Top 100 Photographs 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. All photographs are about light. The great majority of photographs record light as a way of describing objects in space. A few photographs are less about objects and more about the space that contains them. Still fewer photographs are about light itself.
John Paul Caponigro
#3. I wanted my photographs to be as powerful as the last thing a person sees or remembers before death.
Joel-Peter Witkin
#4. There are many photographs which are full of life but
which are confusing and difficult to remember.
It is the force of an image which matters.
Brassai
#5. The worry over media manipulation of photographs pales beside the threat that we will be exposed to an unedited, unvetted picture world where all images seem equally important and equally trivial.
Andy Grundberg
#6. As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
Susan Sontag
#7. I took individual photographs of Annie Liebovitz, I kept taking her picture.
Shirley Knight
#8. Northern Ireland is part of Ireland, not Britain, as can clearly be seen from aerial photographs.
Jeremy Hardy
#9. You can't see fear or lust; you can't photograph someone's anxieties, how disappointment feels. Photographs are approximations.
Duane Michals
#10. If there is pain in my photographs, it relates to the pain in my own existence.
Joel-Peter Witkin
#11. Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
Milan Kundera
#12. I also knew about Brady's photographs of the dead at Antietam: I'd seen the pictures online, pin-eyed boys black with blood at the nose and mouth.
Anonymous
#13. What do you say to your sister who poses in the nude? It's not like you are really itching to see photographs of your sister naked. I mean, it's just something that is not too exciting.
Ron Reagan
#14. I want my photographs to say: "Look-there's this thing you haven't seen that you should see."
Emmet Gowin
#15. I want to make photographs whose very ambiguity provokes thought, rather than cuts it off prematurely. I want to make pictures that work on a more mysterious level, that approach the truth by a more circuitous route.
John Pfahl
#17. We are judged, not by the photographs we take, but by the photographs we show.
Ted Grant
#18. No one could possibly look all the time like my photographs. It is dreadfully hard to live up to them. They stare at me everywhere.
Anna Held
#19. What better hiding place than an old, woodlice-ridden album of photographs!
Renita D'Silva
#20. I'm working on a speed boat at the moment. Much more exciting. It'll really kick ass, give great photographs for the people in Bible.
Eddie Izzard
#21. Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize.
Susan Sontag
#22. One thing that struck me early is that you don't put into a photograph what's going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.
Diane Arbus
#23. Photographs capture only the moments; but since every moment is very important in human life, every photo is also very important!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#24. I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.
Ken Burns
#25. Agitated on the inside by disgust but with nothing showing in their immobile features, absolutely still, as unmoving as those of landscapes, of photographs, of summer sunsets, nothing showing in their ever-horizontal features, decomposing silently in the Formica chairs.
Antonio Lobo Antunes
#26. It is, alas, chiefly the evil emotions that are able to leave their photographs on surrounding scenes and objects and whoever heard of a place haunted by a noble deed, or of beautiful and lovely ghosts revisiting the glimpses of the moon?
Algernon H. Blackwood
#27. I never know in advance what I will photograph, ... I Go Out into the World and Hope I Will come across something that Imperatively interests me. I Am Addicted to the Found object. I have No doubt that I Will Continue to make Photographs till my last Breath.
Ansel Adams
#28. All my pictures are very voyeuristic, but ultimately I'm looking at what lurks in my own interior. I make photographs because I want to answer the question of what propels me to do the things that I do. But that always remains a mystery.
Gregory Crewdson
#29. What would please me most is to make photographs as incomprehensible as life.
William Klein
#30. The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don't die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.
Chuck Palahniuk
#31. Their intensive 1 -day nature photography instructional seminars. Both love to teach others how to make their own fine photographs.
Anonymous
#32. So many people are diverted to doing what people want photographed - fashion models, buildings, mountains - they get to thinking those photographs are good.
Rondal Partridge
#33. Americans are always mortified when I tell them this, but in England, it's a tradition to put your plaques and photographs and awards and gold records and stuff in your bathroom. I don't know why.
Adele
#34. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.
Milan Kundera
#35. Everyone has seen photographs of Mexicans wearing those big sombreros. When you come to Mexico, the astonishing thing is, nobody wears these hats at all.
Bruce Beresford
#36. With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence.
