Photographs Quotes

#1. It is my belief that the most challenging photographs are those that create a tension between what we refer to as the real and the imaginative.

Roger Ballen

#2. There are no reasons for my photographs, nor any rules; all depends on the mood of the moment.

Jeanloup Sieff

#3. I don't like to reminisce much, and my walls don't have photographs of me and the actors I was with, or any of that stuff. I try and keep that disciplined, and just work. There are so many traps you can get into, and looking back on your own work is certainly one of them.

Woody Allen

#4. 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

#5. My appearances are almost theatrical performances. I bring items for the children to see, such as photographs and actual piece of meteorite, a family quilt, sometimes spectacles, sometimes clothing, so that they can understand what I write about is family stories based in fact.

Patricia Polacco

#6. I love sharing photographs and websites, I'm for all of these things. I'm for Facebook. But to say that this is sociability? We begin to define things in terms of what technology enables and technology allows.

Sherry Turkle

#7. However much [photographs] may lie, they do so with the raw materials of truth.

Wright Morris

#8. There's no question that photographs communicate more instantly and powerfully than words do, but if you want to communicate a complex concept clearly, you need words, too.

Galen Rowell

#9. My photographs are not pure: they are a seething wealth of imperfection.

Frederick Sommer

#10. To collect photographs is to collect the world.

Susan Sontag

#11. It is the photographs that gives one the vivid realization of what actually took place. (On photographs from Abu Ghraib prison.)

Donald Rumsfeld

#12. Photographs freed from the scientific bias can, and indeed usually do, have double meanings, implied meanings, unintended meanings, can hint and insinuate, and may even mean the opposite of what they apparently mean.

Peter C Bunnell

#13. Warhol turned to photographs of stars, as the Renaissance turned to antiquities, to find images of gods.

David Sylvester

#14. Having photographs around the house is fine - if they're royal and on the grand piano.

Nicholas Haslam

#15. It became the middle finger I couldn't raise in PR photographs. The mustache became my silent last word in the verbal battles I was losing with higher headquarters on rules, targets, and fighting the war.

Robin Olds

#16. If you can take photographs with language, I'm taking one right now.

Lewis Hine

#17. I can see the character in a photograph, in the way a guy stands or holds his hands, the way he buckles his belt. I fantasize a lot looking at photographs. I'm sure that doesn't work for many people.

Richard Gere

#18. I'm even taller in person, because photographs shrink you down and steal your soul native american.

Thom Yorke

#19. I had seen the photographs of Harlem in its glory days, stylish men in bespoke suits, women so well dressed that they'd put the models in 'Vogue' to shame. I knew that Harlemites loved to dance, to pray, and to eat.

Marcus Samuelsson

#20. The much-lauded visual artist Roni Horn got her Master's in Sculpture from Yale in the Seventies, but in the course of her career she has moved, among other media, from watercolors to photographs to floor-sized installations and mats of poured gold.

Stacey D'Erasmo

#21. As the clutter of outrageous, fantastical photographs that today occupy Sandy Island's place on Google Earth suggests, Sandy Island's disappearance established it as a rebel base for the imagination, an innocent and an upstart that managed to escape the vast technologies of omni-knowledge.

Anonymous

#22. There is always something sad about the old photographs, it is because we know that people in the photos have gone forever.

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#23. The only thing I have done religiously in my life is keep a journal. I have hundreds of them, filled with feathers, flowers, photographs, and words - without locks, open on my shelves.

Terry Tempest Williams

#24. Most of the photographs people take with their cameraphones are of little value in terms of documentary.

Martin Parr

#25. Unless it hurts, unless there's some vulnerability there, I don't think you're going to get good photographs.

Martin Parr

#26. I left Facebook after Facebook groups began appearing about me and suddenly your personal photographs start becoming public property.

Freddie Stroma

#27. My photographs are not planned or composed in advance, and I do not anticipate that the onlooker will share my viewpoint. However, I feel that if my photograph leaves an image on his mind, something has been accomplished.

Robert Frank

#28. Some ghost of myself still lived back in the days when we'd shared a bed and talked of the future. But that love we'd had and those selves we'd been were gone, placed in a box like old photographs and letters you'd never read again.

Dennis Lehane

#29. How can my old photographs fail to create in me a feeling of emptiness and sorrow? They make me acutely aware that this second deprivation will be final this time ...

Claude Levi-Strauss

#30. I want people to see that all-important time in a different way-in the way it was. For of a number of reasons, including the absence of photographs, we tend to see the men and women of the Revolution as not quite real. And we have far too little sense of what they suffered.

David McCullough

#31. Photographs are still always depictions, it's just that for my generation the model for the photograph is probably not reality any more, but images we have of that reality.

Thomas Ruff

#32. Photographs are of course about their makers, and are to be read for what they disclose in that regard no less than for what they reveal of the world as their makers comprehend, invent, and describe it.

A. D. Coleman

#33. Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

Ansel Adams

#34. Sometimes I've gotten photographs back and people have literally shaven off pieces of me, and I tell them to put it back.

