Top 100 Photographer Quotes
#1. Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left - or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story The Adventure of a Photographer )
Italo Calvino
#2. My first modeling job in Paris, the photographer said, 'Tue es belle,' which means, 'you are pretty,' and I thought he said, 'Tu es poubelle,' which means, 'you are the trash can.' I burst into tears. He was not happy about that.
Rachel Nichols
#3. Blake and Livia were next to exit. He took the steps before she could and turned to offer her his hand, like a knight escorting his queen. Livia took Blake's hand and hugged his offered arm. Bea's photographer-nephew's flash blinded them as it captured their moment for all time.
Debra Anastasia
#4. I didn't take inspiration from other photographers, which in a way helped to find my own images.
Peter Lindbergh
#5. Ultimately success or failure in photographing people depends on the photographer's ability to understand his fellow man.
Edward Weston
#6. I consider it essential that the photographer should do his own printing and enlarging. The final effect of the finished print depends so much on these operations.
Bill Brandt
#7. Modern Art is being used to index me. Surely it was a source but photographers have influenced Modern Art quite as deeply as they have been influenced, maybe more. Anyway painters don't have a copyright on M. A. We were all born in the same upheaval.
Edward Weston
#8. Photographer shoots Sutton in close-up, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway behind his head. The expressway was built while Sutton was in prison. God what a monstrosity, Sutton says. I didn't think they could make Brooklyn uglier. I underestimated them.
J.R. Moehringer
#10. For me, the best part is people who watch the movie and tell me it inspired them to collaborate with their friend who's a photographer or filmmaker.
Feist
#11. I have always done the opposite of what I was trained to do ... Having little technical background, I became a photographer. Adopting a machine, I do my utmost to make it malfunction. For me, to make a photograph is to make an anti-photograph.
William Klein
#12. Photographers feel guilty that all they do for a living is press a button.
Andy Warhol
#13. The photographer can arrange his picture just as the painter does, only sometimes he must go about it in a different way.
Laura Gilpin
#15. 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
#16. Me and my friends had BMX magazines and skate magazines, and I was a photographer who made skate videos.
Spike Jonze
#17. Thomas Hawk is the most successful digital photographer in the world. He has taken tens of thousands of pictures, on his way to his goal of taking a million in his lifetime. The
Seth Godin
#18. Boy did he hate banks. He told me once that the Founding Fathers worried more about banks than they worried about the British. They knew that banks had been causing chaos, bringing empires to their knees, for centuries, all in the name of free enterprise. Photographer
J.R. Moehringer
#19. The influence of mystery is the greatest influence.
Paul Caponigro
#20. Mars and Venus are at it again. This time, Hephaestus is standing by with a private detective, a photographer, and a lawyer.
Mason Cooley
#21. If I had sat around and waited until I had an idea to be a successful photographer, I would still be in finance.
Brandon Stanton
#22. If I had seven lives, I'd be a photographer in every one.
Shomei Tomatsu
#23. 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
#24. I continue to be a photographer; I have enjoyed fishing and hunting with a close friend; and have owned two ranches, first in northern California and then in the state of Washington.
Douglass North
#25. The photographer is a manipulator of light; photography is a manipulation of light.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#26. A photographer cannot be inexperienced, or too mature. A photographer ought to be half-ripe.
Nobuyoshi Araki
#27. One of my basic feelings is that the mind, and the heart alike, of the photographer must be dedicated to the glory, the magic, and the mystery of light. The mystery of time, the magic of light, the enigma of reality - and their interrelationships - are my constant themes and preoccupations.
Clarence John Laughlin
#28. I'm a very, very basic photographer. The main strength of my pictures, I guess, is the mood and feel I get out of the people that I meet. But technically I don't think I'm very advanced. That never interested me.
Anton Corbijn
#29. It's important to realize that the images are everywhere, not just where you want or expect them to be.
Jay Maisel
#30. Photography isolates the world via an aperture and gives the photographer the means to see differently, to achieve a spontaneous vision that is direct and uncompromising.
Ellsworth Kelly
#31. Sometimes things need shaking up. You've got to test the limits.
