Photographers Photography Quotes

#1. I think this is the most exciting time in the history of photography. Technology is expanding what photographers can do, like the microscope and the telescope expanded what scientists could do.

Richard Misrach

#2. Photography, too, reduces the world to strips and rectangles; photographers scrutinize the surfaces of reality in hope of unlocking the potential for significance that is latent within them.

Frank Gohlke

#3. I'm not against digital photography. It's great for newspapers. And there are photographers doing great work digitally. When they use Photoshop as a darkroom tool, that's fine, too. But at this point of my life, after so many years, I don't really want to change, and I still love film.

Mary Ellen Mark

#4. I had done a lot of rock 'n' roll photography when I was in college. I was one of many photographers who worked for The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and all of these rock 'n' roll bands.

John Dykstra

#5. Life's the picture. But all good photographers know you gotta have the right lens.

Lamar Giles

#6. 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

#7. The best way for photographers to become rich and famous is to go into another field.

Bill Jay

#8. I am a big fan of photography, more of being behind the camera - so when I get the opportunity to work with such great photographers, I always try and learn from their technique.

Penelope Cruz

#9. As photographers, we live through things so swiftly. All our experience and training is focused toward snatching off the highlights ... That all significant perfect moment, so essential to capture, is often highly perishable. There may be little opportunity to probe deeper.

Margaret Bourke-White

#10. Ask photographers to write and they have nothing to say; ask them to talk about their work and they won't shut up.

Bill Jay

#11. Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers, however, have not understood 'information.' What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.

Vilem Flusser

#12. Photographers - idiots, of which there are so many - say, "Oh, if only I had a Nikon or a Leica, I could make great photographs." That's the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life. It's nothing but a matter of seeing, and thinking, and interest.

Andreas Feininger

#13. It must be confessed that it takes considerable skill to produce the best kind of lies. It is in the hands of first-class photographers only - and perhaps the indifferent ones - that photography can lie.

Henry Peach Robinson

#14. Many photographers think they are photographing nature when they are only caricaturing her.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#15. We are all photographers, that's how we remember things; with pictures in our minds. Some of us have good taste and passion to make it an art form and just a few warriors who know the technicalities and marketing make a living out of it.

Ben Tolosa

#16. I need there to be documentary photographers, because my work is meta-documentary; it is a commentary about the documentary use of photography.

Joan Fontcuberta

#17. What's really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer.

William Albert Allard

#18. 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

#19. A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they'll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won't do a thing for you if you don't have anything in your head or in your heart.

Arnold Newman

#20. There are many points of views. We as photographers immortalize the existence of an isolated view.

Jon Luvelli

#21. Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good

Garry Winogrand

#22. Jesus would have been one of the best photographers that ever existed. He was always looking at the beauty of people souls. In fact Jesus was constantly making pictures of God in people's life by looking at their souls and exposing them to his light.

Francis Bacon

#23. Predators and prey always coexist. That's why we have galleries as well as photographers.

Bill Jay

#24. There are thousands of people across the country taking photography courses. They'll never be professional photographers. They just want to understand what the photographic process is all about.

Brent Schlender

#25. A few photographers make a killing; the rest can't make a living.

Bill Jay

#26. To make good photographs, to express something, to contribute something to the world he lives in, and to contribute something to the art of photography besides imitations of the best photographers on the market today, that is basic training, the understanding of self.

Edward Steichen

#27. I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.

Duane Michals

#28. Discussions allow photographers to shuffle their prejudices

Bill Jay

#29. Edward [Weston] was the first artist - and I don't use the word lightly - to make a living doing art photography. Other photographers did commercial work, or worked for the government.

Rondal Partridge

#30. Evolution in action: First, God said, 'Let there be light.' Then, he created two nude models. Now we have photographers.

Bill Jay

#31. Photographers have already photographed everything too many times, except cheese.

Bill Jay

#32. Photography is a tool to negotiate our idea of reality. Thus it is the responsibility of photographers to not contribute with anaesthetic images but rather to provide images that shake consciousness.

Joan Fontcuberta

#33. Many photographers are consumed with the idea of making beautiful contact sheets. I am far more interested in making the best final print I can.

John Sexton

#34. As the possibilities for straightforward photography seem to have become exhausted it has been the photographers who know about the history of art, not simply the history of photography, who have shaped important directions for the future.

Van Deren Coke

#35. Original art emanates in the mind ... and lessons society's confusion from self indulgence, avarice and greed to trust, hope and love.

Louis Faurer

#36. If I like many photographers, and I do, I account for this by noting a quality they share - animation. They may or may not make a living by photography, but they are alive by it.

Robert Adams

#37. Photography's a case of keeping all the pores of the skin open, as well as the eyes. A lot of photographers today think that by putting on the uniform, the fishing vest, and all the Nikons, that that makes them a photographer. But it doesn't. It's not just seeing. It's feeling.

Don McCullin

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. Photographers undervalue the use of the wastebasket in their pursuit of fine photography.

