Top 100 Photographer Quotes
#1. When the British-Malaysian photographer Ian Teh first worked in China, more than a decade ago, he rendered it as a nation of people in Technicolor.
Evan Osnos
#2. I've never not been sure that I was a photographer any more than you would not be sure you were yourself. I was a photographer, or wanting to be a photographer, or beginning - but some phase of photographer I've always been.
Dorothea Lange
#3. The most important thing you learn as a sports photographer is anticipation - not where the action is taking place, but where it's going to take place. Not where the subject is now, but where they're going to be.
Lawrence Schiller
#4. The German ueber-photographer Andreas Gursky was the perfect pre-9/11 artist.
Jerry Saltz
#5. The photographer, even in fashion and portraiture, has to have a standpoint. It's important to know what you stand for, no? Most people just take pictures, but they stand for nothing. They follow trends and don't know why.
Peter Lindbergh
#6. I do what I feel, that's all. I am an ordinary photographer working for his own pleasure. That's all I've ever done.
Andre Kertesz
#7. My family was very unhappy about my becoming a photographer - profoundly and deeply unhappy.
Saul Leiter
#8. 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
#9. The reason I did fashion was it was the only way to get paid to do anything creative. You couldn't support yourself as an 'artist' - I hate that word. The only way you could be 'arty' was as a fashion photographer, because it still had a certain amount of integrity involved.
David Bailey
#10. My dad's a photographer, and my sister is a writer and a poet. My little brother is a mandolin player - he's a bluegrass musician. It's always been a part of the family.
Timothy Simons
#11. I met a photographer who agreed to give me a few lessons; in exchange, I had to pose naked for him.
Sophie Calle
#12. One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it.
Galen Rowell
#13. The photographer must bear the responsibility for his work and its effect ... [for] photographic journalism, because of its tremendous audience reached by publications using it, has more influence on public thinking than any other branch of photography.
W. Eugene Smith
#14. Being a digital photographer I'm in awe of the older generation of photographers who created all those iconic cinematic style images on film, such as Man Ray's portrait of the photographer Lee Miller.
Paul Walker
#15. A good photographer can make you look incredible, even when you're not feeling very sexy.
Cindy Margolis
#16. We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer.
Criss Jami
#18. The camera only facilitates the taking. The photographer must do the giving in order to transform and transcend ordinary reality. The problem is to transform without deforming. He must gain intensity in form and content by bringing a subjective order into an objective chaos.
Ernst Haas
#19. A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
John Berger
#20. The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
Susan Sontag
#21. When you are a photographer, you work all the time, because your eye is the first camera.
Patrick Demarchelier
#22. I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer.
Richard Avedon
#23. When the novice photographer starts taking pictures, he carries his camera about and shoots everything that interests him. There comes a time when he must crystallize his ideas and set off in an particular direction. He must learn that shooting for the sake of shooting is dull and unprofitable.
Alexey Brodovitch
#24. A photographer must be aware of and concerned about the words that accompany a picture. These words should be considered as carefully as the lighting, exposure and composition of the photograph.
Arthur Rothstein
#25. There is more in art, with an apology to that much abused word, as applied to photography, than startling display lines, on mounts and signs announcing artist Photographer, Artistic Photography Studio, etc., and the lower the standard the more frantic the claim ...
Gertrude Kasebier
#26. When you put an individual on the cover of a big picture magazine, like 'Life of Look', their career skyrocketed. As a photographer, you were very empowered; people came to you, bowing to you and what you represented.
Douglas Kirkland
#27. I look at ordinary objects, and I see things that other people don't see. That's why I'm a photographer.
Ruth Bernhard
#28. Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere ...
John Szarkowski
#30. Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference
Robert Frank
#31. You have to assume that everything you do is public knowledge. Everything. Because now everyone is a reporter. Everyone is a photographer.
Derek Jeter
#32. In my 20 years as a photographer, covering conflicts from Bosnia to Gaza to Iraq to Afghanistan, injured civilians and soldiers have passed through my life many times.
Anja Niedringhaus
#33. [the photographer] can be considered a kind of disembodied burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers. His work, print after print of it, seems to call to be shown before the decay which it portrays flattens all ... Here are the records of the age before an imminent collapse.
Jack Kerouac
#34. 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
#35. The police photographer asks, Don't you wanna give us a smile? Come on. Give us a smile.
Assata Shakur
#36. The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.
