazon
#13. The key to artistic photography is to work out your own thoughts, by yourselves. Imitation leads to certain disaster. New ideas are always antagonized. Do not mind that. If a thing is good it will survive.
Gertrude Kasebier
#14. The only nature I'm interested in is my own nature.
Aaron Siskind
#15. 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
#16. Not only did she [Marilyn Monroe] master her own image, create it and ultimately control it, she was the subject of many of the great masters of photography of the 20th century.
Gail Levin
#17. When a person looks at a photograph you've taken, they will always think of themselves, their own life experience. They will relate your photograph to their memories. That interplay is where a picture comes alive and grows into something. They function like invitations.
Jason Fulford
#18. The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.
Alfred Stieglitz
#19. A photographer must always work with the greatest respect for his subject and in terms of his own point of view.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#20. What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's ... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own.
Diane Arbus
#21. There are things I back off from trying to talk about, you know. Particularly my own work. Also, there may be things better left unsaid. At times I'd much rather talk about other (people's) work.
Garry Winogrand
#22. 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
#23. Photography is an art which touches and grips one's own heart's blood.
Edvard Munch
#24. Photography, for me, is something I can control fully. It's wholly my own expressions.
Mia Wasikowska
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. I'm paid to be lucky and that means making your own luck - getting yourself in the right position, in front of the right subject at the right time, and in the right light.
Michael Yamashita
#29. Visual ideas combined with technology combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold it's own; if it doesn't, the thing collapses.
Arnold Newman
#30. 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
#31. Photography, like any other art, is a form of communication. The artist is not blowing bubbles for his own gratification, but is speaking a language, is telling somebody something.
William Mortensen
#32. The development of a love of medium and a responsibility for one's own pictures is an overall goal.
Minor White
#33. In stamping photography with the patent of realism, society does nothing but confirm itself in the tautological certainty that an image of reality that conforms to its own representation of objectivity is truly objective.
Pierre Bourdieu
#34. Many pictures turn out to be limp translations of the known world instead of vital objects which create an intrinsic world of their own. There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.
Robert Heinecken
#35. You know, I really don't think you learn from teachers. You learn from work. I think what you learn, really, is how to be- you have to be your own toughest critic, and you only learn that from work, from seeing work.
Garry Winogrand
#36. Their intensive 1 -day nature photography instructional seminars. Both love to teach others how to make their own fine photographs.
Anonymous
#37. Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.
Will Self
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. When photographers get beyond copying the achievements of others, or just repeating their own accidental first successes, they learn that they do not know where in the world they will find pictures. Nobody does. Each photograph that works is a revelation to its supposed creator.
Robert Adams
#42. Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.
Arnold Newman
#43. 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
#44. How cool is it to go into your own backyard, talk directly to the spirit of your own loved one and request a response from them in the form of a spirit photograph.
Robyn L. Reynolds
#45. Let the subject generate its own photographs. Become a camera.
Minor White
#46. Photography is the mirror, more faithful than any actual mirror, in which we witness at every age, our own aging. The actual mirror accompanies us through time, thoughtfully and treacherously; it changes with us, so that we appear not to change.
Christian Metz
#47. Art is nothing more than creating an emotion in your own form.
Shannon L. Alder
#48. ( ... ) 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
#49. Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.
Edward Abbey
#50. 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
#52. I don't think there's any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.
Imogen Cunningham
#53. I don't like captions. I prefer people to look at my pictures and invent their own stories.
Josef Koudelka
#54. Photography is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It's a way of life.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#55. You only do exercises in art school. That's not the real thing. A little bit tells you so much. You have to find your own self. And you don't know what you are! But that's what you have to search for.
Harry Callahan
#56. As a good picture would come, I would never know exactly what I had done. When you did see it, it would strike you as a great surprise - who did that? How did it happen? Being surprised by your own work makes you both less serious and have serious reverence.
Emmet Gowin
#57. It cannot be too plainly stated that it is quite unimportant whether photography produces 'art' or not. Its own basic laws, not the opinions of art critics, will provide the only valid measure of its future worth.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#58. I accept that all photography is voyeuristic and exploitative, and obviously I live with my own guilt and conscience. It's part of the test and I don't have a problem with it.
Martin Parr
#59. While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.
Dorothea Lange
#60. Photography itself is most frequently nothing but the reproduction of the image that a group produces of its own integration.
Pierre Bourdieu
#61. [photography] ... wanted to understand, to master for myself, all the processes involved, and to manipulate them in my own way.
Oliver Sacks
#62. However, I must stress that my own interest is immediate and in the picture. What I am conscious of and what I feel is the picture I am making, the relation of that picture to others I have made and, more generally, its relation to others I have experienced.
Aaron Siskind
#63. If I have caught myself struggling to remember, it was, if not a pretense, at least premature, in that I only ever used photography for my own pleasure - even if I then bewailed the vanished pleasure which my pictures brought back to me.
Jeanloup Sieff
#64. Do not settle for easy. Do not settle for that first image. Craft it, work it, and make something more out of it. And finally, don't forget that the biggest joy in photography is making pictures of those things in your own life.
David Burnett
#65. 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
#66. I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.
Ben Shahn
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