Lindsey Kelk
#32. A photographer looks at everything, which is why he must look from beginning to end. Face the subject head-on, stay fixed, turn the entire body into an eye and face the world.
Shomei Tomatsu
#33. If I hadn't been a singer, I might have been a photographer or an artist. But it's singing I love. I sing all the time, and I feel really good that I've expressed myself.
Annie Lennox
#34. While primarily a photographer, I do not see or think photographically; hence the story of Indian life will not be told in microscopic detail, but rather will be presented as a broad and luminous picture.
Edward S. Curtis
#35. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Susan Sontag
#37. [Photography] underlines the photographer. That's the Barthesian this has been. Well, this has been for the photographer as well. The photographer is the hidden placeholder in the Barthesian equation.
James Welling
#38. When you're modeling you're actually acting for the camera and the photographer. It's more fun, too because there are no lines to memorize.
Cindy Margolis
#39. A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.
Richard Avedon
#40. Think like a photographer. Look at every vignette in your home like it's being shot for a shelter magazine and style accordingly.
Jonathan Adler
#41. The head of the photographer is more important than his camera
Philippe Halsman
#42. It's more important for a photographer to have very good shoes, than to have a very good camera
Sebastiao Salgado
#43. I'm a big fan of 'National Geographic', the magazine and the channel. Anything to do with the natural world. For years, when I was younger, I was convinced I would be a nature photographer, but that didn't pan out.
Tom Weston-Jones
#44. I was an amateur - I am an amateur - and I intend to stay an amateur. To me an amateur photographer is one who is in love with taking pictures, a free soul who can photograph what he likes and who likes what he photographs.
Erwin Blumenfeld
#45. When you understand how to do that dance, when the photographer says, 'Hold it, do it,' and you know you're getting it right, oh, the fun. It is fun.
Carmen Dell'Orefice
#47. I've been a photographer all these years ... I haven't been in my own darkroom for 10 years.
Graham Nash
#48. Many claim I am a photographer of tragedy. In the greater sense I am not, for though I often photograph where the tragic emotion is present, the result is almost invariably affirmative.
W. Eugene Smith
#49. You must be open to what otherwise may seem to be a detriment to your 'plans'.
Jay Maisel
#50. The good photographer will produce a competent picture every time whatever his subject. But only when his subject makes and immediate and direct appeal to his own interests will he produce a work of distinction.
Bill Brandt
#51. And remember whatever discipline you're in, whether you're a musician or a photographer, fine artist or a cartoonist, writer, a dancer, a singer, a designer... whatever you do, you have a thing that's unique. You have the ability to make art.
Neil Gaiman
#52. The function of the photographer is to help people understand the world around them.
Sid Grossman
#53. Even though the industry is very big and there's lots of money, when it gets down to it, whether it's a photographer or a designer, as well as a stylist or makeup artist, you're really only working with maybe four or five people on a project. It's all quite small and intimate.
Guido Palau
#54. I'm very lucky that I've worked mainly with two amazing photographers in David Sims and Steven Meisel.
Guido Palau
#55. One of the most important pieces of equipment, for the photographer who really wants to improve, is a great big wastepaper basket.
Ansel Adams
#56. Twitter makes you a comedian in the same way that digital cameras make you a photographer
Ken Jennings
#57. I never thought of being a performer, never thought of being a singer, never thought of being a photographer. It's just the trajectory of my work. I go to the medium that serves the vision.
Patti Smith
#58. But I did go back and soon I realized why. I was in love
Lindsey Kelk
#60. Especially when you are advertising a product, I talk to the photographer and we create a character - it always gives you more freedom because it makes it less about yourself.
Penelope Cruz
#61. What you need to be a good photographer is an overwhelming curiosity and a good digestion. Sometimes you feel blessed with curiosity, sometimes you feel cursed with it.
Eve Arnold
#62. The truth is that one is more frequently blessed with ideas while working.
Jerry Uelsmann
#63. Teachers don't work in the summer, and photographers don't shoot in in the middle of the day.
John Loengard
#64. A lot of what I am looking for is a moment of astonishment, he says. Those moments of pure consciousness when you involuntarily inhale and say 'Wow!'