Brooks Atkinson
#37. As an avid photographer, I also took advantage of the latest technology in photography - digital photography - to post photos on my website on a daily basis.
Tipper Gore
#38. Aside from my modelling, by the early Nineties I was also starting to work as a photographer, which I loved.
Janice Dickinson
#39. The job of the color photographer is to provide some level of abstraction that can take the image out of the daily.
Joel Sternfeld
#40. The public is being spoiled by good technical quality photographs in magazines, on television, in the movies, and they have become bored. The disease of our age is this boredom and a good photographer must successfully combat it. The only way to do this is by invention - by surprise.
Alexey Brodovitch
#41. To become a photographer leave your house first.
Steve McCurry
#42. Look, Matisse I ain't. You know how they have on the invitations, a reception for the artist will be held at ... And I say, Look, you gotta change this. I'm not an artist. I'm a photographer, a skilled craftsman.
Phil Stern
#43. The photographer who attempts to fit happily into the world by using the traditional perspective of the camera will end up falling into the hole of the "idea" he has dug for himself.
Daido Moriyama
#44. I believe it is the photographer's function to reveal that which is concealed, even if it be repugnant to the majority, not merely to record what we see around us.
Arthur Tress
#45. Truthfully, I don't really think of myself as a photographer. I don't have all the disciplines and knowledge of a person who's spent their life devoted to photography.
Patti Smith
#46. Well, I'm not going to get into that. I think that those kind of distinctions and lists of titles like "street photographer" are so stupid. I'm a photographer, a still photographer. That's it.
Garry Winogrand
#47. 'The Gardener' is more than a marvellous collection of images by a master photographer.
John Burnside
#48. Thirty-six satisfactory exposures on a roll means a photographer is not trying anything new
Freeman Patterson
#49. The photographer's art is a continuous discovery which requires patience and time.
Andre Kertesz
#50. If you want to be a photographer, first leave home
Steve McCurry
#51. I am always on the go; being a photographer, filmmaker, author and a father, things become stressful, and it is important to find time to escape for a few minutes.
Nigel Barker
#52. I sell my first book to Random House, a memoir of my years as a war photographer, for twice my NBC salary.
Deborah Copaken Kogan
#53. My father, an architectural photographer, was an incurable tinkerer, maker and mender.
Nick Park
#54. The photographer must possess and preserve the receptive faculties of a child who looks at the world for the first time.
Bill Brandt
#55. I have been frequently accused of deliberately twisting subject matter to my point of view. Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference. Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism. But criticism can come out of love.
Robert Frank
#56. It's funny: I was a photographer before I was a programmer.
Kevin Systrom
#57. Once I became a photographer, it stopped me being scared or intimidated by gangs of young men of whatever stripe. Initially, I could hide behind my camera but eventually I came to realize that if I was polite and friendly to them, then they probably would be to me too - a good life lesson.
Derek Ridgers
#59. I liked the idea of being a photographer, just that you take this one picture of this one thing that'll never happen again - it's a bit weird when you think about it.
Courtney Barnett
#60. Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment.
Ansel Adams
#61. I always feel when you work with an artist and whenever I work with a really good photographer, I try to give him or her their own artistic freedom because that's the way you get the best work or at least the most interesting work.
Helen Mirren
#62. My wife Mariana is a good photographer too and, like me, she just picks up a camera and takes a picture when she sees something, rather than looking too deeply into it.
Graeme Le Saux
#63. Photographs [are] of course heavily dependent upon the culture, the disciplinary point of view and the idiosyncratic vision of the particular photographer-analyst.
Margaret Mead
#64. The subject matter is so much more important than the photographer.
Gordon Parks
#65. Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.
Walker Evans
#66. It's really, really hard to make it as a fine-art photographer exclusively.
Jock Sturges
#67. What matters is not what you photograph, but why and how you photograph it. Even the most controversial subject, if depicted by a sensitive photographer with honesty, sympathy, and understanding, can be transformed into an emotionally rewarding experience.
Andreas Feininger
#68. There are photographic fanatics, just as there are religious fanatics. They buy a so-called candid camera there is no such thing: it's the photographer who has to be candid, not the camera.
Weegee
#69. The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.
Minor White
#70. The photographer is filled with doubt. Nothing will soothe him.
Raymond Depardon
#71. Light is the photographic medium par excellence; it is to the photographer what words are to the writer; color and paint to the painter; wood, metal, stone, or clay to the sculptor.
