Top 100 Photography Camera Quotes
#1. You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.
Ansel Adams
#2. I came to photography with the desire to conquer this machine, the camera, and make it my slave. Instead, I have now a respect for it and all machines as expanders of my awareness.
Todd Walker
#3. The shutter of the photographer's camera makes that repeated mechanical sound. That unlocking and locking of the doors of light to send momentary images of the present into the light trap of the past.
Simon Mawer
#4. It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along ... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.
Susan Sontag
#5. At age four I was a camera. I took pictures with my eyes. I framed my photo within my vision and blinked my eyes to snap the shutter of my memory. Since that time, I've been impersonating inanimate objects at every opportunity.
Sophia Amoruso
#6. I was given a small camera as a wedding gift from a very dear friend. My first pictures were taken on my honeymoon. As soon as I became familiar with the camera, I was intrigued with the possibilities of expression it offered. It was like a discovery for me.
Aaron Siskind
#7. My creative process begins when I get out with the camera and interact with the world. A camera is truly a license to explore. There are no uninteresting things. There are just uninterested people.
Jerry Uelsmann
#8. There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
Susan Sontag
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don't belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation.
Susan Meiselas
#12. ! discovered photography completely by chance. My wife is an architect; when we were young and living in Paris, she bought a camera to take pictures of buildings. For the first time, I looked through a lens - and photography immediately started to invade my life.
Sebastiao Salgado
#13. A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera 'saw' a piece of time and space.
Garry Winogrand
#14. A man with a camera was always suspected of being a spy. Moreover, the Jews did not want to be photographed, due to a misunderstanding of the prohibition against making graven images (photography had not been invented when the Torah was written!). I was forced to use a hidden camera ...
Roman Vishniac
#15. I never shot on sets, but if I was traveling somewhere or on location, I would always have my camera, and I'd always be - it's that kind of fly on the wall approach to photography, though. I don't engage the subject. I like to sneak around, skulk about in the dark.
Jessica Lange
#16. I love photography. My boyfriend's got a great camera, which I bought for his birthday.
Sarah Sutton
#17. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#18. The camera, you know, will never capture you. Photography, in my experience, has the miraculous power of transferring wine into water.
Oscar Wilde
#19. A paparazzi is merely an extremely nosy nobody with a camera - and bills to pay.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#20. As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.
Sam Abell
#21. I'd like my coffin to be a camera obscura so I can see what's going on outside.
Bill Jay
#22. In a strict sense photography can never be abstract, for the camera is incapable of synthetic integration.
Ansel Adams
#23. The photogram, image formation outside the camera is the real key to photography,it embodies the essence ... that allows us to capture light on light sensitive material without the use of any camera.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#24. The camera is a remarkable instrument. Saturate yourself with your subject, and the camera will all but take you by the hand and point the way.
Margaret Bourke-White
#25. The video camera dominates art. It's a bore, it makes everything look a bit the same. If you look at things with a pencil and paper in your hand, you are going to see far more.
David Hockney
#26. I never said the camera was truth. It is, however, a more accurate and more objective way of seeing.
Chuck Close
#27. For black folks, the camera provided a means to document a reality that could, if necessary, be packed, stored, moved from place to place ... [Photography] offered a way to contain memories, to overcome loss, to keep history.
Bell Hooks
#28. Photography is light-writing, the language of images. Less abstract than written or spoken language, it selects images from the existing world of appearances and arranges them in patterns. The camera-eye doesn't think, it recognizes. It shows us what we already know, but don't know that we know.
David Levi Strauss
#29. George Lucas wanted this moving camera for all of the photography in Star Wars. He was willing to take a risk with the concepts that I advanced with regard to ways for doing that.
John Dykstra
#30. Don't pack up your camera until you've left the location.
Joe McNally
#31. The only thing they'll let you shoot with a camera.
Jodi Picoult
#32. "Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie: basically it is an honest medium: so the photographer is much more likely to approach nature in a spirit of inquiry, of communion, instead of with the saucy swagger of self-dubbed "artists"."
Edward Weston
#33. I discovered that this camera was the technical means in photography of communicating what the world looks like in a state of heightened awareness. And it's that awareness of really looking at the everyday world with clear and focused attention that I'm interested in.