Susan Sontag
#37. I don't know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs.
Garry Winogrand
#38. There are some old photographs from where if you take anything out, even a chicken or a little bird, the magic will disappear.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#39. 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
#40. Do not listen to what any society tells you about the body - the body is the metaphor for all experience. A woman's body more than any other. Like language, its beautiful but weaker sister. Look at this poem. This painting. Look at these photographs. The body doesn't lie.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#41. Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
Susan Sontag
#42. What you write down sometimes leaves you forever, like old photographs left in the bright sun, fading to nothing but white. I pray for that sort of release.
Stephen King
#43. Take a random selection of photographs of America in 2012 and 2002 and 1992 and, except for the skinny jeans and the porkpie hats, you'll be hard-pressed to tell the years in which the pictures were taken.
Graydon Carter
#44. Snapchat really has to do with the way photographs have changed. Historically, photos have always been used to save really important memories: major life moments. But today ... pictures are being used for talking.
Evan Spiegel
#45. From the black ocean comes the appearance of light and waves. It helps you imagine birth. I want imagination in the photographs I take. It's like a prologue. You wonder, What's going on? You feel something is going to happen.
Rinko Kawauchi
#46. The greatest photographs are motivated by human feeling.
David Burnett
#47. Most photographs, to me, are description, but they lack insight.
Duane Michals
#48. People say: But photographs are all lies. That's not the point. The lie is a truth, too. How the hell are we going to know what Kissinger looks like? Well, the photograph tells us one version; I'm trying to tell it also, but differently.
Leon Golub
#49. I'm not photographing the model in the classic sense; the model is playing a part in my photographs. It's more like theater. I always work with models I know, and I let them participate in deciding how to act their part.
Kim Weston
#50. Nature is a mirror in which I am reflected, because by rescuing this land from sad devastation [through recreating it in photographs], I am in fact trying to save myself from my own inner sadness.
Mario Giacomelli
#51. I like to undress women - not to dress them. You know, like Manet's 'Olympia' or Helmut Newton's photographs - naked women with shoes. This is what I am trying to do.
Christian Louboutin
#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. When you look at pornography, the women become objects, whereas what I'm trying to do is make the person in the photograph as important as their body. And obviously, I like tits and arse, because I just do. I like the sex of taking photographs.
Rankin
#55. Sometimes you remember your life in photographs that were never taken.
Jackie Kay
#56. I used to capture the vastness and the immensity of the world and confine it to the limited pages of the parchment.
Hark Herald Sarmiento
#57. I am magnetically drawn to images, whether they're paintings, photographs, film, or video. They are all lodestones of inspiration to me.
Twyla Tharp
#58. Cameras and lenses are simply tools to place our unique vision on film. Concentrate on equipment and you'll take technically good photographs. Concentrate on seeing the light's magic colors and your images will stir the soul.
Jack Dykinga
#59. We were really poor when I was growing up; my parents, both artists, were bohemians. Life was a desperate struggle, but in service of a high ideal, which is exactly what my photographs are about.
Justine Kurland
#60. He will miss this quiet full of noise: the nighthawks, the way the woods breathe, the things moving unsuspected through the dark. But he will take with him the canisters full of blasted images and have the pleasure of living them again. They are not nothing, the memories.
Lauren Groff
#61. In Majorca, I can be myself. I go to the supermarket and the cinema, and I am just Rafa. Everyone knows me, and it is no big deal. I can go all day - no photographs.
Rafael Nadal
#62. You just can't win. Men have very recent land mines in their heads. Women have recorded conversations and photographs in their heads from 15 years ago.
Denis Leary
#63. He promised to write a book later about the trip. He sold the rights to the motion pictures and still photographs that would be taken, and he agreed to give a long lecture series on his return. In all these arrangments, there was one basic assumption - that Shackleton would survive.
Alfred Lansing
#64. The way that I rationalize making photographs is because you're countering what's offensively mass-produced with something that you just want more people to see.
Mary Mattingly
#65. During the mission, Walter Jones, a team member was given a package containing bone fragments by a Lao. The source said they were from a crash site. He presented photographs showing himself in company with others digging around obvious aircraft debris.
Bo Gritz
#66. Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!