Andreas Feininger
#72. (1) The more thoroughly a photographer explores his subject with the camera (i.e., the more pictures he makes), the more he sees and the better his chance of getting good results. (2) Even slight changes in subject approach can make significant differences in the effect of the picture.
Andreas Feininger
#73. I never claim my photographs reveal some definitive truth. I claim that this is what I saw and felt about the subject at the time the pictures were made. That's all that any photographer can claim. I do not know any great photographer who would presume otherwise.
David Hurn
#74. Sometimes I think I prefer the storyteller in [Roman Vishniac] to the photographer. But aren't they one and the same?
Elie Wiesel
#75. Paparazzi arrived for Hugh [Grant]. We had to stand under a tree and smile for them.
Photographer: 'Hugh, could you look less
um
'
Hugh: 'Pained?
Emma Thompson
#76. A likeness different from the products of the God-fearing photographer.
Vincent Van Gogh
#77. One eye of the photographer looks wide open through the viewfinder, the other, the closed looks into his own soul.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#78. Strike all the adjectives from your bio. If you take photos, you're not an 'aspiring' photographer, you're not an 'amazing' photographer either. You're a photographer. Don't get cute. Don't brag. Just state the facts.
Austin Kleon
#79. A person cannot learn to be a photographer. He can only cultivate what he already has. I try to make people aware that they have something very precious to cultivate.
Ruth Bernhard
#80. You know, you have to be an optimist, a pessimist, sarcastic and pleasant all at the same time to be a photographer.
Rondal Partridge
#81. The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.
Susan Sontag
#82. If I'd had the nerve, I'd have become a thief or a gangster, but since I didn't, I became a photographer.
Man Ray
#83. Whether you are Minor White or Robert Frank, almost every photograph starts with an act of pure description - a window. But every now and then you catch a glimpse of the photographer's reflection. The mirror is just another function of the window.
Alec Soth
#84. The photographer proceeds, via the intermediary of the lens, to a point where he literally takes a luminous imprint, a cast ... [But] the cinema realizes the paradox of moulding itself on the time of the object and of taking the imprint of its duration as well.
Andre Bazin
#85. These are the two basic controls at the photographer's command
positi on and timing
all others are extensions, peripheral ones, compared to them
David Hurn
#86. Trained as a musician, [photographer Ansel] Adams understood the richness of variation that could be unfolded from a simple theme.
John Szarkowski
#87. The subject isn't always a help to the photographer, it's like handcuffs.
Raymond Depardon
#88. I don't think at that time I realized how important it was and how important it was for me to be here and carry on that legacy in our family of being a photographer.
Kim Weston
#89. I wonder what art is about and I'm not sure that what I do is art because I'm a photographer, not an artist. But whatever you do, the secret is to do what you think you ought to do, and do the hell out of it.
Todd Walker
#90. If I hadn't become a photographer, I would have loved to become a doctor. I would have loved to have done something that actually helped people and changed their lives.
Mary Ellen Mark
#91. No surfer wants to be the photographer, especially when the waves are good.
Nick Woodman
#92. I try not to tell students where to shoot, when to shoot, or what to shoot. I feel finding the picture is the most important part of being a photographer. The actual shooting is of lesser importance.
Jay Maisel
#93. Thoughtfulness begins with seeing. My job as a photographer is to make that seeing easier. What we appreciate, what fascinates us, we will strive to preserve.
Mattias Klum
#94. The awareness of the quality of space in out photos is akin to our awareness of the very air in our photos, the atmosphere that pervades every square inch of our image and yet is often invisible to the photographer.
Jay Maisel
#95. I didn't know a single female photographer who covered conflict who even had a boyfriend, much less a husband or a baby.
Lynsey Addario
#96. I'm a terrible photographer.I'm not being modest. My photos really are crap. But in a way, the more the photo is crap, the better to paint from.
Chantal Joffe
#97. A natural-born photographer, with hypo in my blood.
Weegee
#98. I'm not a serious photographer like many of my contemporaries. That is to say, I am serious about not being serious.
Elliott Erwitt
#99. I found it very helpful not to do the venture round. Instead, I started with very little money, a few thousand dollars, and I did every job myself. I was the first photographer. I was the first customer service rep. I was the first online marketing person.
Jon Oringer
#100. In 1968 I frequently would sit in a photo booth and practice self mirror images which I then documented photographically. Curious types would always open the curtains and chase me away. Today I work with a photographer.
Arnulf Rainer
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