Top 60 Photography Eye Quotes
#1. That's one of the wonderful things about the whole process of photography - eye contact can be very revealing.
Derek Ridgers
#2. Everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations, so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings ... To capture some of this - I suppose that's lyricism.
Josef Sudek
#3. 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
#4. Your most important gear is your eye, heart and soul.
Marius Vieth
#5. I work rather blindly. I have a theory that seems to work with me that some of the best things you ever do sort of come through you. You don't know where you get the impetus and response to what's before your eyes.
Walker Evans
#6. God gave me photography so that I could pray with my eyes.
Dewitt Jones
#7. 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
#8. Photography works upon the human eye: what is seen is reflected in the brain without the need for complicated thought. In this way the bourgeoisie takes advantage of the mental indolence of the masses and does good business as well.
Willi Munzenberg
#9. One eye of the photographer looks wide open through the viewfinder, the other, the closed looks into his own soul.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#10. Photography opens your eyes a little wider to the world around you.
Bill Jay
#11. I seldom think when I take a picture. My eyes and fingers react - click. But first, it's most important to decide on the angle at which your photograph is to be taken.
Alfred Eisenstaedt
#12. Photography is a strange phenomenon ... You trust your eye and cannot help but bare your soul.
Inge Morath
#13. I often see the materials of photography as being a type of terrain. Emulsions, liquid developers, silver salts, and fixers interact, and I construct a landscape that I need to first explore in my mind's eye if I am to make it manifest as an artful image in silver.
Paul Caponigro
#14. Maybe because it's entirely an artist's eye, patience and skill that makes an image and not his tools.
Ken Rockwell
#15. What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.
Ruth Bernhard
#16. The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.
Paul Theroux
#17. The eye should learn to listen before it looks.
Robert Frank
#18. 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
#19. I think that digital is offering many great possibilities for cinematographers. Particularly in urban cityscapes and low light photography its allowing us to render what we actually see with our eyes; which is interesting.
Seamus McGarvey
#20. [Photography] is always like a state of grace, like the appearance of something that I hadn't foreseen, that surprises me and stops me. If I only did what I had in mind, there would be no emotion. It would be like keeping one's eyes shut rather than open, like theorizing rather than seeing.
Sarah Moon
#21. [Photography] is the non-complacence of the eye. To practice my right to look is also a critical attitude. If I stare at you, I will make you uncomfortable, and culturally we have a difficulty of staring and being stared at.
Pedro Meyer
#22. It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera ... they are made with the eye, heart and head.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#23. Realism and superrealism are what I'm after. This world is full of things the eye doesn't see. The camera can see more, and often 10 times better.
Andreas Feininger
#24. Photography is nature seen from the eyes outwards. Painting is nature seen from the eyes inwards.
Charles Sheeler
#25. All we did was to turn back the time to a photography of precision which is superior to the human eye.
Bernd Becher
#26. A photographer needs to be a good editor of negatives and prints! In fact, most of the prints I make are for my eyes only, and they are no good. I find the single most valuable tool in the darkroom is my trash can - that's where most of my prints end up.
John Sexton
#27. I like small things, I like small moments that are almost elliptical, that are not necessarily linear; they're natural things that happen in the world, but if you look at them from a slight angle there's more than meets the eye.
Keith Carter
#28. On digital photography: It's fantastic, but it's not a freebie for anything. You still have to have this (he points to his eyes), and this (points to his heart), and feet.
Rene Burri
#29. Photography can strip from the world that spiritual dust and grime with which our eyes have covered it.
Andre Bazin
#31. 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
#32. A man's eye serves as a photography to the invisible, as well as his ear serves as echo to the silence.
Machado De Assis
#33. Perhaps most intriguing of all is that it is possible to photograph what is impossible for the human eye to see - cumulative time.
Michael Kenna
#34. What the eye sees is a synthesis of who you are and all you have learned. This is what I would call the language of photography.
Graciela Iturbide
#35. Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.
Franz Kafka
#36. I have to shoot three cassettes of film a day, even when not 'photographing', in order to keep the eye in practice.
Josef Koudelka
#37. The idea that any photography can't be personal is madness! I see something; it goes through my eye, brain, heart, guts; I choose the subject. What could be more personal than that?
Cornell Capa
#38. My passion is to open people's eyes to the sea using the power of photography as a universal language to convince the unconvinced among us that the oceans are fragile and finite.
David Doubilet
#39. The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?
Edward Weston
#40. Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#41. We have - through a hundred years of photography and two decades of film - been enormously enriched ... We may say we see the world with entirely different eyes.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#42. 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
#43. I don't go out looking for pictures. I go out, and if something catches my eye, that's reason enough to photograph it.
Henry Wessel Jr.
#44. 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
#45. The lens, that allegedly impartial eye, permits all possible distortions of reality ... The importance of photography lies not only in the fact that it is a creation, but above all in the fact that it is one of the most effective means of shaping our ideas and influencing our behavior.
Gisele Freund
#46. Photography in our time leaves us with a grave responsibility. While we are playing in our studios with broken flowerpots, oranges, nude studies and still lifes, one day we know that we will be brought to account: life is passing before our eyes without our ever having seen a thing.
Brassai
#47. Something catches your eye, or your interest. You attack it in some way or observe it in some way, and try to put it in some kind of form and take a picture. It's as simple as that.
Elliott Erwitt
#48. But now the train had finally begun to move, and Albie had switched the fearless truth-telling eye of his camera lens from his untied laces to the walls of the tunnels under east London, because you can never have enough pictures of dirty concrete.
David Nicholls
#49. I had a growing feeling that most of the best art of the world in painting and sculpture had been done, and that this newest form [photography] was more related to the progress and tempo of modern science of the eye.
Paul Outerbridge
#50. If I could do what I want with my eyes alone, I would be happy.
Richard Avedon
#53. 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
#54. There are too many people studying it [photography] now who are never going to make it. You can't give them a formula for making it. You have to have it in you first, you don't learn it. The seeing eye is the important thing.
Imogen Cunningham
#55. To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#56. Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know.
Ben Shahn
#57. I think of myself as a reportage photographer. I like the word. It implies a personal account of an observed event with connotations of subjectivity but honesty. It is eye-witness photography.
David Hurn
#59. I don't think photography has anything remotely to do with the brain. It has to do with eye appeal.
Horst P. Horst
#60. Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it; and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.
Paul Valery
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