Ralph Steiner

#41. 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

#42. I like photographers-you don't ask questions.

Ronald Reagan

#43. For me it is clear that photography prizes should be for those being photographed and not for the photographers.

Subcomandante Marcos

#44. I admire photographers who can take much more ordinarily subject matter and make it transcend that ordinariness, so that it becomes something else fresh and new. It opens this doorway. I really admire people who can do that with photography.

Andy Summers

#45. Photography should be redefined. It's largely technical ... Photography is just unbelievably limiting. I always think of David Bailey and all the fashion photographers - they overlap, you can't always tell who did it. I don't really even like photography all that much. I just think it's so overdone.

Peter Beard

#46. Photography is very presumptuous. Photographers are always photographing other people's lives - something they know nothing about - and drawing great inferences into it.

Duane Michals

#47. Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture.

Robert Adams

#48. The main thing is to study pictures and stop listening to the pontifictaions of photographers. Photographers aren't oracles of wisdom. If they're good photographers, then take a good look at their pictures - what else do you need?

Elliott Erwitt

#49. The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!

Ansel Adams

#50. 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

#51. I think photographers are too polite. There is not enough anger in photography; it's pretty much trivialized.

Duane Michals

#52. It's up to us as photographers to give voice to the natural world.

Frans Lanting

#53. The word "photography" can be interpreted as "writing with light" or "drawing with light." Some photographers are producing beautiful photographs by drawing with light.. Some other photographers are trying to tell something with their photographs. They are writing with light ...

Philippe Halsman

#54. By some special graciousness of fate I am deposited - as all good photographers like to be - in the right place at the right time. Go into it as young as possible. Bring all the asset you have and play to win.

Margaret Bourke-White

#55. I've seen so many photographers rush to do books the minute they start shooting, but one great thing about photography is that the images don't go away, so the more I sit with these images, the more I learn which ones have had the most impact.

Lynsey Addario

#56. Photographers feel guilty that all they do for a living is press a button.

Andy Warhol

#57. Being a celebrity you always get really good seats to sporting events but you never get as good seats as the photographers get. And I really love sports. So one of the scams I have going now is I want to learn sports photography so I can get better seats at a sporting event.

Drew Carey

#58. All photography is Pop, and all photographers are crazy ... they feel guilty since they don't have to do very much - just push a button.

Andy Warhol

#59. I think that it was a great advantage to go into photography not knowing much about it. Not thinking. I think one of the problems with many photographers today is that they never see for themselves, but just like everybody else ...

Robert Mapplethorpe

#60. There are those photographers who have made a whole career doing commercial work but have never had a museum show, and then there are others who've only had museum shows but couldn't survive for five seconds in the real world of photography. But I've done absolutely everything.

Duane Michals

#61. Photographers, along with dentists, are the two professions never satisfied with what they do. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and inside every photographer is a painter trying to get out.

Pablo Picasso

#62. Why do photographers photograph? To make unreality visible.

Bill Jay

#63. I am a professional photographer by trade and an amateur photographer by vocation.

Elliot Erwitt

#64. How aware were photographers in the past of other visual arts? "No photographer of any distinction at all could approach his work without some awareness of what was going on in other visual media, and for that matter neither the painter nor the draughtsman could ignore photography."

Aaron Scharf

#65. Photographers can either look out the window at the world or they can look in the mirror.

David Alan Harvey

#66. Some photographers could vomit on a piece of paper and call it art, you know ... Hang it in the Guggenheim, or whatever. Sell a print for two hundred pounds? But I can't do that. I just
Maybe I have too much respect for walls ... or something.

Pansy Schneider-Horst

#67. The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity'
of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity.

Roland Barthes

#68. 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

#69. There's no great mystique to photography. A lot of photographers like to put their hands up to their forehead and tell you how they've suffered and so forth. Well, I just rent a car and drive to the place and take the pictures.

Elliott Erwitt

#70. Outstanding past work in photography, and in fact in all the arts, is very important to today's photographers. But it should be used for inspiration and not for imitation. These works should be something to be built upon, not to be repeated.

Alexey Brodovitch

#71. It was only with the emergence of the Conceptualist approaches of the late 1960s that the opposition between artists using photography and photographers became explicit.

Jean-Francois Chevrier

#72. People of my generation who became photographers in the late fifties, early sixties, there were no rewards in photography. There were no museum shows. Maybe MOMA would show something, or Chicago. There were no galleries. Nobody bought photographs.

Duane Michals

#73. Photographers, like kids, should be seen and not heard.

Bill Jay

#74. Adequate photographers use their sight, good photographers use their senses, and great photographers use their souls.

A.J. Compton

#75. True, there are photographers who are failed artists, but so are most artists.

Bill Jay

#76. There are two kinds of photographers: those who compose pictures and those who take them. The former work in studios. For the latter, the studio is the world ... For them, the ordinary doesn't exist: every thing in life is a source of nourishment.

Ernst Haas