Joel Meyerowitz
#65. We feel more emotion ... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history.
Chris Marker
#66. I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are.
Ellen Von Unwerth
#68. If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.
James Whistler
#69. The aim and end of the artist is not truth exactly, much less fact; it is effect ... There is no doubt he [the photographer] best gets his effect by way of truth, but he uses it as he would a servant, not a master.
Henry Peach Robinson
#70. To be a good hairdresser, you have to understand what the vision is of the designer or the photographer and then sort of add your thing.
Guido Palau
#71. It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.
David Bailey
#72. A photographer is a photographer and an artist is an artist. I don't believe in labels or titles. Why should a painter or sculptor who has probably never challenged the rules be an artist just because his title and an art school education automatically make him one.
Peter Lindbergh
#74. If you're an actor, you're at the mercy of a script. You've got far more control if you're the photographer.
Kathryn Prescott
#75. 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
#76. Everyone with a cell phone thinks they're a photographer. Everyone with a laptop thinks they're a journalist. But they have no training, and they have no idea of what we keep to in terms of standards, as in what's far out and what's reality. And they have no dedication to truth.
Helen Thomas
#77. My dad was actually against me being a photographer. He thought it was a dead-end job and that you end up doing baby pictures and weddings.
Rick Smolan
#78. I've been a documentary photographer for much longer than I have been a filmmaker.
Lauren Greenfield
#79. Just because I use the photographic medium, that doesn't mean I'm a photographer.
Nikki S. Lee
#80. Don't overthink things in front of you. I fit moves you, shoot it. If it's fun, shoot it. If you've never seen it before, shoot it.
Jay Maisel
#81. If the photographer is not a discoverer, then he is not an artist.
Paul Strand
#82. In conclusion, the idea of direction on the part of the photographer has its greatest value when its processes are least discernible to the spectator.
Arthur Rothstein
#83. I admired a tremendous number of photographers, but for some reason I arrived at a point of view of my own.
Saul Leiter
#84. The journalistic photographer can have no other than a personal approach; and it is impossible for him to be completely objective. Honest - yes. Objective - no.
W. Eugene Smith
#85. 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
#86. Some presentation authors justify this by saying, "The photographer already knew it was going to be an uncredited effort and it really isn't that hard to take a good photograph.
Neal Ford
#87. The only thing we photographers really want more than life, more than sex, more than anything, is to be invisible.
Philip Jones Griffiths
#88. One impulse of photography, as immediate as its impulse to extend the visible, is to theatricalize its subjects. The photographer's command, Watch the birdie! is essentially a stage direction.
Stanley Cavell
#89. 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
#90. When I was working with Robert Frank, he told me that there was absolutely no relationship between cinema and photography. I challenge that. Surely what you know as a photographer must impact how you set up your shots.
Ralph Gibson
#91. My name is Weegee. I'm the world's greatest photographer ...
Weegee
#92. We have always wanted to find the 'it-ness' of anything we shoot. We want to get as deep into the subject as we can.
Jay Maisel
#93. For a photographer, it's a necessity that you can shoot stuff magically. Accidents are necessary, but after I take the photograph, it's not over. I work on it more.
Rinko Kawauchi
#94. Obviously, we can see what was in front of the camera, but if a photograph is honestly made, it's a bit of a self-portrait. I think it's impossible for a photographer who is working honestly to keep this from happening.
John Sexton
#95. I enjoy very much seeing a good photographer working. There's an elegance, just like in a bullfight.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#96. Photographer Man Ray, for example, is a compelling suspect given that the posing of Ms. Short's body appeared to mimic the Minotaur, one of his better-known photographs.
David McGowan
#97. I was there less than a year before I was assigned to the Paris bureau. I spent two years there and, in fact, before I even went on the staff I was sent to Europe to do assignments which they wouldn't normally do for a young photographer just starting out.
Gordon Parks
#98. As a photographer you have to do things you don't want to.
Massimo Vitali
#99. You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn't waste either.
Galen Rowell
#100. The art is in selecting what is worthwhile to take the trouble about ...
Berenice Abbott
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