Rachel Kushner
#67. The Indians say to draw someone's portrait is to steal their soul, i am taking photographs, does it mean that i am just borrowing them?
T.A
#68. The suburban landscape is alien and strange and exotic. I photograph it out of longing and desire. My photographs are also about repression and internal angst.
Gregory Crewdson
#69. I'm interested in photographs that have no personal signature.
Thomas Struth
#70. The documentation about the work isn't of real importance to me either. I've done lots of works without taking photographs.
Jan Dibbets
#71. (When)
When you call me nugget.
When you take pictures of me.
When you dance.
When you complement me.
When you laugh.
When your eyes squint as you smile.
When we make love when we're sick.
I fall more in love with you.
Crystal Woods
#72. Over time his images of the baby, like photographs handled too often, had worn down and creased, lost their definition.
Anthony Doerr
#73. It also makes me worry about photos of me that exist that I might not even know about. How do I appear in these unwitting photographs? Who is taking them, without my knowledge or consent, and from where?
Keith Murray
#74. For what other reason might we cling to objects, old photographs, tarnished jewelry, yellowed letters? They're charms, little pieces of magic. When we touch them, we regain for a second what time has stolen or worn away.
Lisa Unger
#75. Landscapes, heads and naked women are called artistic photography, while photographs of current events are called press photography.
Alexander Rodchenko
#76. Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
Susan Sontag
#78. When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.
Aleksandar Hemon
#79. What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that's gone forever, impossible to reproduce.
Karl Lagerfeld
#80. Nature photographs downright bore me for some reason or other. I think: 'Oh, yes. Look at that sand dune. What of it?'
Walker Evans
#81. The majority of the people I've taken photographs of, I've had conversations with. "What are your goals and aspirations?" "What are you about?" It's not just about me capturing the image; I want to know what you are about.
Jamel Shabazz
#82. Long before we discovered mirrors and photographs, our mothers' reflections provided us with the earliest glimpses of our female identity.
Debra Evans
#83. he never stopped taking photographs, only now it isn't with a camera but mentally.
Eric Kim
#84. In the late nineties, Katy Grannan began making haunting photographs of people who had extraordinary inner yens to be seen by strangers.
Jerry Saltz
#85. I set a discipline for myself to return every afternoon and take photographs like Edward Weston: f22, full sun, big set squares, big circles. I would smoke a joint with some hippies on the grass, then go do some more pictures.
Max Pam
#86. My photographs at best hold only a small length, but through them I would suggest and criticize and illuminate and try to give compassionate understanding.
W. Eugene Smith
#87. The photographs had made him aware how much the street and the buildings meant to him. Like an extended family that he'd taken for granted and ignored, assuming it would always be there. But buildings and roads and spaces were as fragile as human beings, you had to cherish them while you had them.
Rohinton Mistry
#88. I think of my photographs as being obviously symbolic, but not symbolically obvious.
Jerry Uelsmann
#89. Research material can turn up anywhere - in a dusty old letter in an archive, a journal or some old photographs you find in a charity shop.
Sara Sheridan
#90. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.
Susan Sontag
#91. I suppose we carry photographs now, but I think it's rather wonderful that people used to carry drawings and watercolours. I wish people did that more often.
Alison Jackson
#92. They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. I say its closer to 675 or 700.
A.E. Samaan
#93. Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.
Ansel Adams
#94. I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.
Stephen Chbosky
#95. I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.
Bob Dylan
#96. I love the Dutch impressionists - Vermeer, Rembrandt. What they were able to do with light was astonishing. As for photographers, I think mostly of the Hungarians: Robert Capa, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Jozsef Pesci. In fact, I have one of his photographs hanging in my house.
Vilmos Zsigmond
#97. So I went to Chicago in 1940, I think, '41, and the photographs that I made there, aside from fashion, were things that I was trying to express in a social conscious way.
Gordon Parks
#98. 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
#99. I knew from the first moment I picked up a camera, on my first school assignment, what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was going to find a way to travel the world and tell the stories of the people I met through photographs.
Mary Ellen Mark
#100. As a very small boy, my passion was nature, and I had pets - cats, a dog and a bunny rabbit - and I wrote a very small book called 'My Pets,' filled with their photographs and a discussion about my pets and how much I loved them ... That was my first book.
Tony Buzan
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