Alicia Keys

#35. I was so impressed with the work we were doing and I was very involved ideologically in photography - that I arranged an exhibition at the College Art Association. The first exhibition I picked the photographs and so on and we had an exhibition in New York.

Ben Shahn

#36. 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

#37. Many people keep photos in their homes, in their office, or in their wallet, and happy families tend to display large numbers of photos at home. In 'Happier at Home,' I write about my 'shrine to my family' made of photographs.

Gretchen Rubin

#38. What I'm trying to do is make photographs that are universally understood ... that cross cultural lines. I want my photographs to be about the basic emotions and feelings that we all experience.

Mary Ellen Mark

#39. Digital information, for every type of storage, is unfounded. If everything is on a hard drive and the hard drive freezes up, your whole photography collection could just go away. We can still look at printed photographs of our grandparents. We can physically hold them in our hands and look at it.

Gus Van Sant

#40. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings.

Kate Morton

#41. ...and thinking how the first scent of autumn is like coming across a lost album of childhood photographs.

Jonathan Hull

#42. Taking photographs is not something that happens only in a moment I press the button. It is a full-time occupation. For me there is difference between leisure and work.

Edouard Boubat

#43. Liberman said to me, 'I must cut back on the work you do for Vogue. The editors don't like it. They say the photographs burn on the page . After some years, I began to understand that what they wanted of me was simply a nice, sweet, clean-looking image of a lovely young woman.

Irving Penn

#44. I was pleased that two very disparate photographs, two images that each worked in their own way had appealed enough to other people for them to buy them. I was also relieved they weren't the last ones purchased, and that they sold for a pound more than the frame was worth.

Graeme Le Saux

#45. We used to say that inside Cecil Beaton there was another Cecil Beaton sending out lots of little Cecils into the world. One did the sets, another did the costumes. A third took the photographs. Another put the sketches in an exhibition, then into magazines, then in a book.

Alan Jay Lerner

#46. Photoshop is useful in many ways but must NEVER be used for the altering of photographs. My assistants and my agency do whatever Photoshop work for me that may be required as it is too complicated for my brain.

Elliott Erwitt

#47. I keep three framed photographs on my desk: the latest school picture of my daughter; a photo of my wife getting her diploma from the University of Chicago; and Lytton Strachey, looking serenely self-possessed.

Blake Bailey

#48. I know these will become old stories someday and our pictures will become old photographs and we'll all become somebody's Mom or Dad, but right now, these moments are not stories. This is happening and I'm here.

Logan Lerman

#49. The Heart Gallery premise is very simple. It is a special traveling exhibit of photographs featuring Los Angeles foster youth, designed to highlight the need to find loving adoptive families for waiting children.

Angela Featherstone

#50. LaMont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.

David Foster Wallace

#51. Photographs have a relevance for things that cannot be said.

Olafur Eliasson

#52. Photographs are never records of the way things are; they're records of the way things were.

John Paul Caponigro

#53. 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

#54. It's fair to say that black folks operate under a cloud of invisibility - this too is part of the work, is indeed central to [my photographs] ... This invisibility - this erasure out of the complex history of our life and time - is the greatest source of my longing.

Carrie Mae Weems

#55. [Asteroids are] the vermin of the skies.
[Asteroids can block objects of interest on astronomical photographs.]

Walter Baade

#56. Sometimes, photographs live in our hearts as unborn ghosts and we survive not because their shadows find permanence there, but because that thing that is larger than us, larger than the things we can point to, remember and claim, escorts us from dark into light ...

Laurel Nakadate

#57. Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.

Alain De Botton

#58. It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence

George Orwell

#59. The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.

Paul Theroux

#60. I always took photographs. I photographed a lot of trees, by the way, which is another image I used often in my work, the tree image.

Robert Barry

#61. There are parts of me I only recognize from photographs.

Sarah Kay

#62. I wanted to put reality in my photographs. Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. That's what was happening. And I was going to help make it happen. Boy, they did not want that in America.

Bob Richardson

#63. Oh, I don't know. Italy always seemed an awfully long way to go for fascism and olives." "I rather like olives." "Mother rather liked fascism. We had to burn all the photographs when war was declared." They

Chris Cleave

#64. I happen to take photographs, and they happen to be used for a lot of things, but they're not really made to order. They're paid for, but they're not made for order. I've never really done real commercial work.

Anton Corbijn

#65. If I feel confident wearing something, I think it translates in photographs. It changes my demeanor and posture.

Nina Dobrev

#66. In the end, I believe that the most important influence on my aesthetic has been the photographs I have taken.

Roger Ballen

#67. Our dreams are made of real things, like a shoebox full of photographs.

Jack Johnson

#68. To deal with the chaos of life, I escape into the prism of glass, dancing to the visual music in my mind. My photographs express my interior movement from darkness into light and back.

Polly Norman

#69. You can easily take photographs at a wedding - no one would question it. But funerals are different.

