Top 40 Photography Experience Quotes
#1. I had no real photography experience, thankfully. I consciously took a lot of crowd shots. I was influenced by Seattle photographer Charles Peterson, who always seemed to incorporate fans in his live band shots.
Bruce Pavitt
#2. The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.
Edward Steichen
#3. We think of photography as pictures. And it is. But I think of photography as ideas. And do the pictures sustain your ideas or are they just good pictures? I want to have an experience in the world that is a deepening experience, that makes me feel alive and awake and conscious.
Joel Meyerowitz
#4. I'm afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through magazines and through slides and I think this is dreadful, this is anti-art because art is direct experience with something in the world and photography is just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art.
Carl Andre
#5. I am so delighted when I get to see a really good movie. In that experience the artifice of movie making, the photography or the cutting style, falls away because you are inside the movie.
Jay Cassidy
#6. When a person looks at a photograph you've taken, they will always think of themselves, their own life experience. They will relate your photograph to their memories. That interplay is where a picture comes alive and grows into something. They function like invitations.
Jason Fulford
#7. To the vast majority of people a photograph is an image of something within their direct experience: a more-or-less factual reality. It is difficult for them to realize that the photograph can be the source of experience, as well as the reflection of spiritual awareness of the world and of self.
Ansel Adams
#8. The camera, you know, will never capture you. Photography, in my experience, has the miraculous power of transferring wine into water.
Oscar Wilde
#9. We could teach photography as a way to make a living, and best of all, somehow to get students to experience for themselves photography as a way of life.
Minor White
#10. 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
#11. I have a dark room, and I still process film, but digital photography can be a totally lying kind of experience; you can move anything you want ... the whole thing can't be trusted, really.
Don McCullin
#12. If you let some time go by before considering work that you have done, you move toward a more objective position in judging it. The pleasure of the subjective, physical experience in the world is a more distant memory and less influential.
Henry Wessel Jr.
#13. When a moment in front of me appears to be particularly special, whether it be by beauty or experience, I capture it. I usually find a reason to justify taking that photo - symmetry, or color, or contrast - and it's my hope that my photography sheds light onto what I see and do on a daily basis.
Connor Franta
#14. The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.
Paul Theroux
#15. Most of my photos are grounded in people, I look for the unguarded moment, the essential soul peeking out, experience etched on a persons face.
Steve McCurry
#16. Photography extends our perception allowing us to see and experience more - second hand.
John Paul Caponigro
#17. Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
Susan Sontag
#18. I took a workshop from him a few months after that. That experience changed my whole approach to photography. At that workshop in Yosemite in 1973 I decided I wanted to try and see if I could pursue this for myself, and I'm still trying.
John Sexton
#19. When a photo of a person looks deep into your spirit and tells you thousand stories ... .. Stories from your past even before you existed, then the photo is way above any description.
Sameh Elsayed
#20. Experience has shown that the more fascinating the subject, the less observant the photographer.
Andreas Feininger
#21. Human experience comes suspended in the sickly-sweet amniotic fluid of commercial photography. And a world normally animated by abrasive differences is blithely reduced to a single, homogeneous National Geographic way of seeing.
Geoffrey Batchen
#22. The camera creates a magical transformation. It's not enough to exist; we must chronicle that existence ... Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don't feel any experience is complete unless it's recorded.
Erica Jong
#23. Although I get a lot of ideas from things that have happened in my life, I see the final product as a place where my imagination meets my experience. What I love about photography is that nothing is really as it seems.
Laurel Nakadate
#24. 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
#25. How do you find a way to say what an extraordinary experience it is to be alive in this world? That is the kind of subject matter I try to work with.
Keith Carter
#26. My way of photographing is my way of life. I photograph from my experience, my way of seeing things ...
Sebastiao Salgado
#27. In photography, the issue of the integration of form and content is exceptionally difficult because of the widely held belief that photographs must be a kind of vicarious experience of the subject itself.
Peter C Bunnell
#28. Our experience with knowledge, the way we know things, is not that neat. It doesn't fit into a grand narrative, the way we've been taught to read.
Richard Misrach
#29. There's something really magical about trying to see things in new ways that go beyond, in some sense, the biological human experience. Light-field photography, too, goes beyond the human experience because our eyes work like conventional cameras.
Ren Ng
#30. To me, photography is 90% a retrospective experience. There's the part of pursuing the image, and exposing the film, but once you make the exposure, you're always looking backwards in time. I like that aspect of photography.
John Sexton
#31. I myself happen to find, on the basis of experience and nothing else, that photography can be a high art.
Clement Greenberg
#32. Photography hankers after the condition of the neutral observer. But there can be no such things as a neutral observer. For something to be seen, it must be looked at by somebody, and any true and real depiction must be an account of the experience of that looking.
David Hockney
#33. My enthusiasm for joining the New York Film Academy is predicated on my personal explorations into video as well as a sense of responsibility to share my extended experience of photography with committed students in both mediums.
Ralph Gibson
#34. [Dada is] perfectly kindhearted malice, alongside exact photography the only legitimate pictorial form of communication and balance in shared experience.
Raoul Hausmann
#35. Photography is great, but oftentimes it can be a distraction from the experience itself.
Moses Gates
#36. Photography is a medium, a language, through which I might come to experience directly, live more closely with, the interaction between myself and nature.
Paul Caponigro
#38. The business of making a photograph may be said in simple terms to consist of three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet of paper on which the picture will be realized, and the experience which brings them together.
Aaron Siskind
#39. When I started using the extreme short depth of field and single point of focus, I was trying to replicate my changing eyesight. We have binocular vision; one eye perceives space from the other. I don't experience a scene visually at F32. It's more like F1.4.
Keith Carter
#40. I think one of the shortcomings of reality, of real experience, is most people's inability to examine something carefully and thoughtfully without moving around or being distracted by something else. What photography does really is it forces you to examine something you normally wouldn't.
Grant Mudford
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