Stephen Shore
#34. I was always painting when I was a kid. But then when I handled a camera when I was 17, that was it for me. I loved photography. I would work 4 or 5 hours a day. It was like a calling.
David LaChapelle
#36. The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.
George Bernard Shaw
#38. Photography is a very subtle thing. You must let the camera take you by the hand, as it were, and lead you into your subject.
Margaret Bourke-White
#39. So when I became interested in photography and further being inspired by the work that I saw of Ansel and others, it was a natural extension to go back to these places that I knew as a kid and explore them with my camera.
John Sexton
#40. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
Dorothea Lange
#41. People, there's no such thing as, THE BEST CAMERA BRAND, but yes there will always be THE BEST CAMERA AT ANY GIVEN TIME. Technology will change, but not art.
Ashraf Saharudin
#42. It is definitely mostly due to the invention of the camera that all this design and emphasized paint quality have come into painting.
E. J. Hughes
#43. She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said 'Be careful his bowtie is really a camera'
Paul Simon
#44. The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect.
Arthur Miller
#45. God creates the beauty. Through my camera, I am a witness.
Mark Denman
#46. Just as a fisherman cannot catch fish unless his line is in the water, a wildlife photographer cannot shoot great wildlife images unless he or she is out there with camera in hand and the knowledge of what to do then the 'magnificent moment' occurs.
George H. Harrison
#47. Living in a time of the increasing struggle of the mechanization of man, photography has become another example of this paradoxical problem of how to humanize, how to overcome a machine on which we are thoroughly dependent ... the camera ...
Ernst Haas
#48. It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera ... they are made with the eye, heart and head.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#49. The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.
John Dunning
#50. The joy for me of television is the sort of family feeling of being involved with an ensemble - the cast and the crew and the director of photography and the guys in the camera truck - and you're all coming together. There's a great feeling when that is a successful unit, a successful family.
Jeffrey Pierce
#51. Aesthetics does not exist for the camera as an isolated entity. Aesthetics, in fact, is inseparable from the purpose of the photographer and the use he makes of his theme. When photography fails ... it is usually because a false separation has been imposed on form and content.
Sid Grossman
#52. Photography, like all camera-made images such as film and video, effaces the marks of its making (and maker) at the click of a shutter. A photograph appears to be self-generated - as though it had created itself.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
#53. If there were lies to photography, I figured, there was truth too, truths we'd never see if not through the dispassionate glass eye of a camera.
Richard E. Gropp
#54. I wanted [my photography] to appear as though the camera was seeing by itself.
Lewis Baltz
#55. Photography through the camera is an instrument of detection. We photograph not only what we know, but also what we don't know.
Lisette Model
#56. As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used - as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts - to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera.
Lewis Mumford
#57. There are many reasons why photography does not attract the social and cultural attention it deserves. I would add one more which has received scant attention: it does not make a lot of noise ... Perhaps photography would be more appreciated if camera shutters fired with the sound of a .357 Magnum.
Bill Jay
#58. Photography came as a substitute. I was painfully shy and found talking to people difficult; a camera in hand gave me a function, a reason to be somewhere, a witness, but not an actor.
Martine Franck
#59. To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#60. You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.
Ernst Haas
#61. I just picked up a camera without any kind of ambition to be good or bad. And especially without any ambition to make a living ... My whole freedom working in photography comes because I say to myself, Let's see what is going on in this world. Let's find out. How do these people look?
Lisette Model
#62. I was always in front of the camera. My mom was really passionate about photography - I have pictures of my whole life. I've always just been in front of my mom's camera, and it's always comfortable to me.
Gigi Hadid
#64. To me photography can be simultaneously both a record and a mirror or window of self-expression the camera is generally assumed to be unable to depict that which is not visible to the eye and yet, the photographer who wields it well can depict what lies unseen in his memory.
Eikoh Hosoe
#66. "Utter truth is essential, and that is what stirs me when I look through the camera."
Margaret Bourke-White
#67. Photography is the act of "fixing" time, not of "expressing" the world. The camera is an inadequate tool for extracting a vision of the world or of beauty.