Martin Parr

#70. What is a life? A series of yeses and noes, photographs you shove in a drawer somewhere, loves you think will save you but that cannot. Continuing to move, enduring, not stopping even when there is pain. That's all life is, he wants to tell her. It's continuing.

Hala Alyan

#71. Wherever there is disaster, the newsman is there. If he cannot find disaster, he searches for the odd and the peculiar, the exotic and the unfamiliar. His photographs, seen by millions, make momentary events and strange occurrences all over the world our common property.

Beaumont Newhall

#72. But huge photographs of dead bodies are slightly different. I couldn't find much humor there.

PJ Harvey

#73. How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs.

Jean Cocteau

#74. She had always assumed that her life would end inside the war, that the war itself would be her eternal present, as it was for Darrow and for her brother. The possibility of time going on, her memories growing dim, the photographs of the battles turning from life into history terrified her.

Tatjana Soli

#75. Getting a new passport took me a stupid amount of time. I had to go back five times with different photographs because they kept saying I was smiling, which is against the rules. I was not smiling.

Sally Phillips

#76. Photographs aren't accounts of scrutiny. The shutter is open for a fraction of a second.

David Hockney

#77. I often wondered why I was attracted to certain landscapes and not others and why my photographs (and depictions by other artists) looked the way they did, Archetypes imprinted on my mind started me on a search ...

John Pfahl

#78. All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.

Vladimir Nabokov

#79. I want to take some quite incredible photographs that have never been taken before ... pictures which are simple and complex at the same time, which will amaze and overwhelm people ... I must achieve this so that photography can begin to be considered a form of art.

Alexander Rodchenko

#80. So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

Susan Sontag

#81. I like what Wallace Stevens said: "Poetry must almost successfully resist intelligence." I just change the word "poetry" to "my photographs".

Keith Carter

#82. Elmer Gantry never knew who set him thirty dimes, wrapped in a tract about holiness, nor why. But he found the sentiments in the tract useful in his sermon, and the thirty dimes he spent for lovely photographs of burlesque ladies.

Sinclair Lewis

#83. Not just a recipe book, but a genuine overview of Tuscany's culinary history and culture, a journey in images through photographs taken specifically by expert photographers.

Tuscookany

#84. I think of myself as a kind of pulverizing machine into which everything I look at and feel is fed. I believe that I am different from the mixed-media jackdaws who use photographs etc. more or less literally.

Francis Bacon

#85. When I am preparing my 'lookalike' photographs, I think about the character of the real people, because, if the photographs are going to be plausible, you have to convince the viewer that they could have happened.

Alison Jackson

#86. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, and knowing nothing about Picasso, I had the audacity to knock on his door, became his friend, and took thousands of photographs, of him, his studios, his life and his friends.

David Douglas Duncan

#87. I get into all sorts of trouble with my publicists and with newspapers because I won't do photographs.

M. J. Hyland

#88. People ask me questions like, "Oh, you look so theatrical in your photographs. Is that what you're like when you walk down the street?" It's like, "Of course not." It's such a silly question - it's like being theatrical is a crime.

Bjork

#89. Throughout the history of art it has been art itself - in all its forms - that has inspired art ... today's photographs are so geared to life that one can learn more from them than from life itself.

Van Deren Coke

#90. It's great to get insight into the era of 80's rock-n-roll via a treasure trove
of photographs skillfully captured in front of Mark Weiss' camera lens. This
event is the perfect time capsule for Mark's work finally being released
upon the masses in 2012.

Phil Collen

#91. Afternoon with Michel, sorting maman's belongings.
Began the day by looking at her photographs.
A cruel mourning begins again (but had never ended).
To begin again without resting. Sisyphus.

Roland Barthes

#92. The best photographs are made by the best people.

Morley Baer

#93. When they left, I saw four or five black-and-white photographs I had taken of you, peeping from the file. They'd faded a little over time and were stuck to each other. Delicately, i separated them.

Sachin Kundalkar

#94. I found that while it was interesting to travel around and take the photographs, I would find that I was more interested in the stories behind the photographs. I was more interested in narrative.

Joshua Marston

#95. That [photographs] disturb readers is exactly as it should be: that's why photojournalism is often more powerful than written journalism.

Nora Ephron

#96. Anybody who has spent time with cameras and photographs knows that images, like gravestone rubbings, are no more than impressions of the truth.

Michael Light

#97. [The photographs] were there simply to indicate a radical art that had already vanished. The photograph was necessary only as a residue for communication.

Dennis Oppenheim

#98. No one had ever looked at me before Suzanne, not really, so she became my definition. Her gaze softening my centre so easily that even photographs of her seemed aimed at me, ignited with private meaning.

Emma Cline

#99. No new photographs until all the old ones have been used up.

Joachim Schmid

#100. Painting requires skill. Photography is created by the camera, and one cannot fully control what the camera sees. So people take many photographs because several must always be discarded.

Igor Babailov