Daido Moriyama
#68. When you take a photo, you often take your own reality into your camera - the reality that you shaped in your mind - and not the real reality over there, whatever it is!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#69. 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
#70. I usually befriend the camera department very early on in the film and drive them nuts. I'm constantly bombarding them with questions and going through the stills photography. A film set is a great place for me and I love it.
Eric Bana
#71. My interest in photography did not begin with books or mentors, or with any burning desire to see the world through a camera. It evolved from an intense devotion to mountains and wilderness that eventually shaped all the parts of my life and brought them together.
Galen Rowell
#73. The camera points both ways. In expressing the subject you also express yourself ...
Freeman Patterson
#74. A camera can get you close without the burden of commitment. It's a nifty device that way, a magical passport into people's lives with no permanent strings attached.
Nina Berman
#75. As a young person, and I know it's hard to believe that I was shy, but you could take your camera, and it would take you to places: it was like having a friend, like having someone to go out with and look at the world. I would do things with a camera I wouldn't do normally if I was just by myself.
Annie Leibovitz
#76. Women that can work a camera with ease often work men just as effortlessly for both require the same commitment to vanity and manipulation.
Tiffany Madison
#77. Kodachrome, it gives us those nice bright colors
Gives us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah!
I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph
So momma, don't take my Kodachrome away ...
Paul Simon
#78. Your most important gear is your eye, heart and soul.
Marius Vieth
#79. I just got this new camera. It's very advanced - you don't even need it.
Steven Wright
#80. We used the camera only as a means of expression and as a visual medium that offers possibilities found in no other artistic technique, possibilities that the eye cannot catch in their totality. We tried to establish a characteristic vision of photography.
Piet Zwart
#81. What most artists using photography feel that they need to do is to show that they are serious, that they are not taking snapshots. To point a camera at something does not qualify you as an artist because everybody has done that.
Wolfgang Tillmans
#82. Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#83. With a camera like that you don't believe you're in the masterpiece business. It's enough to be able to peck at the world.
Lee Friedlander
#84. The photogram, or camera-less record of forms produced by light, which embodies the unique nature of the photographic process, is the real key to photography.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#85. The purpose of photography is the transmission of a visualized sector of life through the medium of the camera into a mental process that starts with the photographer's thinking about the subject he photographs and is continued in the mind of the spectator.
Roman Vishniac
#87. Photography is a source of raw materials as I believe the camera is never perfect and will never be able to express in full what I see and feel.
Nikolay Semyonov
#88. Smile for the camera, pretty little Sydney Tar Ponds.
Rebecca McNutt
#89. The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
Susan Sontag
#90. If the photographer is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it's already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.
Eve Arnold
#91. My main camera is a Nikon D3. I use a French camera from the 1800s for wet plate photography, I use a Hasselblad sometimes. But to me the camera really doesn't matter that much. I don't have a preference for film or digital.
Nikki Sixx
#92. The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.
Annie Leibovitz
#93. A camera is just like a woman, as long as you have one of them hanging around your neck ... life is just fine
Sunny-Drunk
#94. Light-field photography is a transformational technology that needs a transformational product to introduce it. For the first time, we have a light-field camera that's going to be for everyone - not something in a huge room in a research facility.
Ren Ng
#95. My first pictures are from 1972, and my first proper camera dates back to 1973. During the first year I used my father's camera. It had a flash on it, which I don't like, but I didn't know anything about photography back then, so it was just what I did.
Anton Corbijn
#96. Never ever say the word shoot when you are taking a picture with a camera because a camera is not a violent weapon.
Ruth Bernhard
#97. The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.
Walker Evans
#98. You cannot explain the whole world in one photograph. Photography pretends. You can see everything that's in front of the camera, but there's always something beside it.
Thomas Ruff
#99. You keep doing that and your camera is likely to explode."
"Are you crazy?" Alfred smirked. "My camera is like me."
"How so?"
"It adores you," Alfred told him.
Remmy Duchene
#100. There is no such thing as a good paparazzo. A good paparazzo, that's a paparazzo who has had his camera broken. In fact, they are bandits, thieves of photography. (Statement after photographs were published showing Jackie Onassis sunbathing nude.)
Federico Fellini
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
